I can’t believe the Neanderthals weren’t intrigued by the stars. I’d go further and assume this about everyone before and since the Neanderthals, too! Not just the powerful people we might find records about, but every single person who’s had the capacity to look up, see, and reflect. It’s hard to think of a simpler example than ‘looking up at the stars’ of something that unifies the imaginative enthusiasm of humankind, across all of time and place.
Of course, today we can do more than gaze. Since the 1960s, humankind has been up there, doing things. And since then, people on Earth haven’t just been interested in space activity—they’ve been interested in space progress. In 1969, about a fifth of the world’s population watched the Apollo 11 moon landing. More recently, the online viewing of rocket launches has become a hobby for millions of people.
Meanwhile, milestones within space progress have regularly been conceived as achievements of humankind, and expensive state spending on space programmes has often been justified in terms of the national pride and unity it engenders. Think of August 23rd, which recently became India’s National Space Day, in recognition of the date in 2023 when an Indian vehicle landed at the moon’s south pole. Or April 12th, a date long celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in parts of the former USSR, which the UN adopted in 2011 as the International Day of Human Space Flight.
Lately, interest has also been growing in the financial returns of space activity. As I discussed in a recent article for Economic Affairs, there’s now widespread acknowledgement of the vast value of the ‘space economy’, and the space progress that drives its growth. The World Economic Forum has calculated the current size of the space economy at over $600 billion, and predicted it’ll reach between $1.4 trillion and $2.3 trillion by 2035!
That said, evaluating the space economy is complicated, particularly because of contestation over its scope. The most expansive calculations can include the value of every single satnav. Different approaches to line-drawing, therefore, help to explain why claims about the 2016 size of the space economy ranged from $166.8 billion (according to the Institute for Defense Analyses) to $350 billion (according to both Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch). This is useful context for considering the WEF’s trillion-dollar predictions, too.
Nonetheless, there’s almost universal acceptance that the space economy will continue to grow, that it’ll increase as a proportion of the global economy, and that its impact on our everyday interactions will broaden. It’s also worth keeping in mind that previous predictions seriously underestimated the then-future size of the space economy: its size in 2021 was, according to Bank of America, over 60 per cent larger than estimates made “just a decade prior”.
The growing role of private space companies
Space progress has long depended on the development of innovative technologies, which have driven down costs, particularly launch costs per payload. This has helped reduce barriers to entry for growing numbers of non-state space actors, enabling competition to improve standards and further decrease costs. Consequently, a more decentralised, innovative, and productive marketplace has developed.
Bank of America reports that almost 80 per cent of the space economy’s financial value is now found in commercial space products and services. These products and services range across areas, including launch and exploration, observation, and particularly satellite technologies. You engage with them every time you use Google Maps, Uber, or Apple Pay, and increasingly when you watch a movie on a plane. And they’re being developed and built by start-ups and scale-ups, as well as the leading space companies that’ve become household names and the focus of those millions of online rocket-launch fans.
As the leading space journalist Eric Berger emphasises in his new book, Reentry, it’s taken SpaceX less than fifteen years to go from “being incapable of launching a single rocket to putting nearly one hundred into space in a single year.” And in January of this year, a serious competitor, Blue Origin, finally entered the game, with the first flight of its flagship rocket, New Glenn. The two companies each now have multi-billion-dollar NASA rocket contracts. It’s generally assumed that America will continue to use private companies to fulfil its space transportation needs, and that other countries will follow suit, as indeed some, including the UK and India, already have.
The outstanding achievements of private space companies extend beyond rocket development and deployment, however. In the past few years, we’ve seen the first landing on the moon by a private company (Intuitive Machines, followed closely by Firefly Aerospace), the first spacewalk by private astronauts (SpaceX), and the first all-private-astronaut mission to the International Space Station (Axiom Space). Significant progress is expected soon on innovative private-sector projects involving low-Earth orbit satellite constellations, lunar prospecting, and asteroid observation.
Yet, regardless of the recent and likely future achievements of private space companies, public cynicism abounds about their increasing role. This cynicism is particularly driven by concerns about the interests, motivations, and priorities of the wealthy leaders of the most successful of these companies. There’s a popular narrative that these people are untrustworthy, in it for the wrong reasons, and that they should spend their money on alternative projects.
In an article discussing this narrative, Forbes Magazine cites a former American labor secretary tweeting, “Is anyone else alarmed that billionaires are having their own private space race while record-breaking heatwaves are sparking a ‘fire-breathing dragon of clouds’ and cooking sea creatures to death in their shells?” The Forbes article also links to a tweet by the executive director of the UN World Food Programme, in which she tells Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos that she’s “Excited to see you compete on who gets to space first! BUT, I would love to see you TEAM up together to save the 41 million people who are about to starve this year on Earth! It only takes $6 Billion. We can solve this quickly!”
Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky has described the advent of private space travel as a “terrible development.” He continued: “The environment, the commons, it’s what we all share. They’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow artificial institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences.” The comedian Jon Stewart recently broadcast a skit about billionaire space ventures, in which an actor playing Jeff Bezos bragged, “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for me personally.” And, beyond celebrity commentary, Pew reports that 65 per cent of American “believe it’s essential” that NASA remains involved in space exploration, alongside private companies.
In response, I’m going to make three simple arguments in favour of the value of private space activity. First, I’ll argue that there are serious risks in space activity being dominated by the state, which are mitigated through increased private-sector involvement. Second, that the criticisms outlined above often reflect a misunderstanding about the opportunity cost involved in the super-rich spending their wealth on space progress. And third, that private activity in space not only holds great economic value and potential, but is also enabling new experiential and epistemic opportunities.
Before making my three arguments, however, it’s important to acknowledge the dominant role the state continues to play in space activity. As I discuss in my Economic Affairs article, it’s rare to find predictions countering the idea that state spending will continue to be “the cornerstone” of the space economy, for the foreseeable future. Moreover, even the most successful private space companies typically depend on taxpayer money in one form or another, including, as discussed above, colossal procurement contracts. Beyond all this, private space progress occurs within tight yet evolving legislative and regulatory constraints, as seen recently by the wide-ranging impact of the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, and the EU’s ongoing development of a European Space Law.
An argument about state domination
In this context, I’m going to make my first argument: that increased private space activity can mitigate the serious costs of space activity being dominated by the state. These costs include the literal costs of the burden that state space spending imposes on the taxpayer. Taxpayer spending always needs to be well-justified. But because such justification is easiest in relation to the meeting of the basic needs of a state’s inhabitants, the extra-territorial and seemingly ‘luxurious’ nature of space spending can seem particularly burdensome—even when it leads to improvements in meeting basic needs, through zero-gravity medical research, for instance. Minimally, therefore, increased private space activity shifts some financial cost away from the taxpayer.
A further serious cost of the state’s centrality to space activity is the risk of politicisation, which occurs when this activity is used as an instrument for furthering political goals. Of course, we’ve seen politicization since the first days of the Space Race. In its darkest manifestations, it represents the pursuit of aggression. That is, as I argue in my Economic Affairs article, while space activity has become increasingly crucial to protecting national interests, this itself reflects the growing exploitation of space for aggressive ends. According to the Space Foundation’s calculations for 2023, global military space budgets grew 18 per cent on the previous year, and comprised almost half of total government space expenditure. None of this is to ignore the militaristic space goals of some non-state actors. But it is to emphasise the value of a more pluralistic and less formally politicised playing field.
Finally, as long as space remains largely the domain of the state, it will be subject to the same constraints on innovation that all state-directed activity suffers. This isn’t to deny that state space spending has been crucial to the space progress of the past sixty years. But, by its nature, the state lacks skill at allocating funds, is vulnerable to rent-seeking, and tends to x-inefficiency and broader bureaucratic bloat. Think of that classic moment in the 1990s Simpsons universe when, while considering where to find an ‘average Joe’ to send into space for publicity purposes, a fictional NASA official says, “I suggest a lengthy, inefficient search, at the taxpayers’ expense, of course.” That is, no longer focused by Kennedy’s presidential mandate and the urgency born of ‘war’ goals, yet still hampered by inflexible hierarchical procedures, NASA had become a stagnant bureaucracy. As Eric Berger saw in 2016, however, the growth of private space activity was already beginning to turbocharge space progress through the introduction of competition. “In the last 10 years,” Berger wrote, “another powerful aspect of Democracy has emerged to push the United States back toward deep space—capitalism.”
My first argument runs like this, therefore: the more the state’s space dominance is countered by private activity, the greater the opportunity to decrease the financial burden on the taxpayer, to reduce the risk of dangerous politicization, and to make the space economy more dynamic. I’m aware, however, that this argument doesn’t explicitly address public cynicism about the interests, motivations, and priorities of the leaders of private space companies. So perhaps you think it’s missing the target.
In response, I’d emphasize the costs of forgetting that state actors are fallible humans, too, open to the same flaws! Indeed, acknowledgement of this helps to underpin my argument. That is, the human fallibility of state actors gives us reason, in itself, to demand the justification of state spending, to be concerned by the politicisation of state space activity, and to understand why state-directed activity is inefficient. Deeper down, however, a specific kind of scrutiny is formally required of state actors. This is because they hold special privileges and obligations, qua political representatives. It’s not only, therefore, that their actions require justification, owing to their dependence on taxpayer funding—it’s that this justification is dependent on the extent to which their actions align with the public’s interests.
An argument about opportunity cost
Next, I want to turn to a common misunderstanding about the opportunity cost involved in billionaires spending their wealth on space progress. In my final section, I’ll make a case for the broad value of this spending. But first, I want to address the standard criticism that the wealth of the super-rich would be ‘better spent’ on other goals.
Such criticism typically involves claiming that the world would be a better place if, instead of funding space projects, billionaires donated their money to charity. Or if, as above, they put it towards solving crucial problems like climate change or poverty. Aside from the impossibility of seeing into counterfactual worlds, however—and the difficulty of predicting any unintended consequences that would arise in these worlds—an overlooked response to such criticism is that, often, this simply isn’t the real-world opportunity cost of the super-rich spending their money on space progress.
I mean, thankfully, many billionaires do give to charity. And, thankfully, some billionaires do fund projects aimed at solving climate change and poverty. But you can’t rely on assumptions about what the alternative options were that these people dismissed when they decided to spend some of their money on space! And you certainly can’t assume that their dismissed options were the ones that you would prioritise. In other words, in at least some cases, the real-world opportunity cost of a billionaire’s space spending is not more charitable giving. It’s buying another few superyachts! Which would you prefer? And if you’ve decided to drop some of your cynicism at this point, because you want to tell me that billionaires probably do seriously consider ‘better’ options, then that works for my position, too.
I’m aware, however, that my second argument doesn’t make an explicit case for the value of billionaires spending their money on space progress. I haven’t touched, for instance, on the direct and indirect benefits of space profits being spent in space and on Earth. Rather, my argument focuses on the flaws in criticizing billionaire space spending on the grounds of opportunity cost, when that criticism depends on assumptions about other people’s preferences. I’m going to end this piece, therefore, by making a simple yet neglected argument for the breadth of the value of private space activity—qua activity that benefits from financing provided by the super-rich, among increasingly diverse sources of capital.
An argument about breadth
My third argument hinges on the way in which, beyond its economic value and potential, private space activity is also expanding experiential and epistemic opportunities. On the simplest level, since most people are not state actors—and many either can’t or don’t want to become state actors—an increase in non-state space activity therefore amounts to people experiencing space who otherwise would not.
But private space activity also widens the variety of the ‘type’ of person who can gain first-hand acquaintance with space. In my Economic Affairs article, I quoted a medic explaining that private space activity involves people who are “more representative of the population on earth” than state space programmes. He tells us how it involves “older people, young people, folks with medical conditions, people from different countries.” This example, therefore, also emphasises that private space activity can broaden the beneficiaries of space-activity-acquired knowledge—in this case, through the development of personalised medicine. These opportunities will surely continue to expand as commercial space flight becomes cheaper and safer.
Space activity is also at the heart of ongoing progress in the development of observation and communications technologies that can enable access to knowledge necessary to reduce suffering on Earth. Epistemic capacity gained from space-tech innovation could help to decrease the likelihood of accidental nuclear war, and has already provided evidence for the existence of the Chinese government’s human rights-violating detention camps. It’s not just that private space activity is driving much of this progress, however. Private actors are also often inherently better suited to this work than their state comparators. This is partly because, again, state action lacks agility, but also because some of this progress is in the monitoring of state actors themselves!
Finally, I want to turn to how the growing space economy offers increased opportunities to learn about—and from—space, through everyday activity on Earth. The most obvious example of this, as mentioned above, is the satnav technology you have in your car and on your mobile phone. As space policy expert Gabriel Elefteriu tells us, “Whole industries and critical services are dependent on satellite systems.” The Satellite Industry Association reports that the commercial satellite industry now “accounts for 71 per cent of the world’s space business.” There are many examples of innovative private satellite companies at the forefront of this progress. Take Spire, for example, which claims to be “revolutionizing” maritime data collection and analysis, or Xona, developing satnav technology to “meet the needs of intelligent systems.”
A more down-to-earth example, however, of the growth of experiential and epistemic opportunity can be found in everyday public engagement with space. During the pandemic, telescope sales at some companies rose by 400 per cent, surely owing in part to innovation-driven cost reductions. And in October, booking.com listed ‘noctotourism’ as its top travel-trend prediction for 2025. After all, most people still don’t have the option to go into space. Until then, we can continue looking up at the stars, but through better lenses more easily accessible, and with increased knowledge of what we’re seeing.
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