Summary: The 2002 book Space: The Free-Market Frontier shows how entrepreneurial capitalism can overcome the stagnation of government-led space travel. In retrospect, this collection of forward-thinking papers correctly predicted the vital role of private enterprise in advancing space exploration, as shown by SpaceX’s achievement of drastically reducing the cost of space launches. While some forecasts did not materialize, such as space tourism’s rapid growth, the book accurately anticipated the transformative impact of market-driven innovation on the space industry.
Space: The Free-Market Frontier is an exceptional book that presents a collection of farsighted papers from a Cato Institute conference in March 2001. The book was published in 2002, the same year that Elon Musk founded SpaceX and launched the space travel revolution. It is fascinating to revisit this book 22 years later to see what the renowned authors got right—and what they got wrong.
First, the book’s fundamental thesis has proven to be correct: Private space travel is the cornerstone of the future of space exploration. Entrepreneurial spirit and capitalism have rescued space travel from the cul de sac in which it had become trapped following the conclusion of the Apollo program. The question posed by the 21 contributors to this volume was: “What has happened in the past three decades to delay humankind’s full exploitation of space, and what can be done to change the situation?”
In one paper, Robert W. Poole Jr., founder of the Reason Foundation, identified the main stumbling block: “the central planning approach: the assumption that engineers and government planners can devise the one best way to launch payloads to space . . . and that it is simply a question of pouring enough funding into the chosen model for long enough to make it succeed.”
Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot for the first human landing on the moon, was equally critical: “The fundamental building block of the US space program is the transportation capability that provides access to space. With the exception of the Space Shuttle, American space access capabilities have changed little in the past four decades and no progress has been made in solving the greatest obstacle to space development—the high costs of space access.”
However, disillusionment had also taken hold with regard to the shuttle program, particularly as promises of cost reductions at the beginning of the program were never fulfilled. Tidal W. McCoy, chairman of the Space Transportation Association, criticizes “the enormous cost of maintaining the Shuttle, not to mention the cost of launch alone, which is close to $500 million every time.” That equated to about $10,000 to $12,000 per pound of cargo per launch, which was comparable to the costs associated with the Apollo flights. The transportation of one pound of payload was approximately 10 times more expensive than optimistic forecasts had initially predicted and was no less than that of traditional, nonreusable rockets.
Following the deaths of seven astronauts in the first shuttle accident in 1986, another seven astronauts lost their lives in a second accident in 2003, just one year after this book was published. The shuttle program was ultimately discontinued in 2011. The subsequent nine years marked a low point in American space exploration, as the United States was forced to depend on outdated Russian spacecraft to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station.
In 2022, the X-33 and X-34 projects, which had cost over $1 billion, were canceled. The X-33 was an experimental spaceplane developed by NASA and Lockheed Martin in the 1990s as a prototype for a reusable space transportation system called VentureStar. The project was abandoned in 2001 before it ever flew. The X-34 was an unmanned hypersonic aircraft developed by NASA, also in the 1990s, designed to test cost-effective reusable spaceflight technologies, but after successful ground tests and several delays, it was terminated in 2001. “X-33 and X-34 both demonstrated that NASA has a less-than-stellar track record in picking the right technologies,” complained Marc Schlather, director of the Senate Space Transportation Roundtable.
What alternatives did the book propose? Robert W. Poole suggested: “Instead of defining in great detail the specifications of a new launch vehicle . . . these government agencies would simply announce their willingness to pay US$X per pound for payloads delivered to, say low Earth orbit (LEO). In other words, instead of the typical government contracting model, which has failed to change the cost-plus corporate culture of aerospace/defense contractors, NASA and the other government agencies with space transportation needs would purchase launch services.”
This is exactly what happened over the next few years. In 2002, Musk established SpaceX and started to design his own rockets, free of the constraints of NASA’s strict guidelines and specifications. Musk rejected the “cost-plus” business model, which had encouraged companies to inflate costs because that allowed them to maximize their profits. Instead, Musk sold his services to NASA at a fixed price, as had been suggested in this book. This approach incentivized Musk to cut costs, a goal he achieved. While launch costs had remained stagnant for nearly four decades, Musk has managed to slash them by an impressive 80 percent so far, and it looks as if he will succeed in achieving further dramatic cost reductions in years to come.
This was precisely what Dana Rohrabacher, chair of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, predicted in his paper: “We all know that the costs of going into space are very high. We also know that the private sector has proven again and again that it can bring the costs of goods and service down and the quality up. Therefore, an obvious way to reduce the costs of access to and enterprise in space is to involve the private sector as much as possible.”
Doris Hamill, Philip Mongan, and Michael Kearney from the company SpaceHab called for a paradigm shift in their article “Space Commerce: An Entrepreneur’s Angle” and correctly predicted: “This approach to attracting commercial users does not require the space agencies to perform market development activities, to command its contractors to find efficiencies that will undercut the contractor’s revenue stream or to establish limits on how much they will subsidize commercial research. They only need to agree to purchase commercial services that meet their research needs within their budgets. The rest will happen by itself.” And that is exactly how it happened.
Of course, in addition to many accurate forecasts, the volume also contains predictions that did not come to fruition. For example, Aldrin predicted that the number of satellites launched into space would not increase significantly and that space tourism would emerge as a major industry. We know 22 years later that things turned out differently, but as space travel expert Eugen Reichl points out, “If you take SpaceX out of the equation, then Aldrin was not all that far off the mark. SpaceX is in a league of its own, far ahead of other countries’ and manufacturers’ space operations. Today, SpaceX launches roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of all satellites worldwide, and they are mostly Starlinks. SpaceX currently sends more than 2,000 satellites into orbit and beyond every year. As far as Aldrin’s perspective on space tourism is concerned, its time is yet to come. Richard Branson led the industry into a dead end with SpaceShip2, which used the only partially scalable hybrid engine of SpaceShip1. It was simply the wrong concept. There were also two serious accidents with a total of four fatalities.” Nevertheless, the arguments put forward in Space: The Free-Market Frontier in favor of private space travel as an attractive business sector are fundamentally convincing.
It is certainly possible that some of the predictions outlined in the book are still on their way. Overall, the volume shows that the paradigm shift initiated with the founding of Space X was correctly predicted even before the company’s inception. “What the United States needs,” wrote Poole, “is a policy toward space that is consistent with free markets and limited government.”