Charles Krauthammer was excited, in his
op-ed a few days ago, by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which managed
to return its booster rocket to land intact.
He wrote a column in praise of it, and in praise of the new role of
private enterprise in extending and expanding the technology of space travel,
particularly the pursuit of space travel at lower cost.
So let me take this rare opportunity to say that I agree
with Charles Krauthammer. I agree that
this transfer of spaceflight from government to private enterprise is
spectacularly good; I agree with all the benefits he sees in it. This technology is, hopefully (and
finally!!!) mature enough to allow private visionaries to take it and run with
it: many of us have been waiting for this and hoping for it for a very long
time. If in fact this technology has
reached escape velocity, then I expect the private visionary entrepreneurs to
do great things with it, and speed its development along, just as has happened
before with many, many other technologies.
I expect them to drive the capabilities up and costs down much faster
and much more efficiently than government alone ever would---not (or not only)
because small-government fanatics have shrunk federal R&D budgets, but because
I believe that competition and quixotic personal vision really are strong forces
for putting new technologies to work.
I have still, of course, some discomforts with Dr.
Krauthammer’s vision. Compared with our
overall agreement on the goodness the new private industry of space flight, of
SpaceX and Blue Origin and all of their present and future competitors, these
are minor things; but as a good hypersensitive liberal they irritate me like a
pea under the mattress.
In his column he said this:
“Musk predicts that the reusable
rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold…assuming Musk is
even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.”
Yes, total agreement.
But then:
“Which both democratizes and
commercializes it. Which means space
travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government…”
The surly bonds of
government, the cold government chains that held the whole of spaceflight
back…right? Full disclosure: I had a
summer job running projectors at meetings at NASA in the late 1960s. I don’t remember anyone there thinking they
were imposing “surly bonds” on anyone. On
the contrary: they were enabling a new human epoch. Private enterprise, at that time, was not
doing space flight, and was not about to do space flight. And: democratizes
it??? Ummm….no. This transfer from government to private
entrepreneurs emphatically does just the opposite. This un-democratizes
it. Democracy is a form of government. It is government
that is generally controlled by democratic vote; private enterprise rarely
is. From now on, maybe, space flight can
be pursued in idiosyncratic and highly undemocratic ways by private
investors. Some of their idiosyncrasies
will fail, but with luck some will succeed, for a time at least, before being
razed to the ground and replaced by new idiosyncrasies, and old failing entrepreneurs
replaced by new entrepreneurs with newer visions, in what Schumpeter famously called
the “gale of creative
destruction” that produces progress in the private economy.
But none of them will have to achieve a democratic national
consensus to proceed. That’s kind of the
point.
Let’s not forget, though, that getting to lift-off for this industry did require a national consensus, and long, serious government action. We should praise Musk, and praise the virtues
of private enterprise, but that does not require us to despise government’s
role in this. Government’s involvement
in spaceflight was not initially a binding restraint: government, instead, was
the founding source of the technology that Musk and others have received. For good reasons and bad---to put a man on
the moon in the sixties, or to launch rocket-bombs at London in the forties---governments
gave birth this cluster of technologies, and nurtured it through all the hard,
expensive years when it could not stand on its own. Now, finally, it has reached maturity, and we hope it can
move out. It may still need
some help, some initial sustaining government support as the largest early
customer, but finally, perhaps, it is robust enough for private enterprise to take it
on. But as a rough comparison of public
to private contributions to this, Elon Musk invested approximately $100
million, other investors about the same amount, and NASA has invested something
like $500 million in SpaceX (see Wikipedia on SpaceX funding here). But NASA has spent something like $790 Billion (current dollars) in the last 50
years to get here (Wikipedia on NASA funding here).
We can’t know whether that long government-led incubation
was a root requirement, without which space flight would never have
happened. Perhaps it would have---after
another millennium or two. But this is one
of government’s best roles: incubating research and development that is so long
term or so large scale that private enterprise either can’t or won’t pursue it on
its own. The end result of this activity
by government is not just the fulfillment of some motivating national
goal. It’s not even the laudable goal of advancing
science. The real, long-term result of
the moon landings and the mars missions and all the rest was SpaceX. Not SpaceX specifically, but the possibility
of SpaceX and of all of the others that will swarm after it, the possibility of
one or many industries that will employ many millions of people.
And as someone who worked at NASA in the 1960s, very briefly
and at an invisibly low level, I can tell you that we knew that. Did you think we were just trying to give
Alan Shepard the opportunity to hit a golf ball on the moon?? We were creating the human future. We were establishing the foundations on which
vast future industries would flourish long after the moon landings were over. We knew that from the start.
