Billionaires, kamikaze space vehicles and regulation
2 questions and 1 prediction with Noah Rothman
Space billionaires are everywhere in the media coverage but the core questions their feats open up are not.
Noah Rothman is the Associate Editor at Commentary Magazine and an MSNBC/NBC News contributor. He is the author of "Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America”. Noah is a voice of reason in this news cycle around the privatization of space travel.
I reached out to Noah to engage in a conversation on what space commerce could entail in terms of regulation and more.
Frederic Guarino: Untold economic output will come from this space exploration. You're one of the few voices who pointed to that fact, if you can expand on what you think it's going to entail in terms of potential regulation ?
Noah Rothman: I suppose we should start the story from the beginning. Space exploration development appears to be something that's very easy to lampoon from the perspective of modern sophisticates. You just take the experience that the Trump administration had when it developed the Space Force as a new branch of the military, which was lampooned within an inch of its life but the necessity of this branch has been demonstrated and now affirmed by the Biden administration. It was obvious at the time because of the proliferating amount of assets that we have in orbit, many of which are already dual use, meaning that they can be transformed into a weapon at a moment's notice.
Anti-satellite weaponry has already been tested by Russia, China and by the United States so this is another tool in the arsenal and low earth orbit is going to become the theater of war in the near future so it has to be treated as such, which means you'll have to develop reusable kill vehicles that are just kamikaze themselves and everything else. The reason why we need to have this protective regime is because of the commercialization of orbit which is already happening before our eyes.
This month we saw Richard Branson take a proof of concept flight for what he envisions would be tourism in orbit and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin New Shepard capsule is much more around suborbital travel. The demand for this is already proven as they're taking reservations on spec for hospitality services in orbit and transportation in orbit, and as competition increases the price of tickets is going to decline. Robert Zubrin who's a futurist and who's been advocating for space exploration his entire career, estimates that within a couple of years a ticket for example in a suborbital transport vehicle will be around twenty thousand dollars. Now that's a lot but that's roughly the cost of a first class ticket from New York to Sydney Australia, so it's within the reach of average consumers.
Once these industries are proven then you have you open up a universe of research and development and corporate investment in this theater, and it has a lot of options and a lot of benefits that you can't get from a terrestrial competitor: almost zero gravity, near vacuum conditions, total isolation, the sort of stuff that's really expensive to reproduce on the ground.
From there out into the distant future you can envision a world that as Bezos imagines will conduct most of its heavy industry off world, which means mining for resources on asteroids and on Mars, developing robotic mining platforms on the moon to harvest helium-3, which is a non-radioactive isotope that can be used in proven technology. MIT has already developed this clean fuel tech with tokamak reactors.
In the very distant future we can envision cylindrical colonies that will house human beings with 24/7 access to solar power and no need for lithium ion batteries. This on demand power generation is going to be highly desirable as you will also be free of natural disasters and a variety of other threats that exist on Earth. All this stuff sounds very science fictional, but so too is the concept of space billionaires competing with one another in order to get people into orbit. Escape velocity was the exclusive province of governments just 10 years ago.
In the very near future Congress is going to have to start thinking about this private enterprise and all the while they're going to be laughed at, meanwhile there will be developing technologies and property rights in the outer atmosphere and in sub-orbit that will lead to a revolution in the human experience, to say nothing of a profound amount of profit.
Frederic Guarino: if you look at history to forecast that privatization could take a form akin to the Hudson Bay Co which controlled Rupert's Land until 1869 and had its own private army and was a quasi-state entity. Do you see a potential for these, let's call them government sanctioned cartels, like Hudson Bay or the East India Co, by essence the first public-private partnerships of the day
Noah Rothman: It's so speculative that it's difficult to engage in anything thoughtful on this subject without trying to catch yourself and not trying to be too fanciful because this is still many decades into the future. We're talking about technology that doesn't exist yet, but you can envision a very 19th century conception of how the inner solar system for example will be developed. Zubrin talked about this in his book The Case for Space.
This will require Congress to light a fire under the initiative by granting speculative property rights in space to companies that have no means of getting anywhere near this property. This will create incentives for them to do so, granting property rights to a body in the asteroid belt. There are no means to get there just yet, however when somebody does or when another country for example violates that property right then you can impose sanctions on them, you can sanction the use of those materials and create incentives for these companies to jump start this sort of exploration.
As you say this is such an isolated, hostile and hazardous environment that's so far out from anything resembling a governing entity, there will have to be measures that these companies will take to safeguard their assets, which could include security. This is something along the lines of what an East India Co would do, essentially a small state, a state miniature, and you could see something very similar to that developing within this century, perhaps even in our lifetimes.
A lot of this suborbital commerce and outer atmosphere commerce is going to develop in our lifetimes, all that other stuff is in the distant future, but it's also the sort of thing that you can prepare for today and to accelerate today, just as Congress granted specular land rights in Oklahoma before it was a territory, that's what today’s Congress can and should do now.
Frederic Guarino: your prediction for a five-year scenario
Noah Rothman: I suppose there's an optimistic scenario and a more pessimistic scenario. A more pessimistic scenario is we don't progress or develop very much beyond where we're at now as we're still proving the concept of suborbital tourism and travel and even research and development and that five years that's easily invisible also easily envisioned is a much more aggressive effort on the part of, for example Musk and Bezos to jump start suborbital travel for high-end people willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money eg fifty thousand dollars a ticket to go from one side of the planet to the other in an hour. Most likely what we're going to see isn't an explosion of commerce at first, but an explosion of government defense and NASA contracts using these vehicles that have been miraculous. These vehicles have been developed by these private companies to ferry soldiers and material from one side of the planet to the other very quickly and I would imagine that you will see that at the end of this decade. Five years is probably a little optimistic, but I would say in the late 20s and early 30s you will probably see something like that.