SpaceX Is The Twenty-first Century Equivalent To The East India And Hudson Bay Companies
On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced
before a crowd of 35,000 that “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade”. On July 20, 1969, we did just that with the
landing of Apollo 11. The United States
Government, driven by popular demand made an unprecedented investment throughout
the 1960’s, often spending up to 4% of the annual federal budget on manned
spaceflight.
As soon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned to earth
however, public interest in space dropped off.
Congress followed popular opinion, and for the last 40 years NASA
budgets averaged about one half of one percent of the federal budget.
This financial malaise has continued to this day. In spite of glorious claims regarding the
Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) projects, the NASA budget has
not increased significantly. SLS/Orion
will not launch until 2021. Even then
the best we can hope for under current budget constraints is to have one launch
every two or three years. This is wholly
insufficient for real exploration and completely eliminates any hope of NASA building
a Mars colony.
By Contrast, commercial space entities like Bigelow
Aerospace and SpaceX are finding ways to get the job done faster, cheaper and
more efficiently. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy
will launch this year for instance, with the ability to lift 80% of the
capacity of the SLS block one at as low as one tenth the price.
Despite the advantage that commercial space has both in
terms of cost and innovation, many balk at giving commercial entities the lead
role in space exploration and colonization.
The truth is that historically it has been shown that commercial
enterprises can be for more effective at colonization and resource development
than government entities.
Let us look at the history of exploration and colonization
of the earth for some examples. On
December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company. In 1670 a similar charter created the Hudson
Bay Company.
England was interested in expanding her empire and bringing
in wealth through trade. The standing
armies and navies and other expenditures necessary to accomplish expansion made
this an expensive endeavor. Instead of
the crown (and therefore the taxpayers) shouldering this cost, members of the
aristocracy and wealthy merchants banded together to form these independent
companies. In addition to conducting
trade, they had their own armies and navies and even local government.
The East India Company in fact set up everything the British
did in India. Eventually they had to let
government entities take over, but that was not until 1847. The British Raj took over an India that
already had all the modern facilities of government in place, courtesy of the East India Company.
The Hudson Bay Company was responsible for the exploration
and settlement of the American Pacific Northwest and Canada. Fur trapping was a major industry, and that
resource drove the company’s trappers all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
These examples prove commercial entities have more incentive
to do resource development and colonization than governments do. It is not such a stretch to view the vast
expanses between our home world and the red planet in the same way that
seventeenth century Europeans viewed the Atlantic Ocean. It is vast, dangerous, and if you cross that
expanse, you may never return. Only the
incentive of profit can drive people to take such great risks.
SpaceX and other commercial space endeavors are the modern
equivalent of the East India and Hudson’s Bay Companies. We need to be sure they have the opportunity
to do what must be done, as history shows that governments may not be the best
drivers for economic migration, resource development and colonization of
strange lands.
