Space: The Free-Market Frontier by Edward L. HudginsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is very exciting to re-read the book that probably created New Space. When editor Ed Hudgins assembled a group of freewheeling space thinkers, space travel was stuck in a dead end. NASA and other space agencies had made the wrong bet after the moon landings. It was too expensive to launch things into orbit, and when the space race wasn't pushing flags and footprints, there was no good reason to be in space. The backbone of the infrastructure, the space shuttle, was an emergency solution after the Apollo program that saw dangerous accidents and prohibitive costs.
In various texts, the authors describe problems and how they can be solved and develop visions for the near future. It is a future where space would have a practical economic role.
Robert W. Poole Jr. wrote that NASA should buy launches from suppliers, instead of building their own rockets. The complicated and rigid requirements set by NASA stifled innovation by encouraging suppliers to exaggerate their costs to maximize their profit. There was a lot of unnecessary innovation, instead of building something that just worked.
The space shuttle program was subsequently shut down, through the inefficiencies some of the authors pointed out, and no new program took its place. Politician Dana Rohrabacker proposes in the book a new model for procurement where NASA buys services, such as the delivery of cargoes to low orbit on an open market. This is what Elon Musk offers with SpaceX. It makes a crucial difference that SpaceX can offer launching a kilogram into orbit for a fixed price of $2,000 these days, compared to the $10,000 it cost when the book was published.
Some predictions have gone wrong. It was probably difficult for astronaut Buzz Aldrin to really see how big the market for satellites would be 10-15 years after the book was published. We do need a lot more of telecommunications than in 2002. The difference is again SpaceX, which accounts for 60-70 percent of all satellite launches. Microsatellites are great, but it's the launch cost that is vital.
The space tourism business that Aldrin advocated does exist today, but not on the scale he envisioned. It is due to some misjudgments that Richard Branson made with Virgin Galatic. They are still too expensive, and unsafe, to make space tourism more than just individual short trips for the rather brave and rather wealthy.
Today, when I read the book, it feels a little tight, somewhat rough and in places overly cautious. Although style is not the point of reading it today, nor to see what technologies did or did not manifest as envisioned. It is to understand the future that Ed Hudgins and his co-writers were very much involved in shaping.
They explained the need for a structure that allowed for experimentation, entrepreneurship, and many different uses of space, and showed well enough what one might look like. The authors foresaw a future were space has a practical economic role. It is a place, not a program. That was the change brought on by New Space.
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