Try It Again, Folks

If you’re the type who follows aerospace news, you’ve probably already seen the footage of the Space-X “Starship” prototype exploding a few minutes after what had, to that point, been its first successful high-altitude flight and soft landing. If not, you may not have known or cared that the two previous landings ended the same way. After all, other than hardcore space wonks like your humble blogger, who really cares if an eccentric billionaire’s pet project works out or not? Elon Musk clearly has the money to spend on this weird science-geek hobby, and if he wants to spend it on an epic-scale model rocketry kit, what difference does that make?

Well, in addition to being a hardcore space wonk (since 1968!) I’m also a business blogger and former business teacher, and I have to say that dismissing the latest Space-X explosion as merely a novelty (or even worse, a vanity project) would be a mistake for financial, economic, and historical reasons. The financial opportunities presented by the commercial exploitation of space have been enumerated by many authors, and need not delay us here; nor does it require any great understanding of business or finance to grasp the benefit of the jobs provided by Space-X itself, and by the many companies from which it buys materials. But failing to grasp the historical and economic significance of the rise of private spacecraft and launchers is difficult to excuse as anything other than being two generations behind the times…

Fifty years ago, private space exploration lay entirely in the realm of science fiction. Putting a person – or even a good-sized satellite – into orbit was possible only for a national government, and indeed only two of those had managed it. Even more daunting, perhaps, was that both the American and Soviet space programs had suffered humiliating failures by 1970, with a plethora of rockets exploding on the launch pad, or shortly thereafter, and at least one fatal accident each. The idea of a private citizen building a space-worthy rocket was the stuff of children’s books, fantasy stories, and (in 1979) comedic adventure television programs staring Andy Griffith. And yet, even then, there were historical perspectives that should have told us otherwise…

In 1903 the airplane had no practical applications, and the automobile wasn’t much better; neither one was anything a modern audience would call safe, either. And yet, thirty years later the first of the Douglas Commercial airplanes was built, followed two years after that by the DC-3. Air travel became a common feature of life, and dozens of commercially viable firms began offering it. The same period saw the rise of literally dozens of automakers, proliferation of highways, and expansion of companies selling everything from internal combustion engines to tree-shaped air fresheners. Today it would be virtually impossible to imagine the world without those two industries…

Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone standing on the dunes at Kitty Hawk in 1903 could have predicted the use of airpower in either world war, let alone the 747, the A380, or the SR-71. And we can only wonder what Henry Ford would have thought about self-driving cars, hybrid vehicles, or jet-powered ground vehicles (it’s a stretch to call them “cars”) that can break the speed of sound. But anyone who dismissed those technologies, or discounted their commercial possibilities, based on the failure of early applications would feel like an idiot in today’s world – and I’d be willing to be that anyone who dismisses Space-X or any of the other private spacecraft companies that are getting started today is going to feel even dumber in just another generation or two…