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Tim Worstall on the Spaceship 1 achievement
So while I congratulate Burt Rutan and Paul Allen on their achievement I'm also remembering the advice of Frederic Bastiat to economists: always look for the hidden. What is important about Spaceship One is not that a private organization has done it once, but that now that it has been done once free markets will continue to make it better, faster, cheaper and someone, one amongst our fellow humans, will work out what to actually do with it, in a manner that none of us today has any inkling of. That's why free markets are important, that's why the first private space trip is important and that's why Paul Allen has done a great deal more than fund a rich man's toy.
The second major point that detractors miss is that free markets are incredibly good at making things cheap. Yes, it has cost $20 million to get this far and put one private individual into space. That's the total program cost of course, the next person to go up will cost a fraction of that. Yet even that is not quite what I mean. Imagine, as I think is virtually certain, that over the next decade someone extends the performance of these private vehicles to Low Earth Orbit. As Jerry Pournelle has repeatedly pointed out, once you are in orbit you are not halfway to the Moon, you are halfway to anywhere. Being able to get to LEO means you can actually stay there, even with a small payload you can send up many cargoes and actually build something. Once that is done, once we have a reasonably safe and reasonably cost effective method of getting to orbit, say $ 1 million a trip and a 1 in 100 chance of disaster, what do you think will happen then? Mass production.
To read the whole thing, click here.
Posted by Ted at June 25, 2004 9:09 AM