COMMERCIAL SPACE: WE HAVE DONE THIS BEFORE

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.