The Final (Privatisation) Frontier

Karl Muth argues that future space races should not be the sole preserve of government. 

Like many nerds born in the 1980’s, I attended Space Camp. Part summer program, part propaganda entity, the Huntsville, Alabama facility has trained hundreds of thousands of young men and women on topics of space travel, science, and mission operations. Space Camp is owned and operated by a government entity, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.

Someone recently asked me what I thought Space X and other Elon Musk ventures could do to inexpensively create goodwill for generations to come and I said, without hesitation, that they should create a privatised Space Camp that would serve as a counterbalance to the rah-rah patriotic borderline-militaristic themes of Space Camp (NASA itself has always been explicitly separate from the U.S. military, though areas of overlap are large and not hard to identify). The story of space exploration is one of invention and entrepreneurship and risk-taking, not one of the success of government.

I write this week because I noticed a little blurb in the news that has enormous symbolic power in terms of the privatisation of the U.S. space programme: the sale of a small structure. Launchpad 39A, known as “Heaven’s Doorstep” in NASA circles, has a special place in our species’s history (not just American history or Occidental history). Three Niner Alpha was the Kennedy Space Center’s key launch asset and the departure point for Apollo 11. It was recently sold to SpaceX.

Unlike some commentators, I don’t view government ownership of 39A as special or private ownership of 39A as sacrilege. It is an asset, like a toll road or the locks of a canal. In fact, I’ve always puzzled at why so much of the U.S. space programme was government-controlled and government-run. It seems the ultimate anti-Soviet message would have been to let American corporations run the space programme directly, with Raytheon and McDonnell-Douglas logos on spacecraft.

Overall, I see privatisation of our space exploration efforts as progress. Though Captain Picard may be fine not receiving a paycheque and not having a Mastercard, we are unlikely to reach that level of technological – or philosophical – sophistication anytime soon. The best incentives to run a safe, efficient, fiscally-sensible space programme are those driven by limited capital and deep investor due diligence, and those drivers are only available in private markets.