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What are the pros and cons of privatizing space exploration? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA, on Quora:
What are the pros and cons of privatizing space exploration? The premise is too binary. The objective isn’t to hand over space exploration to the private sector. The objective is to expand upon the utilization of space by finding opportunities where the private sector could benefit.
The role of government in space exploration is to do the things that the market can’t support, but the people agree are beneficial. When we send a spacecraft like New Horizons to take close up pictures of Pluto, we do so because, as a people, we understand that science is important. We understand that learning about the universe is good for our society. We understand that knowledge has value for its own sake and that we often cannot predict how that knowledge may have additional practical value at some later time. This kind of exploration simply isn’t practical for the private sector because there isn’t a way to, in the near term, make a return on the investment.
Imagine how something like the Hubble Space Telescope would work if it was a product of the private sector. In order to be something worth doing, for a private company, there would need to be a way to recoup the cost and to return a profit sufficient to attract the investors that would fund that cost. So, how does one profit from something like the Hubble Space Telescope? One would have to charge researchers to use it and one would have to sell the data obtained from it. Both of those things would impede the progress of science. The American people (via their representatives) decided that we were willing to each pay $1.60 a year to put this giant telescope in space and operate it so that researchers around the world could use it at no cost and so that teachers around the world could uses its images and data, at no cost, to educate their students, and so that every person could gaze upon the wonders that telescope delivered to us and be marveled by our universe. Over 14,000 scientific papers have been published using data from Hubble. Over 1.3 million observations have been made.
There have been profitable technology spinoffs from the Hubble Space Telescope. For example, imaging technology developed for Hubble has found reuse in imaging of breast tissue to make early detections of cancer. But private companies can’t invest the kind of resources needed to build, launch, and operate a spacecraft like New Horizons or a telescope like Hubble with the hope that they’ll find ways to profit, later.
We will continue to need the will of the public to invest in scientific exploration with satisfaction achieved by the knowledge returned. But, there are many ways to utilize space that may be profitable for the private sector and may be inappropriate for government endeavors.
The aviation industry rose up almost overnight during World War I, as the government demanded an ever-growing need for aircraft for war use. But, once the war ended and those contracts started to be canceled, there was a very real risk that the aviation industry would completely implode. There just wasn’t a profitable market in sight. One place where aircraft were needed was postal delivery. The Contract Air Mail Act of 1925 (the Kelly Act) authorized the postmaster general to contract for domestic airmail service with commercial air carriers. This encouraged private companies to startup air freight businesses and compete for contracts. These mail carrying flights became regular and scheduled and bright enterprising entrepreneurs came up with the idea of selling tickets for passengers to ride on these aircraft, along with the mail. Airplanes became larger and as the industry became established and efficient the market grew. People became more trusting and tickets became cheaper, making passenger aviation a normal way to travel. Soon, the air carriers were making enough profit from the passengers that they didn’t really need to carry the mail to stay in business.
The commercial space industry is in a similar early state, today. The government has needs the private sector can fulfill and through those needs is subsidizing the research and development those private entities need to do to develop their technologies to the point where they can affordably meet the appetites of a market. By providing money to companies like SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra-Nevada to develop human rated spacecraft to ferry our crews to and from ISS, we are helping them develop human rated spacecraft that they can use to take private paying individuals into space. SpaceX recently announced that they have two interested customers willing to pay to ride that Dragon spacecraft to space, around the Moon, and back to Earth.
The more these companies do these things, the more they can amortize the costs. The more they can amortize the costs, the less they need to charge customers. The less they need to charge customers, the larger the potential market of customers. Hopefully, eventually, they will reach a state where they can profit without government business.
At each step along the way, as the public funds the risky and expensive learning process, lessons are learned so that private entities can afford to do similar things. The world’s space agencies have funded the research, development, construction and operation of the International Space Station so that important research that will benefit society can be done. Along the way we have learned a lot about building and operating space stations and private companies like Bigelow have been able to benefit from our investment by using that knowledge to make the first steps into private space stations.
This happens over and over. We learn how to land a probe on a comet or asteroid and the information learned doing that is provided to private entities who have the vision to do similar things for a profit. If we learn how to land on an asteroid, extract a sample, and return it to Earth, they can expand upon that and land on an asteroid, mine that asteroid, and return valuable materials to Earth.
There are areas of space utilization that will be best fulfilled by the private sector and there are areas that are and will continue to be best fulfilled by the public sector. The relationship between the two is symbiotic, not parasitic.
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