Government organizations have failed to develop space technology to the point where economies of scale apply and space activity becomes self-supporting. Private businesses may have the problem that in the early stages, before space is economically developed, there will be a limited market for space travel. When space is developed there could be significant economic returns, but development of the technology to achieve that could be hindered by the limited market in the early stages. This article suggests that a government can help with this by providing a guaranteed market for space travel and development.
By Paul AlmondIntroduction
At the time of writing (2009) space travel has not progressed very far. It is done by relatively few people at enormous expense and has no economy of scale. It does not pay for itself. This was not how some people imagined the future. Some people envisioned a future in which the resources of space would be available on Earth, in which space could be exploited for huge profits and in which space could be colonized. This has not happened in almost 50 years of human spaceflight. Some people are saying that it is now time to give up on any hopes of government organizations opening up space and that private business can do it by itself. In this article I will suggest that a different approach is followed: A weakness of the private enterprise route to space is that there is a limited market for the technology in the early stages, when it is being developed, and governments can help with this by providing a large enough, guaranteed market for spaceflight.
Space Travel and Economy of Scale
In his book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, Gerard O’Neill envisioned the future expansion of humanity into space on a massive scale, with our civilization becoming a spacefaring civilization1. O’Neill’s plan was for material to be mined from the moon and sent to the L5 point in Earth orbit where it would be used to build huge space colonies. These would not rely on government money to sustain them. Instead, space would be developed and exploited by industry that would pay for itself. Similar proposals have been made by Thomas Heppenheimer2. More recently, Marshall Savage proposed a long range plan for space colonization3.
Proposals on this sort of scale cannot become reality with the existing economics of spaceflight in which a space shuttle launch costs $450 million4. Space activity needs economy of scale: It can be a lot cheaper if a lot more of it is done. This is necessary if humanity is to expand into the solar system in any significant way.
The Otherland Scenario
To show the problem facing development of space, here is an imaginary scenario, to serve as an analogy for the problem of space development.
Suppose we live on a much larger planet, on a continent called Thisland in a vast ocean. We know of another continent, which we call Otherland, but it is a great distance away. There is no other land that is closer: There are no islands in the ocean between Thisland and Otherland.
