The Folly of private space travel

Christopher Caldwell - Financial Times (Opinion)
 
Nasa, the government space programme that once brought the US boundless prestige, is underfunded and feckless. Last year, President Barack Obama called for an end to moon exploration just as China and India were taking it up. This summer, the space-shuttle programme ended after three profligate and crash-prone decades, leaving the US with no domestic means of getting its astronauts to the international space station. For now it rents space on Russian rockets for $63m a seat. Either the US has lost the knowhow to lead the world into space or it has lost the will.
 
Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, aims to remedy that. This week he announced a new company called Stratolaunch Systems. Using old jumbo jet engines, it will build an aircraft capable of carrying rockets miles into the sky, where they can more easily be fired into space. Spaceship engineer Burt Rutan will participate.
 
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There is a vogue for such private space companies. SpaceX, set up by PayPal founder Elon Musk, has won a $1.6bn Nasa contract to use its Falcon 9 rocket for transport to the space station. Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur, has been promising space tourism through Virgin Galactic for many years. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has set up Blue Origin, another space-travel offering. Both have received Nasa funding.
 
Is this a shining new model for allowing “corporate visionaries” (as USA Today embarrassingly calls them) to boldly go where ordinary democratic politics has failed? Or is it a pointless rich people’s hobby, with disturbing elements of crony capitalism?
 
There is some measurable advantage to private spaceship development. SpaceX, for example, developed the Falcon 9 for several hundred million dollars. Nasa released a study last August to show that building such a rocket using “traditional Nasa environment/culture” would have cost $4bn. But this is an exercise in propaganda. If you take an already invented private-sector invention, and tally the cost of government accountability after the fact, that cost looks like a waste. The important question – whether the rocket was something the government needed in the first place – is avoided. That is a question that must be determined by voters and their representatives, not by facts-on-the-ground that billionaires have created.
 
This group of space hobbyists is small and clubby. There is a large overlap with high-tech entrepreneurs. Google recently established a $30m Lunar X prize for the first private moon landing. It is worth asking what these space flights are meant to accomplish for the public, as opposed to those who get to attach their names and egos to them. Mr Allen is nostalgic for the time when “America’s space programme was the symbol of aspiration”. Sir Richard said last summer that he hopes Virgin Galactic, presumably by inciting such aspiration, will “create more astronauts than have been created in the past 70 years”.
 
Modern consumers are too indulgent of this kind of dream-your-dreams malarkey. For now, the heart of Virgin Galactic’s ideas for space tourism seems to be charging people $200,000 to experience a few minutes of zero gravity. (It has been reported that 425 people have made $60m in deposits.) Moon Express, a company competing for Google’s prize, has licensed technology from Nasa. Its founder, Naveen Jain told the New York Times that one good application would be to have a television show called Moon Idol, to resemble American Idol. You could not take the contestants to the moon, but you could “play their voices on the Moon, record it and see who sounds the best”. This won’t strike anybody as a technology that a suffering humanity is crying out for.
 
One can argue that allowing decadent gazillionaires to experience zero gravity is only harmless fun. But this argument weakens when government enters the picture in any form. Americans of the 1960s were willing to pay 5 per cent of the federal budget for Nasa not because it gave them prestige but because it gave the US firepower. Nasa was a defence programme. To the extent that rockets are being developed for defence, private investors should be nowhere near them.
 
It is unsettling to hear the goal of Mr Allen’s new plane described as delivering “government payloads”. To an extent the applications will be commercial, but these investors need to be watched like hawks. Mr Musk has said that he and his fellow space entrepreneurs resemble “the shipbuilding industry in the time of Christopher Columbus”. One hopes so. The public should remain vigilant, all the same, that these space entrepreneurs do not come to resemble the railroad-building industry in the time of the robber barons.