In The Rational Optimist Matt Ridley asks:
Can you doubt that if NASA had not existed some rich man would by now have spent his fortune on a man-on-the-moon programme for the prestige alone?
In fact, we have some pretty good historical data on this issue. Bearing in mind that observatories are an early form of space exploration, Alex MacDonald, a NASA research economist, notes:
For the majority of its history, space exploration in America has been funded privately. The trend
of wealthy individuals, such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Robert Bigelow, and Elon Musk,
devoting some of their resources to the exploration of space is not an emerging one, it is the
long-run, dominant trend which is now re-emerging.
MacDonald gives the following list of major observatories and their costs (click to enlarge). Privately funded observatories are in bold.
Private spending on space exploration is even more impressive when we scale by personal wealth.
…rather than scaling the expenditure as a share of the total resources of the U.S. economy, the expenditure can be scaled as a share of the resources of the individuals who undertook the projects. James Lick was the richest man in California and the Lick Observatory expenditure represented 17.5% of his entire estate. The equivalent share of the wealth of the richest man in California today, Larry Ellison, is $3.9 billion dollars, approximately four times higher than the GDP equivalent share.
Private space exploration and commercialization are likely to increase substantially in this century and, perhaps surprisingly, President Obama is pushing NASA in this direction. Here, for example, is a headline you don't see very often, "Obama defends privatization of space travel."
What is really going on is contracting-out rather than privatization per se and as such there is significant room for abuse. Nevertheless, if done carefully, I think Obama's efforts to encourage private efforts in space are a step in the right direction. What would be much more welcome and useful, however, would be a titling system for establishing property rights in space (see also here). Homesteading the highest frontier is our best bet for moving humanity off planet.
I can doubt. Rockets to the moon are more expensive than observatories.
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
The final cost was “between $20 and $25 billion.” Or, as mentioned in the link above, $410 billion today.
“perhaps surprisingly, President Obama is pushing NASA in this direction”
I always get a kick out of what some people get surprised about.
There have been recent efforts. How much did Beal spend before Beal Aerospace folded? How much has Elon Musk put into his company? How about Rotary Rocket? Bezos and Blue Origin? Though to be fair these have not on the whole been amazing successes on a par with Apollo…
“This is like saying – “Hey, we would have a decent interstate highway system if we had just let the billionaires build one. How likely does that sound? How would you like every road to be a toll road? How convenient are our RRs?”
I agree. Ridley seems to miss the whole point of the nature of the public/private split on issues like this.
Whenever a question of externalities and public investment comes up, the response is always “well X, Y, and Z are examples of private roads”, as if that proves anything. The externalities argument is never that you won’t see private investment in these things – it’s that that investment will be sub-optimal. This is why I’m surprised that Alex is so surprised about Obama pushing private space exploration. Since when has an acknowledgement of the public role in this sort of thing militated against a private role? That’s only the case if you misunderstand the argument.
NASA is now too much a jobs program and too risk adverse to accomplish anything
Jerry Pournelle:
“NASA’s budget since Apollo has been big enough that we ought to be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but we certainly had a budget that could have taken us to Mars and the asteroids. We certainly could have a Lunar Colony.†
This isn’t that funny, but…
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/bdeab2ddcc/aids-we-did-it
“Hey, we would have a decent interstate highway system if we had just let the billionaires build one. How likely does that sound? How would you like every road to be a toll road? How convenient are our RRs?”
Sometimes NOT achieving the same stated goal is the goal. Well, one point is maybe we wouldn’t have an interstate system and all the sprawl whiners could whine about something else.
Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to the moon, but maybe there’d be less junk and space wouldn’t be quite as weaponized.
The lick observatory cost 1.2 billion. What observatories on earth are being built with similar costs now? The large hadron collider cost €7.5bn.
The ITER fusion reactor €7.2 billion
The National Ignition Facility$3.5 billion
Do other observatories need private funding?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/european-union-ministers-no-new.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522857,00.html
The externalities argument is never that you won’t see private investment in these things – it’s that that investment will be sub-optimal.
How is that an argument for government provision? With government provision we have excellent reasons to expect investment will be suboptimal, but erring in the direction of too much spending and spending that is inefficiently allocated, because the people paying the bills are spending somebody else’s money so they have little incentive to spend it well and no feedback mechanism to tell them when to stop. In the case of roads that means we get superhighways in West Virginia named after Senator Byrd; in space, we get boondoggles like the Space Shuttle and the Space Station it served, designed as jobs programs more than anything else.
Telecom companies have already utilized space travel, they will not be the last private companies to do so in our lifetimes.
Can you imagine the profits available for the first person to commericialize space travel, mining or farming? Maybe not farming because we’ve got plenty of capacity for that right here, but eventually farming and habitation I’m sure. And maybe farming will move to outer space if the land on earth can be more productively used for other things, like living space even if it is more expensive in absolute terms.
Scale is an important consideration here. Simply achieving a height of several miles or a suborbital or even low orbit is an impressive feat for private exploration but that is an order of magnitude smaller than the construction of a space station or a trip to the moon and back.
And no the technology isn’t really 1960′s Soviet era, it’s 1940′s Nazi era but to date alternatives to rockets are mostly just on the drawing board.
The number of private companies interested in space has increased dramatically over the last decade. This suggests that the cost/benefit ratio of space travel has only recently become favorable.
At its height during Apollo, spaceflight peaked at 5.5% of the federal budget in 1965 and slightly less than 1% of GDP. The chances of a private entity marshaling those types of resources for little payout is nil. It would also be good to note that only one other country has seen fit to create its own manned space program in the last 40 years despite the prestige benefits.
I can doubt it. The cost of the Apollo program, as well as its predecessors the Mercury and Gemini programs, was and is far beyond the wealth of even the richest man alive when converted into real dollars.
I don’t doubt private interests have invested in observatories as they have education and other areas, but did they start out doing so? No. They have only followed the lead of states. You may say only states were wealthy enough to do so back then, but that would just be confirming states have been the great innovators in these areas, not the private sector. At best the private sector follows on in pursuing fairly opportunistic investment even if only as memorial than in first advancement.
“Because we’re destroying the planet irretrievably”
Oh but of course we are. And, if we are, why not go destroy another planet?
There seem to be enough entrepreneurial start-ups in space launch that it is likely that one or two of them will be successful. SpaceX is technically successful is on the road to commercial success. If a few more make it, a competitive industry is the result, which will lead to lower space transportation costs over time.
What I never understood is how a government-run space program could make anymore sense than a government-run airline. The impediment to opening up the high frontier is the high transportation costs. These will only decline due to cost competition resulting from the emergence of a competitive private industry.
My friends and I were saying these things at space conferences over 20 years. The fact that there are people in this country who still believe in a government-run space program indicates to me that we really lost the cold war because there are too many “fifth-columnists” in this country. The fact that there are congress critters, even republican ones, who are opposed to the emergence of a private, commercial space industry makes clear to me that these fifth-columnists have infiltrated our government.
I think the emergence of the so-called “tea party” movement means that more and more Americans are starting to realize that we really did loose the cold war and that the fight to win in must be done here at home.
The GDP approach puts the value of these things off by a couple orders of magnitude. Lick observatory is put at $700,000 in 1876 and it’s turned into $1.2 billion; contrast that with pure inflation and you get about $13.9 million.
…except, that’s OBSEVATION, not EXPLORATION. I think he’s being deliberately controversial.
Actual exploration is a completely different thing, and, so far, very expensive, because so far it takes lots of rockets and rocket fuel for each mission to free us from Earth, and was far too low on financial return for the first few decades to reward risk. How could Projects Vanguard or Mercury have hoped to interest a VC?
It was the same thing for early cross-Atlantic exploration. It took governments – first Prince Henry, and then Queen Isabella, and later still Felipe II and Liz I to afford the actual exploration. First, Henry developed a suitable exploration ship, a caravel, from a kind of local fishing boat. Then he sent out lots of voyages, probably most of which didn’t return, much less bring a return suitable for a capitalist rather than a government. Most voyages needed multiple ships to go along to get a decent chance of any returning with news. We all know about Isabella and Columbus. Then Felipe II developed a new kind of ship, a galleon, the first European ship designed to cross oceans with cargo and cannon; though, still, 80%-90% of hulls got lost. Liz I’s gummint, as we know, developed still another kind of ship for use against Spanish ships. Liz I was also the start of at least party-privately-financed ventures, most of which went bust from overoptimism on how quickly colonies could become paying ventures or on chances of capturing treasure Flotas or other gold quickly.
And sea exploration didn’t reach NASA’s level of risk for centuries, right ’til Captain Cook.
In the past six months, we have spent approximately 65 billion dollars on cell phone handsets alone.
We are currently spending more money on cell phones in one year, than the Apollo program spent in a decade.
It stands to reason that a public venture might be able to throw together more financial resources, brainpower, and raw motivation than any single government agency or private company could hope to achieve.
dazzling and outstanding; every girl will be happier
A note on the GDP-ratio vs inflation-adjusted comments: the question of which type of conversion method is appropriate depends on the question that is being asked. If we are interested in the share of total national resources that space exploration projects represent then it is appropriate to examine the expenditure of the projects relative to the size of the American economy at the time – i.e. in terms of their GDP-ratio equivalent values. For more on historical value conversion methods see http://www.measuringworth.com
I think this is one of the few times imo when privatization is a really good idea. Whether we think it’s necessary or not, we need to continue to develop new forms of space travel and technology to facilitate it. What the ppl whose only argument is “we have too many problems down here to be worrying about this,† they fail to understand the two most important implications of aeronautical research. The first is for national defense†¦ it’s bad enough that nasa has to rely on Russia to ferry them to the ISS. If we keep going at this rate, our disadvantage will only grow as they continue to develop new technologies in their space program while we pump the brakes on ours. Is air and space superiority something you really want the Russians to have? It doesn’t seem like a good idea for any one country to have, let alone one whom we have a sketchy history with. The second is that with aeronautical research comes a flood of new technologies, most of which are very applicable to us down on earth. For example, if it wasn’t for nasa, we wouldn’t have the chips that we use for non-invasive biopsies, solar energy, and a whole litany of other things (http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html#Top has a good number of inventions that most of us don’t know came from our space program).
What a fun pattern! It’s great to hear from you and see what you’ve sent up to. All of the projects look great! You make it so simple to this.Thanks!
So great , I like it
I love thinking about going into space. I get close when driving my beemer, but it’s in the BMW repair shop.
http://www.eurobahnmotorsportsnc.com/
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