First Post: The Cost of Doing Business

This blog will be my "Space Blog".  I plan to ruminate on the philosophy of space exploration and travel and to elucidate some of the less well-known aspects of space operations.  My posts will probably start out sporadic but I expect I'll eventually fall into a predictable rhythm that you-all will appreciate.  In the meantime, my first offering.  This was written in 2004 (it actually says so) and speaks of systems such as Falcon V and SpaceShip One as current or future prospects.  However, the tenor, the philosophy, and, ultimately, the conclusion are as relevant now as they were then.  Enjoy!

The Cost of Doing Business

I've read a few essays about how mankind is done sending people into space - how it's too expensive, too dangerous, too hard, too expensive . . .  The people who write these essays are usually very well versed in the literature, have a good understanding of the science and technology involved, and have the best of intentions.  They are also wrong.  The only point they are right about is the timing.  It is highly doubtful that there will be freestanding space, lunar, or martian colonies in the next fifty years.  That means that I certainly won't see the Lunar Republic or the L5 Commune proclaimed.  And why should I expect to?  I certainly would like to see those things happen but my desires, wants, and prejudices have no bearing on what will actually happen. 

The issues have to do, ultimately, with cost.  Today in 2004, it is very expensive to place a pound of anything in Earth orbit - highly crafted electronics or water, it doesn't matter.  The cost still hovers around $10,000 per pound.  Recent developments such as Scaled Composite's SpaceShip One or Falcon's Falcon I and V do provide a glimmer of hope, but the expected decrease in cost is fractional, not an order of magnitude or more.  No doubt by the 2050s, ordinary rich people - multi-millionaires - will be able to take flights to orbiting "hotels" perhaps once or twice in their lives.  Truly rich people - multi-billionaires - might be able to do so several times.  And magnates of truly large corporations might do it even more frequently to check on investments, wow a client, etc etc.  All of these are important but rich people don't build habitats.  Rich people don't mine for water or air.  Rich people don't expose themselves to regular doses of hard radiation.  Rich people don't open space.  What rich people do is drive costs down simply by traveling, by demanding normal living conditions that don't kill them in a few years.  Rich people make space affordable by demanding the best - and then seeing to it that it gets there.

The people who will open space are miners, engineers, farmers, well, you get the idea.  Ordinary people that can't travel first class - indeed can't travel to space at all unless there's steerage in which to do it.  And Robert Heinlein's spaceships to orbit won't show up for another hundred years or so.  Engineering plays a large part in the equation but the deciding factor is, as always, cost.  If it costs too much to get to orbit, no one goes, at least in any quantity.  At $10,000 per pound for my (gulp) 200 pounds, that means I'd have to pay $2,000,000 to go up.  Staying there is another matter, as is coming down.  None of it is free, gravity notwithstanding.  Bill Gates may have that kind of money - I don't and never will.  Even at $100 per pound, I still need to spring for $20,000 - not exactly peanuts.   And no engineer in her right mind would dare to predict when we could reach that performance level - if ever. 

And this is the argument the well-intentioned, apologetic naysayers use.  Since we can't do it now, they argue, we can't do it at all.  All us dreamers should just pack up our dreams and go work for the poor or the environment.  The naysayers, however, miss the entire point.  And that is that we've already been here before.  In every age, there has always been a civilization-changing challenge that was too hard, too expensive, too dangerous.  And now those challenges have been met and historians can say that crossing the Atlantic was inevitable for Europeans, that Romans had to build those exquisite roads (some still in use!), that the Chinese had to invent printing, etc etc.  It was inevitable.  And we will do the same.  And historians on Ganymede will be able to write that "it was inevitable."

What isn't inevitable is that the US, Russia, or Europe will be the nations to open space.  It is entirely possible that we will be as the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Dutch - able to start the process or exploit a specific niche but unable to fully benefit from the broader uses of the new medium.  It is entirely possible that Brazil or Kenya or some entirely new nation or other organizational entity.  After all, the French appeared to have a strong hold on the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries but were pushed out by the British who actually populated it with Europeans in the 18th. 

And so this is what I predict:  The current "masters of space" will gradually lose their dominance - not without much wailing and gnashing of teeth, to be sure - and some other, unrecognized group or state will find ways to drive down that cost, make the innovations needed to open space to the farmers, welders, engineers - the people who open any frontier and found any new civilization.  And I think this process will play out throughout the 21st century.  By 2200, the torch will have passed and by 2300 the true opening of the Solar System will be under way.  It will be a bright, glorious future that those people face with untold opportunities.  And, someday, those selfsame folk, now owning the resources of an entire planetary system, will go to the stars.

None of this means that we shouldn't continue to pursue US - or Russian or European or Chinese - dominance in near-Earth space.  Only governments can afford to make the initial investments, build the initial infrastructure, make the first discoveries that will enable those that follow to reach further than we can.  Just as Newton said, those who follow will have to say, "If can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."  Always remember - we are those giants.  It is ours to open the door.  We alone can say that we began it.  We are the first.  Whatever follows, that can never be taken away.