Competition will drive the space race

One of the worst parts of growing up is realizing that not everyone gets to be an astronaut. But thanks to recent developments in the space tourism industry, we dreamers still might make it to the moon.

On Dec. 1, Jeff Bezos, CEO of spaceflight company Blue Origin, announced that his company had launched, reached space with and — most importantly — successfully re-landed the “space vehicle” New Shepard in one piece.

Private businessmen like Bezos are at the forefront of an emerging space travel industry. In an era where federal funding for space exploration is faltering, a competition-driven conquest of space is the only way we’ll reach the stars any time soon.

“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in west Texas is the rarest of beasts — a used rocket,” Bezos declared in a public statement. His optimism about the re-landing — the first of its kind and a vital step in making space travel more efficient and practical — was as remarkable as the re-landing itself. According to him, this is the beginning of “a new golden age of space exploration.”

If Bezos is right, this “golden age” looks very different from NASA’s heyday in the ’60s. With NASA’s meager 0.47 percent share of federal funding a mere one-tenth of the 4.4 percent of the budget it received in 1966, a federally led future for space exploration seems stuck on the ground.

The competition fueling a renaissance in space travel was almost immediately demonstrated after Bezos’s statement in a response from Elon Musk. Musk is CEO of SpaceX — another space-faring company at “war” with Blue Origin. The businessman, who originally made his fortune as a founder of PayPal, extended tepid congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin for their achievement.

“It is, however, important to clear up the difference between ‘space’ and ‘orbit,’” he pointed out on Twitter.

According to Musk’s following tweets, successfully launching an object in space requires speeds of only around 2,300 miles per hour. The more significant feat of launching an object that can stay in orbit requires far more speed — around 23,000 miles per hour.

To Musk, the Blue Origin landing was nothing compared to the task of pulling off “orbital landing,” which his company was taking on. The ability to reuse space vessels that travel at a sub-orbital level, the PayPal co-founder suggested, is more similar to airplanes than it is to space shuttles or satellites.

There is some basis for Musk’s perspective. But part of it is grounded in the competition between the two companies.

The re-landing puts Blue Origin one step closer to the widely available spaceflight necessary for new markets, including broader-based space tourism, which both companies want to control.

In the new Space Race between companies instead of superpowers, the  support of the federal government is a valuable asset. When NASA put SpaceX in charge of its manned missions coming up in 2017, it raised the stakes for Musk’s company to lead the charge into outer space.

Of course, Musk can’t let the Blue Origin landing outdo SpaceX. On the Tuesday following Blue Origin’s landing, NASA representatives at a media conference relayed the “exciting news” that Musk’s company would be skipping ocean-based landings altogether and moving to an attempt at landing on the ground at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX has been conducting experimental landings for well over a year with the motivation of fulfilling a contractual obligation to a governmental organization.

It’s almost certain that the sudden re-prioritizing of the scheduled landing attempts wouldn’t have happened without the unexpected success of Blue Origin’s landing. And the outcome of SpaceX’s attempts will be of considerable interest to taxpayers — they ultimately foot the bill of the company’s $3.4 billion contract with NASA.

And although 2013 Pew polls show that NASA holds an exceptionally high approval rating of 73 percent among the American public, a 2012 General Social Survey poll showed no more than 22 percent in favor of increasing NASA’s budget.

Without competition, the current strategy of space exploration by private contract wouldn’t work.

This effect isn’t unknown or unacknowledged by NASA, either. Back in 2012, the agency had yet to choose a private endeavor to lead American excursions into space. Instead of selecting only one, NASA distributed almost $270 million in federal funds to four companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin. The reason? According to NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, “Competition is key.”

“We are ushering in a new era that embraces the innovation of the private sector along with the importance of what we do here in the government,” Garver said in a conference call with reporters.

Nevertheless, Congress insisted on a choice of only one, and SpaceX clinched the contract due to its relatively low operating costs.

Of course, Blue Origin’s landing last month shows that the choice has evidently not ended all competitiveness in the industry. But it’s clearly the Bezos-Musk antagonism rather than NASA’s decision-making that now supplies the greater part of competitive incentive in the development of space travel.

Blue Origin’s successful landing and SpaceX’s reaction to it justify putting faith in private competition in the space race today. Both also point to a rapidly expanding future for human travel in space. The more these two companies and their competitors push each other, the more rapid and the more significant human expansion into space will be.

The pettiness of the free market may not be the most ideal pathway to the stars. But if we want to turn childhood fantasies into reality, it’s indispensable.

Henry primarily writes on government and domestic policy for The Pitt News.

Write Henry at hgg7@pitt.edu.