…by Esther Dyson, over at Foreign Policy. The Space Frontier Foundation is cited.
3 thoughts on “More Defense Of The New NASA Budget”
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…by Esther Dyson, over at Foreign Policy. The Space Frontier Foundation is cited.
Comments are closed.
Esther Dyson’s editorial had to main faults. Yeah, if the gov was shifting the return to the moon program budget to commercial’s that would spawn a huge boom and thriving commercial launch market – but they aren’t. The programs just canceled.
Also the return top the moon program was not $25 billion worth of contracts – it was $250 billion.
Possibly the second error lead to the first? Not realizing how big “Apollo on steroids” was, she thought the trivial gains by commercial launches was a significant fraction of the total?
The major problem is that once again a false comparison is being made between an industry (Internet) with very low barriers to entry and a huge number of independent vendors and consumers with an industry with high barriers to entrance and a very very limited number of users. The market structure and economies of scale for both are completely different rendering any comparisons moot.
A better comparison with commercial launch would be commercial jetliners. It has market entry and economies which are much closer to commercial launch then the Internet. Just note how many start-ups are competing with Boeing and Airbus to build new jetliners for the trillion dollar plus travel industry…
Folks tend to forget that ultimately its market economics that determine the competitive mix in an industry. Market innovation and technology development are the result of demand pull, not technology push. This is why the eventual market structure for commercial crew will not look significantly different the contractor model.
This is why the likely end result of the new policy will just be NASA heavily subsidizing two vendors for crew launch to make it appear like they are competitive. $6 billion dollars being allocated to develop capsules on EELV (which is what the end result will be…) does not speak of any drastic reduction in launch costs for human space flight. Nor for any breakthrough in low cost human access to orbit. That would only come from true market driven demand.
With a market that small divided between 2 venders, they’ll be so uneconomical – they could well cost more per launch.
That might be a plus to NASA. “Hey we tried comercials, they were to expensive. We need to build and operate our own launch service with government employees.”