WE ARE LIVING ROBERT HEINLEIN'S DREAM: A NEW GENERATION OF COMPANIES HAS MADE SPACE TRAVEL AFFORDABLE.

• Author: Poole, Robert

ON FEBRUARY 6, 2018, I was sitting in the American Airlines Admirals Club at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, getting a snack prior to boarding a flight. CNN was playing on the club's large TV screens.

When 1 looked up, I happened to see blastoff video of the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of putting much larger pay-loads into orbit than the workhorse Falcon 9. That first launch was the one that sent into a solar orbit a Tesla convertible with a dummy astronaut sitting behind the wheel.

A bit later, when I looked up again, I saw two of the three Falcon first-stage boosters come in for perfect vertical landings at Cape Canaveral. I confess I had tears in my eyes, thinking, "Robert Heinlein, you should be alive to see this today."

I grew up reading Heinlein's science fiction, starting in fifth grade and continuing through my young adulthood. One of my favorites was his 1950 novella The Man Who Sold the Moon. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time any mainstream science fiction author had portrayed a privately financed space venture. From the 1950s onward, respectable analysts took it for granted that space was far too expensive for anyone but tax-supported governments to explore.

The successful Apollo moon landing program seemed to confirm that assumption. NASA spent $25 billion, equivalent to roughly $177 billion today, on the seven Apollo missions. Subsequent NASA endeavors reinforced the idea that space travel had to be financed by the government.

Post-Apollo, a reusable launch vehicle sounded sensible. After all, we don't build airliners for a single trip and then scrap them. So NASA created a new program to build and operate the space shuttle, intended as "the national launch vehicle" for all space missions. The agency ended up building five vehicles, of which only the orbiters were reusable. The total cost to build them was about $257 billion in current dollars. Taking into account support infrastructure and personnel, each launch cost about $2 billion in current dollars. NASA concealed that cost, charging customers a small fraction of the real amount to launch satellites.

In the last 15 years, however, an investor-financed space industry has made that exorbitant approach obsolete by slashing the cost of launching payloads to orbit. Its modus operandi is dramatically different from NASA's traditional way of doing things.

ONE BEST WAY

UNDER THE OLD model, NASA engineers figure out the "one best way" to define a new vehicle. Then they pay aerospace contractors to meet NASA's specs. To ensure broad-based congressional support for the needed budget, NASA's prime contractors rely on an army of subcontractors across a majority of the 50 states. Because NASA is very risk averse, its engineers and bureaucrats insist on endless testing and revisions of the one-best-way concept. This operating procedure generally means repeated schedule delays and large cost overruns, as occurred with the space shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), and the current very late and grossly over-budget Space Launch System (SLS).

An alternative began to emerge in the late 1970s, when the German startup OTRAG pioneered a modular approach to a proposed family of launch vehicles, as I described in a July 1978 Reason cover story. That effort was killed when East German propaganda spread the lie that OTRAG was developing cruise missiles. The publicity fed French fears of a threat to taxpayer-funded Arianespace, and OTRAG's funding dried up.

There were at least half a dozen serious space-launch startups in the 1980s and '90s, including American Rocket Company, Kistler Aerospace, Rotary Rocket, and XCOR. Some were based on innovative concepts such as new kinds of rocket motors and novel launch methods. But raising venture capital was very difficult, partly because, as a January 1985 Reason article documented, companies got negative reviews when...