Bring on the space barons
Name calling, weeping and gnashing of teeth have ensued over Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson’s recent flights into space. Critics claim only their “privilege” allowed them to go into space, they should be spending their fortunes fixing things on Earth, and if they don’t, we’ll simply tax them for their transgressions, like “sin taxes” on tobacco or liquor. Lost among this discourse has been any rational discussion of the full impact of these flights.
The cries of “save Earth first!” are nothing new. In the 1960s, detractors complained that we shouldn’t go to the Moon until we’d cleaned up this planet and eradicated all forms of injustice. Yet these critics failed then and now to account for how humans evolve and progress, and the relentless fight we wage against the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” life. This progress comes largely from the best, the smartest, and, yes, the richest to increase the quality of their own lives. Mass society adopts the best tools, but only after the rich pay the upfront costs.
I was part of the legal team that won the first U.S. cellular telephone license. MCI’s visionaries predicted a total market of at most 10 million phones. The network was built on the backs of those who could spend $10,000 on the first suitcase phones and $.30/minute for the service. Today, there are almost 300 million cellphones in use in the United States, phones weigh almost nothing and cost hundreds of dollars (at most), and virtually no one pays by the minute for voice or data service. The original estimates were wrong by more than an order of magnitude (10x).
The adoption curve for cell phones mirrors nearly every revolutionary technology over the past century. In the 1930s, “85 percent of the [aircraft] passengers came from major businesses and high-income residential areas.” The average flight from L.A. to Boston in 1941 cost $4,539.24. In 2015, a nonstop flight cost $480.89 and took only six hours. Again, an order of magnitude reduction in price — paid for by the rich early adopters.
Every technology since the Industrial Revolution, if not far earlier, has followed that same formula: develop a technology that the rich purchase at a premium, then cost-reduce and mass-produce it until the technology becomes a mass-market commodity. Yes, in many instances, those who develop or support new technologies get rich (or richer). But many rich people have also lost their fortunes (and sometimes their lives) by introducing new technologies or becoming first adopters. The flops easily outnumber the successes.
Outer space is not immune to this “equation of progress.” There’s an old adage among the entrepreneurial space circles: “How do you create a space millionaire? Start with a non-space billionaire.” That’s just what happened when Bill Gates and cell phone mogul Craig McCaw created Teledesic in 1990 to bring the Internet to the planet. As described by one historian, “the pairing was akin to Elvis and the pope on tour together. They were Seattle’s most prominent business leaders, both having defied conventional wisdom in their industries to build billion-dollar companies.” Yet Teledesic failed and the first generation of “Space Barons” fizzled.
Further, when we label Branson, Bezos, and Musk as elite “Space Barons,” we continue the fallacy that progress in outer space must come only from governments spending taxpayer money. Until the likes of Branson, Bezos, and Musk, space was an incredibly expensive undertaking. The price per pound to orbit remained nearly constant for 50 years. Musk broke that paradigm with the Falcon 9 and its reusable first stage, something heretofore imagined in science fiction. Musk has reduced the price to orbit by almost an order of magnitude, and Bezos’ New Shepard rocket has flown 15 times to space on the same engine.
But lowering launch costs is only one part of the equation to bring space to the masses. Legendary space visionary Tom Rogers once visited the Boeing plant building the International Space Station. His guide paused at the Unity Module, commenting, “that opening is the closest thing to a perfect circle that has ever been constructed.” Tom responded, “How much less would it have cost if the circle wasn’t so perfect?” His point was simple: everything has cost so much in space because everything costs so much. With taxpayers footing the bill for contractors, and so few opportunities to fly, everything has been overengineered.
In a nod to all the failed space entrepreneurs before him, Musk claims the goal of SpaceX’s Starlink service “is not to go bankrupt.” What Musk has going for him is not only SpaceX’s much cheaper launches, but the price of space hardware itself. Each Starlink satellite costs only $500,000. That represents a 98 percent reduction of the cost on a price-per-kilogram basis as compared to traditional telecommunications satellites — a two-orders of magnitude reduction. The key, as with every other innovative product, is mass production.
Where will all this cost reduction lead? My guess is that lower launch prices and mass production of space infrastructure will revolutionize the development of space for the benefit of all humans. These advances will leave in the dust the likes of GPS, weather satellite warnings, Tang, and Teflon, all things that are net-positive additions to the human experience (okay, maybe not Tang). Opening the space frontier brings access to the near-limitless energy of the sun, and the ability to harvest the quintillions worth of rare Earth metals contained in asteroids that will fuel the future hydrogen and fusion economies of Earth. Such advances will allow us to wean ourselves off ugly fossil fuels without the economic devastation forecast if we use only terrestrial renewables. Ultimately, if we’re lucky, we’ll get some “privileged” rich people to decide to move our polluting heavy industry into outer space, as proposed by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill almost 50 years ago.
So, yes, I’ll cheer on the Space Barons, and fight for their freedom to innovate in space. The ultimate magnitude of their efforts may well be judged by just that — an order of magnitude (or more) reduction in the price of doing business in space, opening up its potential for all of us.
James E. Dunstan serves as the General Counsel to TechFreedom. He has more than 35 years of private-practice experience in a technology-focused practice, including telecommunications, media, computer game, and outer space law.
