Life Beyond Earth: The Space Barons and the Commercialization of Space

Christian Davenport, staff writer, The Washington Post, doesn’t remember much about Neal Armstrong’s landing on the moon. For him, his first memory of space was the tragedy of the Challenger launch disaster – and that was the image of space he had grew up with. He pointed out that, “the thing about the Shuttle was that it held a promise, it was supposed to fly frequently.” [10:41] In this first session of the Ten Years Hence 2022 series, Davenport explored the origins of commercial space travel, space barons, and where commercial space travel could take humanity in the next 10 years. 

The origins of space travel for regular Americans, the Space Flight Participant Program, were halted along with The Challenger and in 2011, NASA completely retired the space shuttle. This was the climate where, three years later, Davenport found himself assigned to cover a press conference for Elon Musk. Musk and his company SpaceX were trying to move the needle on the commercialization of space, and had begun suing the Air Force and Pentagon, wanting to compete to fly national security satellites on his rocket. Though no one was really paying attention, Davenport began to lean in to try to understand how Musk was trying to bring about a complete change in space exploration. 

“It occurred to me that if some of the richest men in the world were plowing big parts of their fortunes into space and trying to develop new technologies and new ways of doing things – that that was something we should be paying attention to; because, frankly, a lot of the mainstream media were not paying attention to it at the time.” [16:02]

From then on, the industry moved at a rapid pace. SpaceX and Boeing won a contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station despite hesitancy to allow a private company to carry the country’s most precious resource – astronauts. A year later, Jeffrey Bezos and Blue Origin successfully landed a suborbital rocket and kicked off the public competition of businesses, competing much in the way that the US and the Soviet Union once did. It signaled a shift in the paradigm that put the push for space in the hands of businesses and the owners that back them. The advent of reusable rockets lowered costs and increased access to space. Though the two space barons had different visions of space (Musk sees it as a “backup” for humanity, and Bezos an “industrial zone” for Earth) they both are seeking the same thing – lowering the cost barrier to access space and doing so more reliably and safely. 

Davenport explains that while we aren’t quite there yet for space tourism, the cost may come down following recent advancements in the field, including a tourism flight on Blue Origin that sold for millions, and the influx of investment from NASA and the US government’s Artemis project. While travels out of Earth are dangerous, they are important. In 10 years, Davenport talks about the profound impact that space travel could have on humanity. 

“You could go from 600 hundred people who have been to space, to 6,000, then 60,000 over a series of years. And now we’re talking about the Ten Years Hence, and what that means – where you know someone, who knows someone who has been in space.” [43:25] 

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