The debate over whether space should be primarily explored via the private sector or with governmental control has long raged on between advocates of space settlement.
Advocates of a government led initiative argue that the private sector couldn’t raise the necessary capital to fund this big ticket item, because space development has high upfront costs and low long-term returns. On the other hand, advocates of a private initiative say that even if the government were to magically give NASA all the financial support it requires (something it’s beenhistorically bad at), NASA is too “risk averse” to get the job done. In other words, the government isn’t willing to send astronauts into space without decades of arguably superfluous testing, something the private sector would bypass. Some argue that selling property rights on extraterrestrial bodies would be sufficient to spark a commercial space race because of the potential profit available to private corporations.
This debate has recently become more intense after a large space exploration company called SpaceX launched the first privately owned capsule to the International Space Station. In my opinion, this act has arguably tilted the scales of the debate in favor of those supporting the private sector. While NASA spends $50 million every year paying Russia to ferry US astronauts to the ISS, entrepreneur Elon Musk (founder of paypal and SpaceX) is building rockets that will do the same job. Michael Lopez-Alegria said that the launch of Dragon (the name of the craft) is “the spark that will ignite a flourishing commercial spaceflight marketplace.” For now, this is simply SpaceX fulfilling its contract with NASA to ferry goods and eventually people to the ISS, but with more major privately owned space companies than airlines, it seems likely that the commercial space race will soon take off, possibly getting us to NASA’s ultimate destinations of Asteroids and/or Mars.
No comments:
Post a Comment