Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Private Business Will Not Open the Space Frontier 580
MarkWhittington writes "Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist and media personality, offered something of a reality check on the potential of commercial enterprises to open the space frontier without the aid of government. Specifically referencing SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk's boast that he would establish a Mars colony, Tyson said on a recent video podcast, 'It's not possible. Space is dangerous. It's expensive. There are unquantified risks. Combine all of those under one umbrella; you cannot establish a free market capitalization of that enterprise.'"
counterargument: (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson's_Bay_Company [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Company [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_company [wikipedia.org]
http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Weyland-Yutani [wikia.com]
(ok, the last one not so much)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Informative)
He's a govt/NASA guy. Not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, there are many very smart people there, but you gotta figure whatever he says represents the gov't/Big Aerospace point of view.
Re:SpaceX is impressive, but... (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX's launch manifest is right here: http://www.spacex.com/missions
Of the remaining four launches this year, only one is for NASA. Indeed, only one is for a US-based customer.
Of the twelve launches next year, three are for NASA and one is for the US Air Force. One is a launch demo so that obviously doesn't count, but that's still seven out of eleven launches going somewhere other than the US Government.
I don't really see SpaceX as being just a government contractor. It has plenty of customers, some of which are governments, and it actively seeks more by bringing launch costs down lower than any government agency has done in the past.
The real questions are:
1) Is there any profit to be made in colonizing space with human presence? If yes, then as someone else said, the hard part will be stopping them from doing so.
2) If there isn't, since Elon Musk is a bit of a space colonization nut, can he make enough profit off of his other business to finance a colony out of sspare change?
Re:I suspect he's right. (Score:5, Informative)
I can prove him wrong with two words: commercial satellites.
I watched a speech to the space society where he stated this message a bit more clearly, I think. Tyson means the Frontier will be "opened", as in "trail blazed" by the governments. Once you can get a person to Mars, then private industry has much more data to make the calculated risks. Massive uncalculated risk? That's not a valid business strategy, really. However, a government can allocate more funds as needed, and push forth a frontier for the good of mankind. Money isn't much of issue for governments (look at the size of the US's war budget, for example).
Inspiring the people by pushing the frontier even further has shown beneficial in both economic and social terms in the past. This new generation has no Neil or Buzz. The ISS is hugely valuable, but we're still whipping around in the same near Earth orbit. That's not nearly as captivating, or inspiring to the average Jane or Joe.
Take commercial space satellites. You didn't disprove shit, man. Guess who "opened" that frontier first? Governments. Neil is saying the Governments will blaze the trails and make way for the private space industry for the benefit of all. We all benefit from satellites now, but that private industry remained grounded until governments took the first steps.
Re:I suspect he's wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
He observed and noted that NASA funding goes up during Republican administrations and goes down during Democrat administrations: here is a video of him talking about NIH, NSF, and NASA budgets and Bush vs Clinton funding levels. [youtube.com]
Re:I suspect he's wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Musk is also a physicist. He actually dropped out of a PhD in physics to start PayPal.
Re:I suspect he's right. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with an entrepreneur making a profit in space is getting cooperation from government to get that to happen. Note that I'm not saying that the government must necessarily subsidize the venture, but it is possible to set up a "business climate" that encourages or discourages entrepreneurial activity in space.
Two big examples for how the U.S. government basically killed entrepreneurial spaceflight activity:
Space Services, Inc. [wikipedia.org] designed and built the Conestoga rocket [wikipedia.org]. They got to the working hardware stage of development which actual flights of the hardware (most rocket launching companies don't even get that far). While there were admittedly problems with quality control and other problems, the primary issue that this company faced was competition from the Space Shuttle program, where NASA claimed commercial customers could buy launching services for about $1000 per pound to low-Earth orbit. This basically threw out the business case for Space Services to continue developing this rocket, thus they bailed out. The funny thing is that NASA never delivered on that promise of commercial launches and the Space Shuttle never could have been able to fly payloads at that price even if commercial payloads were actually flowing freely like was originally promised.
The OTRAG rocket [wikipedia.org] wasn't even manufactured by an American company, but instead was mostly composed of European investors and engineers. Again they got to the working hardware stage of development and even started to build some launch sites for their rockets.... except those launch sites were located in "sensitive countries" like Libya and Zaire (now called Congo again). Intense diplomatic pressure (perhaps justified) was employed by the U.S. government to kill the development of this rocket, not to mention that Arianespace had formed as a competitor (government funded as well... something OTRAG didn't have) so all further permits were cancelled.
The interesting thing is that more recently there was sort of the opposite sort of anti-entrepreneurial activity that took place, especially following the success of the Ansari X-Prize when Burt Rutan's Spaceship One finally made a successful series of sub-orbital flights. Noting that Scaled Composites was hardly the only company, the Office of Commercial Spaceflight [faa.gov] was established to at the very least permit entrepreneurs to try and see if they can make a commercial effort in space. It also doesn't hurt that existing government launcher efforts like the Constellation program [wikipedia.org] and the SLS [wikipedia.org] have proven to be so horribly uneconomical in their operations and development that the case for commercial launcher operations is basically a slam dunk business case at the moment.
What I'm trying to say is that the government can either encourage private entrepreneurial efforts in this regard, or they can completely screw them up so they would never be successful no matter how hard these entrepreneurs try. Also, spaceflight really is a very capital intensive business. Not nearly so much as petroleum exploration and refining (which definitely has much more capital tied up in those business), but unfortunately space transportation services is also a razor thin profit margin as well. In the words of Elon Musk, commercial spaceflight launchers is an excellent way to turn billionaires into millionaires.
Re:I suspect he's right. (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't a government that pushed to find the new world. Columbus had to search for funding for his expedition. Sounds like a commercial endeavor being done by an entrepreneur to me.
You do know where Columbus got his funding [wikipedia.org], right?