By James Pethokoukis and Alex MacDonald

Today’s orbital economy is
dominated by SpaceX, whose reusable rockets have revolutionized spaceflight and
paved the way to exciting private ventures in space that the coming decades
will witness. And the company’s founder, Elon Musk, dreams of shuttling
passengers to a colony on Mars. Spaceflight used to be a government project,
but now private actors are getting into the game and some are criticizing them
for it. But is private investment in space exploration really a recent
phenomenon? To get a better sense of what has led to this moment, I looked back
to the cultural and economic history of space exploration with Alex MacDonald
on a recent episode of “Political Economy.”

Alex is the Chief Economist at
NASA and author of “The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration
from Colonial America to the Cold War.”

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: The conventional narrative of the history of America in
space begins in 1957 with Sputnik, but there’s a lot more to American space
than that. What was going on before the Cold War?

MacDonald: Depending on how you
want to look at it, you can think of the beginning of space exploration as
really beginning with astronomy as a method by which we extended our vision into
the sky and were able to explore new worlds. But you can also think about it as
a way of investing in space exploration technology, because by the time you get
to the 19th century, large telescopes are hundreds of millions of dollars, and
in some cases even a billion dollars, in today’s terms.

In the 19th century, the United States
was, in fact, the leading investor in astronomical telescope equipment, but the
people who were making these investments were private individuals. That’s
really the original model, I would argue, of space exploration in the United
States. When we think about the current rise of privately funded space
activities, I’d argue that this isn’t so much a new phenomenon. This is
actually, in many respects, a return to one of the origins of space flight here
in this country.

National pride was a hallmark of the space race and subsequent
space exploration missions. Was that a factor when 19th-century America was
building these observatories?

Absolutely. In fact, you see that
type of national pride in John Quincy Adams’ pitch to Congress for a federal
national observatory. He, in fact, would point to all of the observatories in
Europe. At the time, there were dozens of observatories in Europe, and he made
the point to Congress that all other major countries in the world were contributing
to this important science, and here in the United States at the time we were
not.

It actually comes across even more
incredibly and more amazingly in the story of the Cincinnati Observatory, which
was promoted by Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel. He argued that because we are a
republic, there are no kings or queens to fund large telescopes, as was the
case in Europe at the time. He says, “We need to show the czar of Russia that
here in this republican country” — small-R republican — “the citizens will
become the patrons of science, and that we will become the most successful
patrons of science.”

He made the appeal on this
national pride element, and so I think there really is this way in which space
flight signals not just our personal ambitions, but the aspirations and the
value sets of the nation and communities as a whole.

Was the Moon landing such a powerful example that we’re
trapped in an Apollo model that is unhelpful and holding us back?

What
I would say is not that it’s unhelpful, but that it’s incomplete. I actually still
think it is helpful, because it’s important to remember that the predominant
source of funding for space exploration to this day remains the taxpayer
dollar.

What
was incomplete, I think, about the solely Apollo model was that it does not
allow for the intrinsic motivations of individuals, and specifically the
intrinsic motivations of highly capitalized individuals, to be able to make
serious progress. If the wealthiest Americans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk spent
17.5 percent of their estate at current market values — a number for which we
have a historical precedent of individuals spending on a single project of
space exploration — each of them could fund a $20 billion project of space
exploration.

Today’s private ventures in space have led to reduced
rocket launch costs. Why are those important?

It’s
incredibly important. The scale of change in launch costs, which have improved
by a factor of five or 10, depending on how you want to look at it, has enabled
the type of growth of capability and the growth of companies that we’re now
seeing. But even more important is the transformation in the cost of small
satellite capabilities. The improvement there actually is, arguably, a factor
of 100, relative to the amount that it costs you to build a high-resolution
telescope and put it in low-Earth orbit. Those used to be hundreds of millions
to billions, and today are now in the millions to tens of millions. That’s an
even more transformative change that we’ve been seeing. These two trends
together is what’s resulting in the current explosion of private capital that’s
now moving into the space industry.

Why is it important that we have stories that show us a
future worth building?

The
stories that we tell each other can give people motivation, and even purpose,
for why they should be undertaking maybe a decade of hard research and labor
and risk. They lay out a potential place that you can get to, a narrative
place. In many respects, space flight is really one of these most classic
examples.

For
literally hundreds of years, space flight was only a story that we told each
other about a possible future that we could enjoy. When Jules Verne is writing “From
the Earth to the Moon” in 1865, he is showing a future that could exist, and in
fact, ultimately came to pass. He wrote about three people launching from
Florida on a trip to the moon that took about a week. He tells the story of
Apollo about 100 years before it happens. The story that he told directly
inspired many of the people who then helped make it happen.

I
think people are starting to see that we need to tell better stories. My hope
is that we tell stories that include a future where humanity travels out into
the cosmos and learns as much from other planets in our solar system as we have
learned from this one.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Alex MacDonald is the Chief Economist at NASA and author of “The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War.”

The post 5 questions for Alex MacDonald on the history of private investments in space exploration appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.