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This week, as Americans on the ground saw the embarrassment of lost counts and found ballots, a part of America that works was making history: SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit and docked the SpaceX Resilience capsule at the International Space Station.
It was the first of six commercial astronaut launches that NASA bought from SpaceX, the aerospace manufacturing company founded by inventor Elon Musk.
As I explain in my new book, “America’s New Fate in Space,” we are now entering a third age of space travel. The first age came at the beginning of the 20th century, when men like Soviet scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and American engineer Robert Goddard wrote and thought about space flight and tinkered with small rockets.
This was followed by the era of the command economy of the German-American engineer Wernher von Braun and the Soviet Sergei Korolev, when “rocket men” funded by deep pockets of government proved that the visions of visionaries were achievable but costly.
We are now entering a new phase, the sustainable era. We have moved from space projects motivated by international tensions, like Apollo, or domestic politics, like the space shuttle, to things that are done because they return economic value. And because they become cheaper, which makes it easier to return value.
To launch a kilogram into orbit on the space shuttle cost almost $ 55,000. Doing the same on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 only costs $ 2,700, or about a twentieth more. Musk promises it will only be $ 200 on his next ship, the Starship.
Many things that cost too much at $ 55,000 become profitable at $ 2,700 – and even more at $ 200. These are the kinds of cost reductions we’re used to seeing in electronics, but not in the world of heavy metal rockets.
Falling costs are already allowing SpaceX to launch its Starlink constellation of global broadband Internet satellites, which would have been unaffordable at Shuttle’s price.
At $ 200 a kilo, all sorts of things become possible, from space hotels and mining asteroids to settlements on the Moon and Mars. Space contains enormous amounts of energy and material, but to enjoy it, you have to get there. It is now becoming much cheaper to get there.
A friend on Facebook compared this week’s SpaceX flight to the first Air Mail flight on May 15, 1918 – although, to be fair, the space launch went much easier: this time, no one missed a beat. essence nor got lost. But the comparison is appropriate.
In the old Air Mail program of the 1920s, the US government did not build its own planes; he paid people to fly mail and paid them more when they used better planes.
With this incentive, the industry quickly moved up the learning curve, from the Curtiss Jenny used for early postal flights to large multi-engine planes capable of crossing a continent in a relatively short period of time. And the cost of this operation has decreased with experience.
A small amount of federal spending, purchasing an inherently valuable commodity from the private economy, spurred a whole new industry and cemented American dominance in aviation. The same will happen here, if we continue on our current path. (And SpaceX isn’t the only company: other companies like Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, Virgin Galactic by Richard Branson, and lesser-known companies like Sierra Nevada and Rocket Lab are also pursuing lower-cost space launches).
This begs the policy question: are we going to continue to see this kind of progress under a Biden administration?
No one knows, but the odds are pretty good. Besides the creation of the Space Force, the space policy of the Trump administration was roughly a continuation of that of the Obama administration. Even President Trump’s much-discussed executive order recognizing that American citizens could have proprietary rights to the resources they develop on the moon and asteroids was just an implementation of a statute adopted and signed by the President Barack Obama in 2015.
So there are reasons for hope. As most of the news continues to focus on the 2020 version of the hanging chad, look up to the sky and realize that some parts of America are still working; a bright future still awaits us.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and founder of the blog InstaPundit.com.
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