Last week's post discussed Elon Musk and his boasts that he will establish a colony on Mars. That post described the physical challenges of trying to get to Mars via rockets whose thrust comes from chemical combustion. Today I want to mention various estimates of the cost of such a venture. According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the total cost of developing a manned mission to Mars is $120.6 billion in 2017 dollars. According to former U.S. astronaut and ISS mission commander Steve Swanson, those costs would run from $100 billion to $500 billion. Elon Musk is purportedly worth $195.6 billion at present. He seems to have lost another $100 billion between the start of 2022 and now. If he were to try to send even one mission to Mars out of his own pocket, I think it's safe to say that he would no longer be a high-flying celebrity afterward. He might wind up needing to take a job as a shopping cart jockey or shelf stocker at a local supermarket. (The Winco near my house is hiring, by the way.)
In other words, I don't think Musk has so much as a snowball's chance on Venus of sending anyone to Mars. So why the hype about Musk and SpaceX, then? That is a question whose answer will require a fair amount of research. But its beginnings can be traced to the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to begin to privatize delivery of rocket-launched payloads into low Earth orbit. Due to Musk's friendship with former NASA chief Michael Griffin, Musk's company was awarded the contract for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to develop commercial resupply rockets for the International Space Station in 2006, even though Musk's company "had never flown a rocket" before, according to Wikipedia. This award is even more surprising, given that twenty well-established aerospace companies had also bid on the project.
So it seems that from the start, SpaceX has been a beneficiary of corporate welfare. And as a beneficiary of corporate welfare, SpaceX may well become a poster child of the effects of privatization on the ability of societies to engage in large-scale, transformative projects. I'd like to suggest that privatized societies dominated by hyper-capitalists lose this ability over time. I'd like to suggest further that societies which want to advance in substantive, paradigm-shifting ways need to learn to engage in megaprojects. These megaprojects cannot be left entirely to the private sector. Neither can they be entirely the province of governments. Rather, both government and the private sector must learn to negotiate a healthy balance. Where this balance is unhealthy, graft and corruption appear and megaprojects do not deliver on their promises. Crony capitalism is a state of unbalance, and turning free market ideology into a fetish tends to turn societies into crony capitalist states dominated by large players with contradictory self-interests.
The corrosive effect of crony capitalism on a society's ability to undertake large-scale projects is most clearly seen when a crony capitalist society is hit by a sudden challenge, test, or shock. One example of this is the botched response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina. Another possible example may well be the botched response of the Japanese government and private industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. (Author Haruki Murakami offers a surprisingly insightful criticism of the response to Fukushima in his book Novelist as a Vocation.) For an example of the damage which a self-inflicted shock can cause to the systems of a crony capitalist society, we need look no farther than the failure of Russian military hardware and supplies during Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine. By the way, that failure is a fine example of the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned. Putin has reaped what he has sown - and he is not enjoying the reaping. My hope is that things become even more unpleasant for him and for the Russian military.
If crony capitalism has extended even to space exploration, I imagine that space itself will inflict yet another unexpected shock. Lives will be lost. Because Musk seems to want to portray himself as a doer of megaprojects, the rest of us must ask whether he represents a case of healthy balance between the public and private sector, or whether he is actually a case of crony capitalism.
It would be instructive to delve in more detail into the subject of megaprojects, their role in societal development, and the potential for forfeiting this development by means of privatization and crony capitalism. But I'm out of time today...
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