A White House Commission on NASA will recommend increased privatization as part of the space agency’s upcoming redesign. At first glance, this sounds like Dubya kicking more money back to his favorite companies. That being said, my lefty-leaning friends who work in the aerospace industry have told me that NASA’s current culture is far too risk-averse and bureaucratic to ever be very efficient, and that privatization may be the only way to make continued space exploration feasible. If so, I guess I’m for it.
2 thoughts on “Mars, Inc.”
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A few months ago The Econmist had a few great articles on the advantages of privitizing the space program.
I’m not really down with Moon / Mars exploration, at least in our generation. Until a human presence in Earth orbit is routine, I don’t see any reason to waste money and risk lives by going elsewhere. For science, robot exploration is going to be cheaper — period. Look at the latest Mars rovers for example. Sure, they have limited capabilities and cost $500M…but it would be SO much more expensive to put people there (current estimates are $100B, or 200x the cost). Instead of spending that money, just build the next generation of robots. Why is space exploration so expensive? The number one reason is that launch costs are incredible. The cheapest launches today will get you into low-earth orbit for no less than
$1000 per pound. And those prices are just now becoming reality – typical costs are 5 or 10 times higher. And because it’s so expensive to get into space, things built for space are expensive as well. If you are spending $10M to put a satellite into orbit, you’re not going to toss together something for $50k and launch it. Nope, you’re going to build a $10M satellite. Once reusable launch vehicles are a reality, launch costs will come way down. As a result, it will be easy to put people into orbit and start building infrastructure. Going to the moon or Mars will be incredibly easier and cheaper once you can use earth orbit as a launching pad rather than the ground.
As for privatization, it’s not a simple problem. The basic issue is that there isn’t much money to be made in space. Sure, there are niche industries such as direct broadcast TV, some satellite phone services, military applications, etc. And space tourism may start to be affordable for rich people in the next 10 years. But other than that, there is very little advantage gained by being in space for pretty much ANYTHING. Maybe someday advanced materials will be manufactured in microgravity, asteroids will be mined for precious metals, etc. But that’s not about to happen. So without money to be made, there is no real incentive for privitization. You can take government $$$ and give it to private companies — but that’s not really any better. Right now, there are just a handful of giant aerospace companies: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc. These might as well be government agencies; they have no incentive to be creative or efficient, because the military and NASA just pour money into them for space programs that are for science or for military use. So just extending the province of the large aerospace companies won’t help lower launch costs and
accelerate space exploration. The commission report does talk about encouraging smaller firms to participate more in the space business. But again, without real profit potential, ultimately the money will still come from the government.
So putting those two pieces together, I don’t think much will change in the short run. In the longer term, government spending through smaller companies will result in reusable launch vehicles that will finally lower the cost of space access to a reasonable level. Because the govt hates bad press, and people dying in govt space launches generates a lot of bad press, space tourism will probably lead the way in increasing human traffic to space with this cheaper launch technology. Once this happens, we can start thinking about the moon or Mars. Until then, the price and risk will be way too high. And don’t think the staff of the Village Idiot don’t know this as well…