Megan McArdle laments the apparent loss of the dream of space exploration:
Four years before I was born, man walked on the moon for the first time, the most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed. Now we don’t even do that. What happened to the dream? Government mismanagement, yes, but something more than that, too, some failure of imagination and will.
Outside of a small number in Huntsville, Houston, and Florida, there isn’t really a constituency for space exploration. With the exception of a few districts no Congressman ever lost a race because he or she didn’t vote for higher NASA funding.
There’s no urgent defense need as it was perceived there was in the 1960’s.
If space exploration is to continue, it will be by private efforts.
The problem is that space exploration is since space exploration is highly expensive, it’s unlikely that you’ll see private efforts in the “manned space flight” area beyond possibly some lower-cost Low Earth Orbit efforts (I’m still holding out for a private space plane).
For the truly important efforts (the various steps necessary towards setting up colonies off-Earth), you’ll probably need government support, or some very well-off and organized not-for-profit efforts.
As for why it fizzled, I’d argue that it’s because space exploration and colonization (manned space flight, basically) is an extremely important but long-term goal. Ultimately, on the scale of centuries to millenia, having viable colonies off-Earth is crucial to human survival – but in the meantime, on the scale of decision-making in terms of months and years, it’s hard not to procrastinate.
I don’t know that space flight has to be expensive. SS1 was only something like $20-30 million dollars, for the entire effort, before taking into account the X-Prize money they got out of it. Certainly, government space operations have been fantastically expensive, but much of the expense has nothing to do with space flight per se, but with political mandates to spread money around to influential districts, combined with extreme risk aversion and the bureaucratic imperative that set in by the late 1960s. (Frankly, if it had taken us five years longer before we got to the moon, we might have never made it. By the mid-1970s, NASA had already become just another government agency.) So it’s quite possible that private space flight might be considerably cheaper than government space flight, simply because it’s done differently, with money as a primary consideration.
Second, the question is not even about costs, but about profits. A very expensive, but profitable, undertaking would succeed where an inexpensive, but unprofitable, undertaking would be abandoned, assuming that the program in question was entirely rational. (Which is, I realize, a bad assumption with space, as it is with my father’s pseudo-farm: high emotions cause people to spend money to increase their happiness, even where that expenditure does not return a profit in monetary terms.) So private space exploration would likely look much, much different than government efforts in another way: incrementalism combined with constant exploitation.
Take SS1 as an example. It was a billionaire-funded speculative adventure, presumably at least in part to make Paul Allen happy. But once it demonstrated that the design was possible and inexpensive, there was immediately a business investor interested in making a profit, which is why SS2 is being built for Virgin Galactic, which aims to make money by charging rich people for sub-orbital rides.
Let’s say that it succeeds. In that case, we can be almost certain of an attempt to demonstrate the practicality of an SS3, scaled to low orbital capability, or at least longer sub-orbital flights. And assuming this works, someone will again attempt to exploit it for profit, and so on until eventually we have colonies on other worlds.
Or let’s say, instead, that SS2 fails. If there are other people out there bright enough to think they can do better, and there are, then they might try a different approach, to see if they can make that approach profitable. And if they fail, there would be another group, and so forth. Eventually, there will be a success.
If, and there’s a big if, the government doesn’t simply regulate the industry out of existence. Once of my great fears with private space access is that the government will try to regulate away all risk, in particular that they will try to do so while the industry is still highly experimental. We would have never had air transportation develop if it had to follow today’s regulations: it could not have profitably done so. Similarly, there is no way that private space flight will be profitable if NASA’s or the FAA’s safety-obsessed mindset is forced on private space flight operators and designers while they are still trying to establish the possibility of profitable and consistent operations.
Safety is important, at least for those unwilling participants on the ground underneath launches and landings, but an excess of safety regulations in flight would kill the industry before it can develop. At least, it would kill it here in the US.
A private-public partnership might be the key to continuing space exploration. In any case, this piece overviews the future of the American space program. It’s worth looking over if you’re interested:
http://www.flypmedia.com/issues/33/#1/2