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Commercialization

Dueling Space Barons

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 5, 2016
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Dueling Space Barons

Rocket men: why tech’s biggest billionaires want their place in space, Guardian
“Bezos and Musk have developed an intense personal rivalry, says Ashlee Vance. “As time has gone on and these companies have been successful, ambitions have grown. Musk and Bezos used to be cordial, but they’re vicious now.” In 2013, SpaceX and Blue Origin fought over control of a Nasa launch pad and a patent for landing rockets at sea; Musk won both tussles. When Blue Origin tried to block SpaceX from using the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Musk emailed Space News slamming the company and questioning its ability to build a rocket that would meet Nasa standards. “We are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct,” Musk wrote. After a successful Blue Origin test launch and landing in November 2015, Bezos used his first ever tweet to boast about “the rarest of beasts – a used rocket”.”
Keith’s note: This sounds reminiscent of the late 1800s when dueling millionaires (often called “the barons of industry”) dueled with one another – but, in the process, caused America to be covered with railroads, oil fields, coal mines, telegraph, telephone, and electrical grids, and eventually roads filled with cars and skies filed with airplanes.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

20 responses to “Dueling Space Barons”

  1. Donald Barker says:
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    The main difference, for now, is that in the 1800s they had nearly unlimited customers forging ahead in pursuing individual dreams and heir daily lives who would be part of the financial growth and plan for those industries. Space if a very different beast. When regarding human space flight there is and has been only “one” customer – the government. A reason I have never been happy with the use of the term commercial space flight. The nearest upcoming commercial activity will be the “E-ticket” suborbital or LEO rides for those who can afford such a ticket. Again, barely what I would consider commercial. And hardly a sustainable venture such as a rail-road from Kansas City to Denver. But once a feasible destination is built, then things might start to change.

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      Movement of people is important, but movement of freight is much more profitable. True of both rockets and railroads.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        To where, Doug? To the ISS? To some fictional ‘hotel’ idea that’s been kicking around for decades?

        Mr. Barker is mostly correct. There is only one customer. Comparing the rocket-race with railroads is just plain silly. And I’d go further: where does anyone imagine a feasible destination will be built? By whom? And what will people be doing there?

        Substitute the word ‘Mars’ or ‘Luna’ and the argument is the same. There’s no ‘there’ there unless the government is paying the ticket.

        We live in a new age of Super-Mercantilism. Until we can utilize the real riches of the solar system the rest of it is a wet dream.

        Nobody longs for pan-humanism more than I do. But we won’t get anyplace until we face and deal with reality.

        • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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          Currently, the ISS. Perhaps after that, some private space station or a lunar or mars venture. If any of that doesn’t materialize, if there’s no market to be served, then rocket-based crew / cargo services will die out. Railroads would have died out if there were no place to transport goods and people.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      That is the great tragedy of space, the government got there first unlike most other frontiers where private ventures led. As a result folks keep looking to it money and not to other sources.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Oh please.

        The government got there first because there is no “there” other than the dreams of those of us who want to go to space for whatever personal reason. It’s not even a frontier. It’s nothing, nada.

        I’d go further: permanent “colonies” on Mars or Luna?
        Not. Gonna. Happen. Not unless there’s a huge (ahem) paradigm shift someplace or somehow.

        Reason? Human settlements need food and they need trade and they need transportation. We aren’t even close on the first two. And the last? Rockets? Really?

        The history of human geography is enlightening and is completely ignored by the space nuts (count me in). The so-called ‘space community’ writes paper after paper on how to get the government or someone else to go here or there but they ignore what people will actually do when they get to Mars or Luna.

        Watch movies in red caves?

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          They will do the same thing the adventure merchants who led the age of discovery did, make money while building a new society. The went for gold and silver, but found Cod, Tobacco and Tar instead.

          But I don’t think it will be on the surface of the Moon or Mars, there will just be work bases there. It will be in orbital space habitats as Danridge Cole wrote about many years ago.

          One problem about the government going first is that governments tend to do things in the most expensive way possible creating the impression of everything being high cost and driving entrepreneurs away.

          Finally the low cost launch development that should have happened decades ago is starting. Did you know that the first stage of the Saturn 1B actually had hard points on it for recovery by parachute? But since NASA had a never ending stream of government funding they never followed up plans to make it reusable. One wonders where launch costs would be today if NASA had stopped launching commercial payloads in the 1960’s and let the market develop instead of launching commercial satellites until the Challenger Accident.

    • Spacenut says:
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      The government (possibly governments) are indeed the only human spaceflight customer in the game at the moment, and will remain so as long as the costs remain as prohibitive as they are, the lower the costs and the more complete the infrastructure the more likely others will find the money and the reasons to send humans into space. The railroads were built because there was a need (and therefore the prospect of profit) for fast reliable transportation between destinations, without that need they would not have been built. Space of course is a very different beast, and in many ways you have to build the railroad network first with little or no prospect of profit (not something any baron would do) and hope that somewhere down the line someone will find a use for your railroad. To maximize the chances someone other than the government will uses your railroad the cost has to be affordable and destination fluid, Musk certainly understands the former and seems to be coming round to the latter with his renaming of the Mars Colonial Transporter to Interplanetary Transport System, Only time will tell however whether he or Bezos will be successful in getting the costs to the point that Space becomes viable for large scale profit which will in turn produce even more opportunity for profit.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Nuts.

        Focus on transportation costs consume current thinking but transportation costs are the least of the issue.

        • Spacenut says:
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          While my posts may not be as eloquent as your posts I would maintain that to say launch and transportation costs (be it human or simple cargo) are one of the biggest issues facing anyone looking to exploit space based resourses is not “NUTS”. Yes I understand there are many other issues to be overcome (not least in my opinion the negative “it wont happen because x,y,z” attitude) but if launch costs remain in the millions for a few tonnes of cargo there is no way that it will be economically viable to overcome those issues. If you are going to expand human civilization and exploit opportunities beyond earth then you need very serious support infrastructure which at least in the short to medium turn requires launching from earth by rockets, this needs to be fast and cheap, you don’t need a few tens, hundreds or even thousands of tonnes launching but potentially millions or billions if we are to even begin to create some sort of self sustaining architecture that will hopefully grow and expand independently and foster increasing opportunities. The less it costs to set up the infrastructure the more more likely it is that someone will be willing to take a risk on space as the next big thing.

    • fcrary says:
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      My memory of history may be off, but… I believe Canadian settlement of the west involved the trains going in first (at government expenses) and the settlers following. It certainly happened the other way around in the United States. But that doesn’t mean only one order is possible. And, in Canada, the desire to migrate westward, if not preexisting destinations, existed before the infrastructure.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        There was a robust trade between the coasts via the Horn before rail in either countries.

        That’s the point, of course; people found a reason to live in California, which forced rail. What is the reason to live on Mars?

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          And it was a trade started by adventure merchants, in particular John Bullfinch who financed Robert Gray to led the first America ships there to open trade 15 years before the famous government expedition of Lewis and Clark made it to Oregon.

  2. TheBrett says:
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    One would hope. At least this one doesn’t seem to be happening with massive securities fraud, like with the transcontinental railroad boom.

    It’ll be worth it if any one of the new space barons gets the cost of launches down a lot.

    • mfwright says:
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      >massive securities fraud

      Is this about some have written the new transcontinental railroad was not a financial success (except the barons that got rich from it)? I heard of a book called “Railroaded” where many people were economically devastated by the new transcontinental railroad. In some ways I can perceive it not great in 1870 but 30 and in later years it was very important.

      Using that analogy does this mean commercial space will be a financial loss for next 30 years? But if they maintain the effort it will have huge payoffs?

      Paul Spudis’ 2016 book has mention that Kraft Erhicke said, “If God intended man to be a space faring species he would have given them a Moon.” Going OT but maybe these barons focus on the Moon…?

      • TheBrett says:
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        Railroaded was definitely an inspiration for this. I wasn’t bashing the idea of either transcontinentals or a commercial space race, just making an off-hand comment that at least the latter didn’t involve fraud on the scale that the transcontinental race had incurred.

  3. sunman42 says:
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    The cutthroat competition didn’t really last all that long, except in railroads, and even them, the government stepped in to subsidize the roads too big to fail (the UP and CP). In mining, steel, oil, and so forth, monopolists gained control of enormous market share in order to both smooth out and maximize their profits — with disastrous results for the employees and the general public. Teddy Roosevelt had to step in and bust the trusts to protect the national interest.

    Let’s hope healthy competition goes on for a long time.

  4. mfwright says:
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    Interesting to examine historic analogies, I was thinking about early days of aviation I read someplace in 1920s there were 400 airplane companies, these were the “high tech” startups and most disappeared. Then we go back further of those countries that build ocean going ships, Britain eventually commanded the seas, others like Portugal fell by the wayside. Before then there was China, Vikings, Romans, etc.

    There have always been visionaries like Tsiolkovsk, Goddard, Korolev,
    Oberth [Von Braun was his student] but we now have barons with visions of space travel
    but have billions of their own to spend (the other guys were either
    ignored or relied on all their funding from governments). Perhaps space travel is much more difficult than people expect. SLS moves slowly along, there has been some action in “commercial space” but not as much as we expected after those flights of Space Ship One more than 10 years ago.

    Additional note: One thing certain Elon Musk generates lots of excitement among young people, and he pours money back into his companies instead of yachts and mansions.

  5. Bob Mahoney says:
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    And then came Amtrak…