SpaceX and Commercial Space Exploration | StarTalk

I think people conflate two different things here when they talk about the moving frontier of space exploration. If you're going to advance a space frontier, you have gone farther than anyone has gone before. To me, that's advancing a space frontier. Anything else could be an engineering frontier, and of course, there's overlap between the two.

So, uh, SpaceX launched, went into orbit, came back, and landed. That's great; we've never done that before. Now we ask who is going to advance the space frontier. The history of this exercise at high risk with little promise of economic return for doing it first tells me that governments do it, and they sign the tasks. The patents get made and discovered to accomplish these previous untapped goals. Once that's quantified, then you have private enterprise come in and make a buck off of it.

The first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company; it was Columbus, sent by Spain. Spain had other objectives. They have a baseline of time much longer than a quarterly report or an annual report. It's a country. Countries can make those kinds of investments, particularly if the long-term return on that investment is for the greater glory of the country itself.

I don't see SpaceX as being like the private company that's going to take us to Mars. They could do it on a SpaceX rocket; that's not a new thing. The relationship between NASA and all the rest—what would be new is if SpaceX said, "We're going to Mars, and we don't need any governmental help, and we're going to do this as a complete commercial exercise." I just don't see that happening.

Imagine the conversation: I'm CEO of a company, and I want to be the first to put a colony on Venus. But I'm a private company, so I bring in investors, and they ask me questions. They say, "How much does it cost?" I don't know, but more than has ever been spent in space before. "Okay, is it dangerous?" Yes, people will probably die. But what's the return on the investment? I don't know; probably nothing for a long time.

That's a really quick meeting. The government can say, "We want to go to Venus because that's strategic value, possible long-term economic value." That venture capitalist investors don't have the patience to wait out. So, I'm just trying to be practical here in the way civilizations have behaved ever since there's been civilization.