The many benefits of the private space race

ON Sunday, American astronauts returned to Earth. Their trip to the space station was the first manned launch from the United States in 10 years.

By NASA? No. Of course, not.

This space flight happened because government was not in charge. An Obama administration committee had concluded that launching such a vehicle would take 12 years and cost $36 billion. But this rocket was finished in half that time — for less than $1 billion.

That’s because it was built by Elon Musk’s private company, Spacex. He does things faster and cheaper because he spends his own money. “This is the potential of free enterprise!” aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin explained in my newest video.

Of course, years ago,

NASA did manage to send astronauts to the moon. That succeeded, says Zubrin, “because it was purpose-driven. (America) wanted to astonish the world what free people could do.”

But in the 50 years since then, as transportation improved and computers got smaller and cheaper, NASA made little progress. Fortunately, President Barack Obama gave private companies permission to compete in space, saying, “We can’t keep doing the same old things as before.”

Competition then cut the cost of space travel to a fraction of what it was. Why couldn’t NASA have done that?

Because after the moon landing, it became a typical government agency — overbudget and behind schedule. Zubrin said NASA’S purpose seemed to be to “supply money to various suppliers.” Suppliers were happy to go along.

Zubrin once worked at Lockheed Martin, where he discovered a way for a rocket to carry twice as much weight. “We went to management, the engineers, and said, ‘Look, we could double the payload capability for 10 percent extra cost.’ They said, ‘Look, if the Air Force wants us to improve the Titan, they’ll pay us to do it!’ ”

NASA was paying contractors’ development costs and then adding 10 percent profit. The more things cost, the bigger the contractor’s profit. So contractors had little incentive to innovate. Nor is NASA good at innovating. Its technology was so out of date, Zubrin said, that “astronauts brought their laptops with them into space — because shuttle computers were obsolete.”

NASA was OK with high costs as long as spaceships were assembled in many congressmen’s districts. “NASA is a very large job program,” Aerospace lawyer James Dunstan said. “By spreading its centers across the country, NASA gets more support from more different congressmen.”

Private companies do more with less money. One of Musk’s cost-saving innovations is reusable rocket boosters. For years, NASA dropped its boosters into the ocean.

Twenty years ago, at Lockheed Martin, Zubrin had proposed reusable boosters. His bosses told him: “Cute idea. But if we sell one of these, we’re out of business.”

Thankfully, now that self-interested entrepreneurs compete, space travel will get cheaper. Musk can’t waste a dollar. Spacex must compete with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and others.

The private sector always comes up with ways to do things that politicians cannot imagine. Government didn’t invent affordable cars, airplanes, iphones, etc. It took competing entrepreneurs, pursuing profit, to nurture them into the good things we have now.

Get rid of government monopolies. For-profit competition brings us the best things in life.

John Stossel is author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”