Let Space Travel Flourish, Leave It to the Cranks and Crackpots
It's perhaps hard to imagine now given the ubiquitous nature of air travel today, but as the 19th century came to a close the concept of flying was seen as ludicrous. "It is a fact that man can't fly," opined the Washington Post in an editorial from that time. The Post stated what was broadly believed, and what was obvious at the time.
As David McCullough wrote in his 2015 biography of Wilbur and Orville Wright, The Wright Brothers, "would-be ‘conquerors of the air' and their strange or childish flying machines" served "as a continuous source of popular comic relief." For one to be a flying enthusiast back then was for that same person to be "mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason."
Happily for all of us, dreamers like the Wright brothers didn't allow accepted wisdom to neuter their determination. Though neither attended college, their curiosity about something that couldn't be taught as it was got the best of them. Wilbur aggressively pursued all available knowledge about the then impossibility that was flight, and then Orville was a lifelong tinkerer. Builders and repairers of bicycles by day, the brothers used the proceeds from their eponymous business to pursue the design and creation of an airplane.
Their initial flying experiment took place in October of 1900 with a glider that cost them all of $15 to make. Their first try failed, as did many after that. Entrepreneurs are made of sterner stuff than the rest of us. Failure to them is knowledge that compounds; failure nearly always the requirement for eventual success. On December 17, 1903 the brothers succeeded where none had before. Orville maneuvered their plane into the air for 120 feet and 12 seconds of flying time. Air travel was no longer an impossible dream.
Interesting about the brothers' years of experimentation was that according to McCullough, it cost them a little less than $1,000 in total. The Wrights had to be frugal as they had neither private nor public backing.
Conversely, Samuel Langley was the individual whom the federal government backed to the tune of $50,000. At the time it was the largest grant ever appropriated by the U.S. War Department. But as the Washington Post wrote about Langley's efforts with his "Great Aerodrome", it "involved a very large outlay of public money without disclosing a single ground for hope."
So while it would be shooting fish in the most crowded of barrels to say that the failed bet on Langley was early evidence of a federal government incapable of investing wisely, the greater truth about flight was that countless private attempts to achieve lift-off failed too. When it comes to the "impossible," there's going to be voluminous error amid trial. The more error the better. Considering the automobile that emerged not too long before the airplane, no less than 2,000 carmarkers incorporated in the U.S. alone in the early part of the 20th century. Nearly every single one went bankrupt. Wilbur Wright himself dismissed the potential of the automobile. And that's the point.
When it comes to advances that promise to boggle the mind, or that appear preposterous at first, routine failure is going to be the norm in the early days. In that case government reads as a lousy venture capitalist owing to its bottomless pockets that mean capital won't be used with circumspection, and worse, that failed ideas will be wastefully funded far longer than bad ones in the market-disciplined private sector. Either way, and in a world where capital is finite, government allocation of it means that bad ideas are supported for a longer time at the expense of more promising new ones that emerge more speedily from quickly acknowledged mistakes.
Second, largely because what's never been done before is initially absurd, odds are that the innovation is going to come from the people and businesses least likely to attract government funding. The latter is not an ideological statement as much as government is invariably going to choose what is known, or who is connected. In Langley's case he was a top official at the Smithsonian. As for the Wrights, they were the oddballs seen staring at seagulls for hours in their adopted (for flying purposes) town of Kitty Hawk, NC.
All of this rates mention in light of ongoing fascination with space and space exploration. Precisely because travel into space and beyond sometimes seems an impossible dream, we want government as far away from the process as possible. Turning a seemingly unthinkable trip to Mars into something real requires just the kind of outside-the-box thinking that is most likely to emerge from those who appear to have originated there. We want the "cranks" and the "crackpots" pursuing inconceivable advances in space, as opposed to the individuals and businesses that know a congressman or senator.
That's what's exciting about the entrance of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) into the space exploration game. Once business outsiders themselves, they're bringing unquenchable energy and unconventional thinking to a concept held back for too long by stodgy government officials. Both can point to successful rocket launches into space over the last few months.
At the same time, government still looms large in a sector that needs much less of it. Specifically, the federal government has handed monopoly power to Lockheed Martin and Boeing in their oversight of the United Launch Alliance. The two well-connected contractors get over $1 billion a year from the feds in return for conducting space launches for the U.S. military. Notable here for those with a nationalist bent, the rocket engines used for the launches have for years been purchased from Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Whether they're sourcing their rockets from Putin or Peoria, the bigger story here is that the federal government is arrogating monopoly power as opposed to stepping aside so that myriad competitors can emerge. This is crucial because assuming major advances in space exploration in the future, odds are they won't spring from government-created monopolies. It's once again because space travel and exploration seem so distant and unimaginable that any real advances will most likely emerge from places not presently on the federal government's proverbial radar screen.
Who knows for sure, but space travel and exploration have the potential to be truly life enhancing in the way that cars and airplanes have already been. What's important is that cars and planes emerged from well outside not just government, but also established businesses already friendly with government. For space exploration to reach full flower, it will thanks to abundant and rather intrepid capital being matched with all manner of dreamers that don't generally find a home in Fortune 500 companies or government, or in monopolies created by government.
Space's potential appears huge, and by its very name, rather limitless. With its vast potential in mind, let's get our capital consuming government out of the way so that increased experimentation can begin, along with the countless failures that will surely follow. Only then will the truly bewildering advances reveal themselves that will enable space exploration to live up to its long-discussed, but so far unfulfilled promise.
