The Cost of Space

There was an interesting article on the Vox website a week or so ago about the relative costs of exploring and colonizing space relative to the amounts our government spends on other things. It’s no secret that I have been in favor of space exploration for as long as anyone can remember, going back to early childhood when I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the Moon for the first time and “helped” (to the extent that a six-year-old can help) my father build a plastic model of the Apollo spacecraft. But over the years since Apollo space travel has lost a lot of its popular support and interest, and increasingly people seem convinced that moving beyond Low Earth Orbit is prohibitively expensive under any conditions short of a full-blown Cold War pissing contest. It turns out that this isn’t exactly the case…

For example, the cost of building and deploying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, everybody’s favorite high-tech boondoggle, is running about $29 billion per year (projected) over the course of its 50 year service life. The cost of a manned mission to Mars is estimated at about $5 billion per year over 20 years – about $100 billion compared to $1.5 trillion, if you prefer. Granted that no one has ever built the equipment to go to Mars, the price differential might not be quite as high as it appears; my point here is that a Mars project could run 100% over budget and still leave $19 billion a year over for F-35 units…

If that is too speculative – and I can see how it might be, given the currently unknown issues involved in interplanetary travel – how about something more down to Earth? Ask anyone you like which the US spends more money on, NASA or the Post Office, and see what they say. Most people would tell you that the USPS is supposed to make money, or at least break even; there are years where it loses money, but not that much. According to the USPS and NASA websites, however, our government lost $5.5 billion on the Post Office last year, while NASA’s Planetary Science program (that’s everything they’re working on that relates to the planets, moons and asteroids) received just $1.35 billion. To be fair, the whole of NASA’s budget is bigger than what we lost on the Post Office – it’s about $16 billion according to the agency’s own 2015 projections. But we should also note that this is still only a third of what we lost on Medicare fraud according to the GAO – not what we spent on actually providing Medicare benefits to the people who qualify for them, but what the Federal government lost on overpayments, benefits sent in error, and outright fraud…

If that’s not crazy enough for you, consider that according to the GAO, in 2013 the Federal government’s Office of Personnel Management spent just under $85 million on payments to Federal retirees who were, at that time, already dead. Again, that’s not counting death benefits or payments made to spouses or dependents; that’s the money literally thrown away. By contrast, the New Horizons spacecraft, which is due to reach Pluto later this year, costs about $78 million per year. And that’s not even counting silly things, like the fact that the U.S. Mint loses $105 million per year on pennies and nickels – pennies cost more than 1 cent to make, and nickels cost more than 5 cents to produce…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you asking. After all, it’s not as though I can tell you what we stand to make on our investment; I can’t even tell you for certain what the benefits of commercial utilization of space are likely to be. My point here is that the income from things as simple as communications satellites, memory foam, advances in electronics and the so-called “space metals” is already incredible, and all of the commercial space flight thus far is just barely scratching the surface of that potential waiting a few thousand miles overhead. There may be good reasons why we should not go to space; there may be more important or more immediate uses for the necessary resources here on Earth. I’m just saying that whatever those arguments might be, cost isn’t one of them…