We Need Billionaires in Space

P rivately funded American astronauts of the Polaris Dawn mission are currently hundreds of miles above Earth ready to enact the first commercial space walk.

Paid for by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and powered by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, the four non-NASA astronauts will pass through parts of our planet’s Van Allen radiation belt and fly about three times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) to study the health effects of radiation and spaceflight on the human body.

“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” Isaacman said. Isaacman, the founder both of aircraft and of payment-processing-technology companies, is a commercial astronaut himself and will be part of the mission. Polaris Dawn is the first of three rides Isaacman has purchased from SpaceX for an undisclosed, but likely huge, sum.

Early innovations in aviation had also come largely from the private sector. Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh originally crossed the Atlantic Ocean by plane without stopping in pursuit of a cash prize, funded by a hotel entrepreneur, of $25,000 (which today would be worth almost $477,000). The value of the prize to aviation was immense. Aerospace experts expect that a $10 billion prize for sending a crew to Mars and returning it safely to Earth could lead to a successful landing. That would be a bargain compared with the $500 billion at which NASA values that objective. Private companies just do it better.

U.S. commercial interests rely heavily on space. Consider the Global Positioning System, which powers the cellphone network that virtually all American drivers rely on to navigate, and our increasingly vital satellite internet connections. Space has been big business for years, and it generated $366 billion in revenue in 2019, according to the Harvard Business Review. Much of that business depends on SpaceX. Of the 109 American orbital launches in 2023, 98 were conducted by SpaceX. By comparison, China managed 67 launches in that time frame. Without Elon Musk, America would lag dangerously behind. And the benefits to America aren’t just commercial.

SpaceX is a key part of America’s strategically vital dominance of space, which is arguably the core of U.S. global power. American military communications and intelligence offer our country a radical technological advantage over its adversaries, and they are deeply dependent on the control of space. Despite several false starts and dramatic crashes, China is investing heavily in space technology for commercial, military, and scientific reasons. The Communist country’s space program is now comparable in size to Europe’s. A few years ago, it conducted a successful Mars mission, and this year it became the first country to retrieve rock samples from the far side of the Moon. China aims to put a person on the Moon before 2030, largely for the immense propaganda value of the act.

Yet SpaceX’s successes have very much been in spite of the U.S. government rather than because of it. Government agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration regularly delay the private company’s flights, and federal law is regularly weaponized against it for minor offenses such as disturbing nine (non-endangered) bird species.

Perhaps the best example of the private sector’s amazing ability to outcompete government bureaucracy and mismanagement is NASA’s planned Shuttle replacement, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is estimated to cost more than $2.5 billion per flight and has yet to deliver a single human being to space. SLS’s first congressionally mandated launch was supposed to be in 2016, but NASA leadership announced in January that the program would be delayed again until 2026. It cost NASA roughly $24 billion and twelve years to merely develop the vehicle, which has had merely one successful unmanned test flight so far.

Contrast that with the comparatively inexpensive $300 million spent by SpaceX to develop the Falcon 9 in a little over four years, each flight of which costs around $62 million and has been launched successfully 380 times over 14 years with a success rate higher than 99 percent. Pretty impressive considering that one SLS launch could pay for more than 40 SpaceX launches.

NASA’s own inspector general admitted in 2021 that plans to send astronauts back to space were unfeasible because of a failure to successfully build a space suit, technology that the agency had originally mastered in the late 1950s. The problem today is partly the fact that new suits are being built by 27 different companies, each of which has successfully lobbied the government for a piece of the action, making the program politically untouchable but practically useless. The difference between NASA’s cumbersome, designed-by-committee suits and SpaceX’s suits is remarkable and even visible to the untrained eye. In Musk’s words, NASA had “too many cooks in the kitchen.” The agency is now arguably a mere jobs program intent on bringing home the space bacon and enacting purely symbolic measures, such as former president Barack Obama’s infamous focus on Muslim outreach.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, in her role as chairwoman of the National Space Council, focused on diversity and identity-politics-focused initiatives, which would never come to pass, such as micromanaging the racial make-up of future lunar missions — despite the fact that NASA has been incapable of sending astronauts of any color into space under its own power since former Democratic president Obama scrapped the Space Shuttle program in July 2011. This has forced NASA to beg Russia for rides to the ISS on its horrendously dangerous rockets. So, to reach the stunningly expensive, $150 billion ISS, which was almost entirely (84 percent) funded by American taxpayers, America was utterly dependent on a country with which it is currently waging a proxy war.

Despite regularly drawing the ire of society’s elite on bogus environmental grounds, America’s tiny, private investments in space are paying huge dividends. If Biden-Harris-administration bureaucrats get out of the way, not even the sky’s the limit for commercial spaceflight.