American Enterprise Institute

Web event — To the moon, Mars, and beyond: Space exploration and public policy

Introduction: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow, AEI

Discussion

Panelists: Tim Fernholz, Senior Reporter, Quartz Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stan Veuger, Resident Scholar, AEI Matthew C. Weinzierl, Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Moderator: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow, AEI

Tuesday, February 23, 2021 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-space- exploration-and-public-policy/

James Pethokoukis: Good afternoon. Welcome to our AEI event on the future of America and space.

America, in 2021, seems to be interested and active in space to a degree not seen since the space race with the Soviet Union. Private firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, have emerged as new pioneers of space exploration, and many politicians have begun calling for us to return to the moon and finally put a on Mars — an American. And the US is not alone. Countries ranging from China to the United Arab Emirates have developed space programs as well.

Overall, humanity appears ripe to resume its exploration of outer space, which opens many questions — among them, what are the roles of both private companies and NASA in driving this exploration? And what new opportunities and challenges will be uncovered as we delve further into the final frontier, and will those opportunities be profitable? I’m excited to discuss these questions with today’s panel, which I will now introduce.

Tim Fernholz is a senior reporter at Quartz, where he covers space, the economy, and geopolitics. He’s authored the excellent 2018 book, “Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race.” Sara Seager is a professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she’s known for her research on extrasolar planets. She’s the author of the 2020 memoir, also excellent, “The Smallest Lights in the Universe.” Stan Veuger is a resident scholar in economic policy studies here at AEI, as well as a visiting lecturer of economics at . And Matt Weinzierl is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, as well as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He’s recently launched a set of research projects focusing on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications.

One last thing before we begin: We’ll be doing a Q&A at the end of the event, so please, please, please submit your questions on Twitter with the #AskAEIEcon. And there are also links and email addresses to ask questions on the event page.

So with that, we will get started. Let me start with Sara. Is this renewal of interest (that I mentioned in the intro) in space, is this a permanent thing? Are we entering a true space age as the optimists of the 1960s envisioned? We’ve sort of been here before, and we lost interest. Are we going to stay interested in space and all its many aspects?

Sara Seager: Well, I have to say yes, because that’s my whole field of research.

James Pethokoukis: Good.

Sara Seager: But it seems like we are because it’s just as everything got smaller and cheaper. Like, the amount of capability in our phones today, compared to the beginning of the space race is just tremendous. And that, in part, is also fueling this cheaper and more accessible space for all of us.

James Pethokoukis: Why did we lose interest?

Sara Seager: I don’t know if we lost interest, but it’s like the shiny new thing — “Do it, it’s really hard.” Also, it all wrapped up initially in the Cold War, and we just had less of a motivation to continue to pursue.

James Pethokoukis: Certainly, we lost interest in sort of the manned aspect of exploration, but that’s not it. We’ve been doing a lot of other things over the past 50 years other than — we may have not been going to the moon or Mars, but we’ve still been exploring space, which is kind of what, you know, what you devoted your life to.

Sara Seager: The human factor adds just a whole lot of risk. You know, it’s true that our Mars rover landing in the last couple days was just absolutely fantastic. Like, perfect, really. But when you add to the equation, you know, no one wants to be responsible if something were to go wrong with a person there, because that usually is fatal. So it’s just my personal opinion that the cost is just too high, typically, you know, when we put humans in the equation.

James Pethokoukis: Tim, what is driving this sort of renewal of activity? Is it commerce, exploration, national pride, national security, some combination of all of the above?

Tim Fernholz: I mean, the correct and easy answer is all of the above, but what we’ve seen in the last few decades has been an increased emphasis on the economic potential of space. We saw that, at the turn of the century, the tech boom laid out a lot of trends that have made this possible. Like the small powerful computers and batteries in our cell phones are at the heart of a lot of what’s happening in space now. But we saw people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make a lot of money and, believing in the future of space, invest in there, both with the idea of driving down the cost of access to space. And it’s that dynamic that has reawakened commercial interest in space and new scientific potential.

But you can’t ignore the geopolitics. I think, in particular, China’s ambitious space agenda has a lot of people in the strategic national security community saying, “We need to make sure that the US has those same capabilities.” And it also raises questions about, you know, if China thinks economic success is possible in space, what can US companies do there? So I think all of these things are sort of interacting and driving each other on.

James Pethokoukis: Does the fact — and anybody can answer this — does the fact that China isn’t going away — apparently their interest in space probably isn’t going away — so that sort of argues that America’s interest in space, and all these many dimensions, is really going to be a long-term factor in American policy, you know, whether it’s government or American business?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah, I guess I’ll just jump in. I absolutely think that that rivalry, both economic and geopolitical, is going to drive a lot of activity in space. I think we all also have some, I think, natural wariness about the directions in which that might head, right. I mean, space is — we’ve always wanted space to be a non-militarized zone, to be a zone of cooperation, and it has been that in many wonderful ways for the last 50 years. And so I think there’s some nervousness about where that might go. But I think you’re absolutely right, Jim. It’s a huge driver of spending and of competition.

James Pethokoukis: Sara, as far as other nations, you know, exploring and doing science, is that their focus? Or for some of these other countries, is it more sort of what the US was like

in the 1960s, where a lot of it was driven by sort of, if not geopolitics, then as a source of national pride? Do they want to do science?

Sara Seager: I think it depends on which country. I mean, surely for many countries, civilian space science is like the tip of the iceberg, you know, where the other part of the iceberg we don’t know what’s going on, and so they like to showcase their prowess. There are, though, many, many countries now that, because of the revolution in very small satellites, like namely CubeSats, have now standardized parts that are cheaper than having to make everything custom. It’s enabled all kinds of countries to be able to go to space to do science, like Ecuador, Vietnam, or places you normally wouldn’t think of as spacefaring nations. And even on a larger scale, it’s not kind of there yet. And it’s not just the companies you mentioned, but it’s Rocket Lab wanting — you know, planning to go to Venus. It’s Virgin Orbit, who you saw with that spectacular launch of the airplane, that want to next go to Mars or Venus. And that will enable countries to literally buy those launch services and be able to do more science than they ever could.

James Pethokoukis: Do we — and anyone can answer this — do we get a sense that Americans are interested in space? I’m sort of assuming that I’m interested, and everybody sort of in this panel is, at one degree, you know, fairly interested. I mean, how interested were they back in the ’60s? In the ’60s, were they very interested in going to the moon, or was it really wrapped up in that Cold War rivalry?

Tim Fernholz: I think, historically speaking, we sometimes overstate the public response to the Apollo program. I think most of the time there was general approval, but this was also during the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement. You know, the American public was thinking about a lot of different things.

I think today, yes, the American public is very interested in space. We saw with the Perseverance landing. We’ve seen with SpaceX’s televised firsts, whether it’s the Falcon Heavy or their reusable rockets or the commercial crew flights this year. You know, people are excited about space. But I think an interesting thing to talk about, for advocates of doing more activity in space, is there’s also reluctance or suspicion of more private actors going up there.

We’re going to see the first space tourism mission to the International Space Station this year on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. And I think that NASA sees this as sort of priming the pump for a future where private actors do more and NASA can use its resources to focus on other things. But I think the public sees super-wealthy people going to the National Laboratory in space and is maybe not sure that’s the right balance of interest. So I think it’s worth talking about, you know, how we explain to people that private-sector activity in space, even if it first seems like a holiday for the super wealthy, will have big benefits for everybody through the economy.

Stan Veuger: I do wonder how much of the interest is driven by firsts, you know, like the first time we landed on the moon, the first time any object made it to Mars, the first time you use GPS, right. Those things are more important, I think, to most voters than necessarily the ongoing developments, the ongoing policy debates. And I do think that Tim is right. It was never at the center of political debate outside those specific moments. There was not an ongoing level of interest as high as we saw in the Vietnam War, or as we saw just in the general state of the economy.

And so, I think it’s very easy to set your expectations very high if you — like you, James Pethokoukis — are obsessed with building your own generation ship. I don’t think that’s a level of interest that you can expect from the median voters on an ongoing basis.

Sara Seager: You know, despite all this enthusiasm, Jim and everyone, we still see, you know, some pushback — and it’s fair pushback — that we’re spending billions of dollars going to Mars, and we’re struggling here. Maybe not us here, but lots of people because of the pandemic now, you know, have been out of work, and there are a lot of bad things happening. So we try to explain why we’re still exploring space even amidst everything going on.

James Pethokoukis: And certainly that was a big issue in the 1960s, at the exact moment as we were ending the Apollo program or were finally meeting that goal. There was a tremendous amount of concern that it was a huge waste of money; it was a diversion of resources. That issue is not going away.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah. Although, I’ll jump in with a slightly contrary opinion maybe, which is that I think it’s absolutely right, of course, that public support dropped off right away after Apollo. And you really saw that in the funding to NASA. I guess one of the twists I see is that, very much to Tim’s point about, you know, the billionaires or the super wealthy driving sort of a next era, I think that’s an important tipping point in the sense that now there are people who are going to space, not for some public interest, not because the government is excited to send them there for geopolitical reasons, but because they want to go. And of course, at first, that’s going to be people with a tremendous amount of disposable income, but like many frontier technologies, eventually, we do hope that that becomes a more general-purpose technology and experience. And I guess I’m optimistic that that’s going to continue driving this interest that you’re starting with, Jim.

Stan Veuger: I mean a big advantage is — I’m sorry, go ahead.

Sara Seager: I just want to give, I guess, a pushback or a question to the economist here, and that is, you know, is there a sustainable business for them in space, or will they continue to rely on the government and the taxpayer’s dollars, at least initially? They’re very clever, you know. Get the contract to go to the space station, get the contract to do this or that, and that’s how they’re, you know, funding their way, eventually, to build the ship that goes to Mars. So I was just wondering if you think there’s ever a sustainable way.

James Pethokoukis: Well, that’s an excellent leaping-off point to that area. Certainly, you know, as I’ve been sort of doing a lot of reading lately about sort of what the visions of space were from the 1960s, there was certainly a huge economic component. They thought there was going to be a thriving space economy, both in near-Earth orbit and other planets. It wasn’t just about exploration. It certainly just wasn’t about the military.

So do we see — to Sara’s question, what is that economic model? How big is it? And will people, at some point in the near future, see new benefits from this new age of space exploration, space industry? Start with Matt, I know you’ve done a lot of work on that.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Well, yeah, that is the central question, so I’m glad we’re getting to it. I mean, the big gap in all of the enthusiasm, or between enthusiasm and reality, has been

“Where’s the demand?” Like, why are we going up there? Who’s paying for this other than the government? And that question is, to be perfectly candid, not answered. I mean, we do not have a solid answer to that. We have some things people have always hoped will become answers: manufacturing in space or, you know, the extraction and use of space resources. Tourism, of course, is the one that we’ve already mentioned.

You know, when I think about an economy, the one thing that I think is important to realize is that the economy is just people interacting. And so, part of the reason we haven’t had a space economy in space is because we don’t have people in space. Like, everything we do in space is for the people, and almost all the people are on Earth. So it’s not surprising that we haven’t gotten the sort of flourishing that we had the drawings of in the ’60s and ’70s.

Stan Veuger: And so, to the extent that there is a space economy, it’s mostly satellite-based, right, which is providing services on Earth, which, you know — and so there, you know, does that count as a space economy? I mean, I’d say it does, but —

Sara Seager: Well, the perfect example unfolding right in front of us is Starlink — SpaceX’s Starlink — and Amazon and OneWeb and everything. So we’ll see, right. Maybe that, Matt, maybe that will be it.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Well, and you know, why is SpaceX getting into Starlink? I mean, at least the story that I believe is that it’s probably because they really can’t get enough money in the launch market to fund the dreams of settling Mars. There’s a huge pile of money to go after in satellite internet and telecommunications, and so it’s a play for funding their broader ambitions. And if we really do —

Sara Seager: And don’t forget, it’s developing the capability they’ll need on Mars. They’ll have to put a lot of satellites up around Mars so they can communicate with each other and back to Earth.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah. So my hope is if we routinely start sending people up there for a few hours, for a few days, for a few weeks, eventually, then you start to get that economy and that demand just organically because it’s people.

James Pethokoukis: Do any of the things that — Matt, you can answer this, and if there’s anybody else that wants to — does anything that Matt mentioned sound like, I don’t know, the killer app for the space economy? If you’re talking about creating a multitrillion-dollar space economy, is space tourism that killer app, or what is?

Tim Fernholz: I spend a lot of my day-to-day talking to entrepreneurs and VCs in Silicon Valley who are trying to solve this very specific question, and I think the answer right now is we don’t know. I think if you want to draw analogies to the commercialization of another sort of publicly created technology, you know, from the internet, going from the Defense Department to the, you know, commercial ecosystem we have today, we’re still very early on — the creation of platforms where, if you want to do business in space, you really have to have a lot of domain-specific space knowledge right now, if you want to run a satellite company. And it’s hard for a random business to use that data without a lot of training.

So a big challenge in the economy is going to be making people aware of, and interested in, leveraging space stuff. So I think satellites and remote sensing are going to be the biggest

areas going forward. And then when you think about how to make that next jump to a more aspirational space economy, I think the answer is going to be in satellite servicing.

A big problem right now is space traffic management. And in the years ahead, there’s only going to be thousands and thousands of more satellites launched. And as well as, you know, rules, best practices, international agreements about how to deal with that, there’s also going to be — and there already are — businesses coming up to figure out how to do work on those. And you know, that’s the kind of virtuous cycle that I think Matt is talking about when you want to see, you know, a new ecosystem, a new economy develop.

James Pethokoukis: As far as other sectors, whether it’s manufacturing — I feel like if I bring up asteroid mining, you know, people will really think I’m off into science fiction. But things like manufacturing or even asteroid mining, are those things which are our 21st- century aspirations or not?

Sara Seager: You know, asteroid mining, I love that topic, and initially I was on the board of Planetary Resources, who you all know they’re no longer with us. I think, I feel like investors, perhaps, aren’t comfortable with like a decades-long investment, right. Like, imagine if you have to invest for 40 years. You might not even be around 40 years later.

But the reality is, you know, for space science, you know, we know how to get to an asteroid. We know how to land on asteroids, at least the Japanese landed. We know how to bring material back. NASA right now has OSIRIS-REx on its way back here that scooped up a tiny amount of an asteroid. So we actually can put all the components together. We don’t know how to drill on the asteroid. We don’t know how to chemically sort the material we need to bring back to Earth. But if you want a nitty-gritty, we actually know how to get the job done, at least 90 percent of it. But it’s just so far away that people don’t want to really —

Stan Veuger: And I do think we have a bunch of pretty large companies now that, for years, did not make a profit. And so I do think there is that patience. I don’t know, maybe Tim or Matt can talk about that, but I’m surprised that that would be the obstacle.

Tim Fernholz: Well, I would say there’s an old aphorism in Silicon Valley that is: Don’t mistake a technology for a business plan. There’s a lot of things that we can do that aren’t actually going to return a profit, and when we think about companies that grow for a long time without profitability, their companies are growing —

Stan Veuger: And it was a clear path to profitability.

Tim Fernholz: Sure. So, you know, I think it’s very interesting to think about where are we going to find that killer app again. When we talk about in-space manufacturing, you know, it would be really great if Merck would come out and say, “Hey, we finally figured out how to crystallize the COVID cure, and it can only be done in zero-G.” But so far, we haven’t found that.

You know, there’s a company called Made in Space that’s very excited about its fiber optic cables. There’s a lot of work on the ISS on this. We haven’t found that real added value yet, and maybe it’s a question of economies of scale. That’s why the reusable rockets are such an

emphasis for these people, because that’s how you lower that access cost to do those things. But it’s still an open question, I think.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah, I’ll just build on — I thought, Tim, you said that so well. And it’s true that, even back in the ’60s and ’70s, people were saying, “Well, what could we manufacture in space that we could only manufacture in zero-gravity?” So we’ve been looking for that killer manufactured product for decades. The one thing I’ll mention, to Sara’s point about where do you get the patient capital, that’s like a real question.

Tim Fernholz: NASA.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Right, exactly right. So VCs don’t have it, typically. NASA used to have it. Maybe they still do, although politics get in the way. The billionaires, right. I mean, that’s the most obvious answer — is that Bezos and Musk, I think, both are willing to put 50 years of, you know, patience into this.

But there has been some innovation, even quite recently, in the financing side of space, which I think is pretty exciting, whether it’s SPACs or roll-ups or now there’s a Space ETF. So you can see that, like, the finance sector is trying to figure out how to solve some of those problems, I think.

James Pethokoukis: Sara, are you overall comfortable with the sort of privatization of space and space launches and perhaps the changing mission for NASA?

Sara Seager: Absolutely. Even more than comfortable, just thrilled. Because what these companies are doing, they’re actually bringing the cost down to go to space. Because as we’ve just talked about, they have to for their own sustainable business.

And so I just always smile when I remember a mission I just stepped down from a leadership role on. It’s an MIT-led NASA mission called TESS, like the girl’s name. It’s a planet- hunting telescope, and we find literally 50 new planet candidates every month. That’s like 50 new worlds a month out there. And TESS, by the way, we launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but the TESS mission was like this big in the faring that was this big. We had so much extra space. It would be like having a giant suitcase inside a school bus. All that extra space because it was cheaper. The Falcon 9 rocket was still cheaper than whatever else was available that was maybe even smaller. So they’re bringing the cost down.

And this whole idea of sending a small rocket to Venus or Mars, it’ll change the scope of how space science operates. Because right now, we spend billions of dollars and don’t go very often with something that everyone has a part of. But if we can send small, focused missions more frequently, it will change the game. So yeah, I can speak for myself and perhaps others. I’m happy.

James Pethokoukis: And so the mission for NASA — since, you know, we’re a think tank supposed to be thinking about public policy — so the mission for NASA should be what over the next generation? In what way is that different than the mission over the past, you know, 20 years?

Sara Seager: Okay. Well, I’ll just speak from my own opinion, you know, rather than what NASA should or is doing. But you know, when you think about the past — and other people

here have probably read more and know more about it than me — but you hear how NASA — it wasn’t like run by 20-year-olds, but they were very young people taking a lot of risks. And we don’t really see that as much now in NASA. It’s kind of more conservative. Everything has to work. Nobody wants to see anything kind of go wrong. So opening it up to letting the private companies, you know, take on part of this is kind of allowing more risk and more focused innovative ideas to flourish. So it’s very complimentary actually.

Stan Veuger: Are you and the other panelists, are you worried that as more parties get involved, the sort of peaceful nature of the various projects are in jeopardy? If you have more companies from different countries competing, you’ll get in fights over, you know, who gets to tax them. Once you start bringing the output of your asteroid mining efforts, you’ll get fights over, you know, over tariffs and whatnot. And obviously, there will be a national security dimension to much of this, and so you’ll get this temptation to become very protectionist and say, “Look, you know, only US-shielded asteroid mining ships are allowed to deliver the products of asteroid mining to the United States. You’re not allowed to use the proceeds of Chinese-mined product.” Are you worried that creating this private space economy will lead to those kinds of tensions and will ultimately backfire? Matt, what do you think?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: I guess I’m optimistic in the following sense. I think that there’s a lot of shared interest in capturing the surplus that can be had by, you know, successfully building the space economy, and so there’s a lot of incentive for people to get around the table and figure it out. That’s not to say that they’ve done it yet. So I think that we have a lot of work to do in bolstering the international treaties that currently govern it, because most of these questions weren’t really pressing in 1967 when we got the Outer Space Treaty.

So I think you’re absolutely right. Property rights, figuring that out, figuring out taxation even, and much less rule of law, all this kind of stuff does need to be figured out, but I think people will try pretty hard to do it.

James Pethokoukis: Tim, do you think the private space industry can withstand failure — very devastating loss of life or other kinds of failure? Or are they in it sort of for the long term, and you know, if there’s a disaster, well, that’s just the cost of doing business, and they will just plow forward?

Tim Fernholz: Well, unfortunately, I fear we will find out the answer to this sometime in the years ahead. I think it’s a main reason that Elon Musk has kept SpaceX private and that Jeff Bezos won’t take Blue Origin public for a long time. We’re going to be entering interesting territory when Virgin Galactic starts doing regular suborbital tourist service. I think, you know, it’s going to be like any other major transportation industry, whether it’s airlines, trains, you know, cruise ships. There’s going to be really tragic disasters that are going to turn out to be caused by human error or design error.

And you know, people are going to have to just keep doing the calculus of, “Is this worth it? Is the experience worth this risk? Is the profit worth this risk?” And eventually, you know, right now, a lot of this is essentially not regulated. It’s indemnified by law. You’re at your own risk. But there is going to come a point where there will be safety rules in space, and that’s going to be a whole public policy conversation.

So, you know, right now, I think, as Sara very accurately pointed out, NASA is using, you know, private companies to outsource risk-taking, because NASA really can’t do that kind of risk-taking anymore for a lot of political and cultural reasons. And that same cycle will happen with the private space sector, but it’s going to take, you know, decades.

James Pethokoukis: Should NASA be building rockets at all?

Tim Fernholz: I think there’s a good argument that NASA hasn’t been building rockets for a while. You know, the traditional model of NASA sort of making the requirements and outsourcing them to a private company has not succeeded in the last several decades when it comes to just launch vehicles. And so I think there are a lot of people at NASA who think, you know, “This is something we should outsource so we could work on a hardware problem.” If you think about what SpaceX has done, you know, they’ve done Mercury, they’ve done Gemini, they’re working on Apollo. And NASA already did all that. And so maybe they have other things to focus on.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: And I’d just add: It’s not about rockets per se, but it actually goes back to an earlier question and also Sara’s answer to it, which is, you know, what should NASA be doing? I think NASA can provide really great sort of seed capital in some sense, or first customer access to a lot of space startups. So, you know, that is a place they can plug some gaps in the space ecosystem.

Sara Seager: And just back to science for a moment, NASA still plays a really critical role because there are some big, huge questions that are way out of the price range of the private companies, or at least what they’re willing to invest in.

Tim Fernholz: And I think it’s worth talking about this in the context of the debate over the Artemis program right now. When we talk about a lot of the success of private space companies, SpaceX in particular, but also Northrop Grumman, we’re talking about them doing a service for NASA and the International Space Station. And that worked out for them because flying to the International Space Station is analogous to launching satellites, which is an actual business, and you know, we have a little previous experience flying people into low-Earth orbit for space tourism.

So now we’re trying to take this same model to the moon, where we’re going to pay private companies to perhaps land people with a human lander system, to fly supplies to the moon, to do all this stuff. And I think, especially for people who advocate for more private activity in space, it’s worth asking, are these companies going to have non-NASA customers who want them to fly payloads to the moon or people to the moon? And I think, initially, the answer is probably no, at least for the next five to 10 years. And I think that is a hard question for people who look at what commercial crew has been so successful at doing and say, “Can we do this on the moon?” I’m not sure who the other purchases are. Now, maybe it’s the UAE, maybe it’s other nations who have new space programs and want to do stuff. There are ideas for this, but I think it behooves people who think that the private sector is going to do more in space to sort of ask those tough questions about what the next sort of “beyond-LEO” business model is going to be.

Stan Veuger: Well, this is what Matt was saying earlier, right. You need a moon resort before you can diversify your revenue sources there.

James Pethokoukis: Are we getting back to the moon anytime soon? I think some people think we are. Some politicians seem to be suggesting it’s very soon. Are we?

Tim Fernholz: I think, especially now that the Trump administration is over, we can all stop pretending that anyone’s going to land on the moon in 2024. I think, right now, we’re at a really interesting inflection point where maybe 2028, maybe 2026. It’s not clear how lawmakers feel about accelerating that timing or the priorities. And also, we’ve had a big pandemic and a recession that maybe will change spending priorities.

But I do think that the smaller precursor programs, particularly the commercial lunar payload services, which are hiring private companies to send robots to the moon, in the years ahead, I think that those missions will go off. And if they succeed, they will help sort of get the ball rolling forward. But I think we’re still — there’s a lot of open questions about what the Biden administration’s approach to civil space policy, commercial space policy, national security space policy will be, and we just don’t know yet.

James Pethokoukis: Is there a reason to go back to the moon that is not just national pride?

Stan Veuger: There is no COVID on the moon.

James Pethokoukis: That’s a fact. And if you’re trying to sell this to policymakers, or policymakers are trying to sell to voters that we should — “Yes, we need to go to the moon” — what is the case that someone selling this idea would make other than, you know, in the case of the moon, “Let’s go do what we did 50 years ago and let’s go do it again?” That doesn’t seem like a very powerful case and not particularly interesting. What’s interesting and exciting about going back to the moon?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: So many Mars advocates see it as a stepping-stone in a number of ways. So it’s a lot shorter and, in some ways, easier to get to the moon. You can practice some of the things that you might want to do on Mars on the moon. Of course, it’s a different environment so how much you learn is up for debate, I guess I would say. But certainly, the idea of getting down and back up from the surface, mining resources, living on the surface for a while, those are all things that we can practice on the moon in a much lower-risk sense, I guess, than going all the way to Mars — and lower cost. So even if your goal is not the moon but Mars, that’s one argument that’s often made.

Sara Seager: Tim, do you buy that argument? Because you look very skeptical.

Tim Fernholz: You know, I think there are a number of reasons to go to the moon. I think a top one, previously, has been good jobs in Huntsville, Alabama. I’m not sure that will continue to be the reason going forward, but I think an obvious one is water. The confirmation of water ice on the moon is still like the 12-year-old fact I think scientists — and Sara, maybe you can speak to this — feel like there are things we can learn from that water. I know there’s interest in doing like radio telescope observations from the far side of the moon. So there’s a lot of scientific work that could be done.

With the water, there are a lot of people who think harvesting that water could be an enabler for businesses in low-Earth orbit, for longer-term stays on the moon. But I think, ultimately, it’s going to be geopolitics. If China is serious about landing people on the moon and continues to head in that direction, I don’t think it will be tenable for US leadership to say,

“Go ahead, we don’t care anymore.” And so I think that will be a major driver going forward, alongside the ambitions of the private space sector, which wants to go to the moon whether or not it has a government customer. I think it would take any customer to go there.

Sara Seager: Yeah, I’d like to build on what Tim and Matt said, because everything they said I do agree with at some level. Like, the moon’s a good practice place. Scientists still have a list of things they’d like to do on the moon. But when you ask yourself what about Mars, going right to Mars, the scientists would be, wow, just way more excited. And you could ask, “Is the moon really a training ground when it doesn’t train for some of the critical things?” Like, we’ve heard people talk about perhaps you want to send astronauts to Mars and back without landing because that would help sort through one of the problems, just this long duration in space. So I feel like I agree with everything you say, but there’s this equally strong argument for just going to Mars.

Tim Fernholz: I guess the — I mean, I definitely am staying out of any moon-Mars fights. I’m merely a reporter. But I am curious. The one thing that I think makes sense pragmatically for the moon is it’s cheaper, and it might be easier to sell that way. And private companies maybe will be more likely to throw in to go to the moon rather than Mars. How much should that calculus matter when we’re talking about setting the direction for space policy?

Sara Seager: I mean, I feel like if you had a good plan, it would be good, but if you’re going to go to the moon and it just keeps getting more and more expensive, you’ve sort of taken a big distraction for nothing. But I do agree that the moon is closer; it’s a lot easier. And there’s still a lot of incentive because we haven’t been there in so long.

James Pethokoukis: Sara, you mentioned using the moon to explore space, maybe build a big telescope on the moon. Is that something astronomers talk about, as something we can do?

Sara Seager: Matt actually mentioned that, but yes, it was — actually Matt or Tim, or both maybe. But the far side of the moon, you know, the sort of dream is you could put a giant radio telescope there, and you’d be blocking, you know — on our planet Earth here, it’s very noisy for radio. I mean, there are some narrow frequencies we’ve still maintained for science. There are some places, like in the heart of Australia, that are radio-quiet. But on the whole, it’s just messy. And so that’s kind of one of the dreams is to go there.

As far as other telescopes are concerned, like visible wavelength, the moon isn’t that great. It’s very dusty. You know, all that regolith would just mess things up. And, yeah. But for radio astronomy, it’s exciting.

Tim Fernholz: And one interesting wrinkle to add to that radio astronomy on the moon question is that’s where we’re going to see science really intersect with geopolitics. Because under the current regime of lunar laws, we understand that the main thing is you can’t interfere with what someone is already doing there. So the first country to go lay out its radio telescope on a high mountain on the far side of the moon is going to be there, and no one else can land. And is that going to be effectively a land grab on the moon? How will the countries that don’t own that radio telescope react?

And so that’s why, even as we talk about this, it’s so important to sort of think about, like with the Artemis Accords launched under the last administration, what are the rules of the road going to be if we start doing these scientific or commercial projects?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: And who is around the table signing those, right? I mean, the absence of cooperation between China and the US on many of these space agreements is troubling in exactly that direction that Tim is going.

Stan Veuger: And so, if we think that the main driver of dramatic expansion of at least some activity is precisely this kind of geopolitical conflict between the US and China, will these kinds of potential conflicts not drive more activity and, you know, be a stimulus for the sector, right? If ultimately, the main reason why policymakers care is because they want to outcompete China, just like they outcompeted the Soviet Union, not for any, you know, directly tangible military advantage necessarily but just to do better than the opponent, isn’t that exactly the dynamic we should want?

Tim Fernholz: Well, I did an interview for the Perseverance landing, which also had UAE and China’s first Mars missions, and one interesting thing that came of this, from a guy named Pete Garretson, who’s a fellow of the American foreign — an American foreign policy think tank whose name I can’t quite remember right now. Basically, he said the US still has this “flags and footprints” mentality where we feel like, as long as we do something symbolically big and good, that’s fine, whereas China appears to be investing much more cumulatively and steadily going forward. And so I think the one fear would be that, if the US is mainly investing in symbolic missions and China’s missions are better poised for economic gains, then maybe we will have made a mistake in emphasizing the wrong things. But that’s maybe a nuanced point about future space investment.

Stan Veuger: Do you think that’s really true? Because this is, you know, this is what some of the foreign policy types say about China and Earth as well, right? “Oh, they’re going to buy a bunch of roads in rural , and before you know it, they control the Earth.”

Tim Fernholz: Well, maybe it’s like Russia’s Buran or the Soviet Union’s Buran rocket, where one country is tricking the other into investing in, you know, a big white elephant. And it’s very hard to tell what China is doing internally.

Stan Veuger: Okay.

James Pethokoukis: But it sounds like it’s not just the United States and China that, given the dropping cost — everybody sees an opportunity out there, and they don’t want to be left behind. Again, you know, what’s the diff between now and the 1960s? That’s certainly a major difference and perhaps creates some sort of self-sustaining dynamic that this will be forever a part of what countries do, I hope.

Sara, you mentioned a bit earlier, at the very beginning, about, if I remember it correctly, sort of the manned aspect of all this. Someone like you, a scientist, you’re interested in exploration. The fact that we focus a lot on the manned aspect of it does create some risk. We also mentioned that with the private sector earlier. I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit. I mean, would you prefer this all just be done by robots and satellites and —

Sara Seager: Well, just like everyone else, I love the idea of people going to Mars. I myself don’t want to go. I don’t know about all of you. But I just love the idea of boots on Mars. So I’m always a big supporter of that. But in terms of science, you know, we still have a lot we can do without people. You know, we would really like people to go, look at the rocks, look at things, do some investigation there.

But with all the things we have right now, my main interest is the planet Venus. And we’re on this big kind of tangent in this — what used to be a ridiculously crazy idea that there could be life, like microbial type life, floating around in the Venus clouds. So to sort of move that idea forward, you know, we don’t need people. Well, we can’t really have people go to Venus, because yeah, it’s hot at the surface and the clouds are just nasty. But there’s a lot we can do without people. So I think we still have a lot we can do, and it’s cheaper and easier.

James Pethokoukis: What is the latest thinking about Venus and the life in the atmosphere?

Sara Seager: Well, I was on the team that made a big announcement last fall on phosphine on Venus, which is a gas that, on Earth, is only produced either by us, humans, or by bacteria in oxygen-free environments. So there’s been a lot of controversy on this because it’s looking for the needle in the haystack, so to speak, and the data is very — Venus is so, so bright. If you see it in the night sky — if you can see the night sky — it’s incredibly bright. And ironically, it’s quite hard to study with our very big telescopes. It’s almost too bright, too spatially resolved, too big.

So it’s very hard to find the signal, and there’s been a lot of pushback. People have looked at our data and said they don’t see phosphine. Other people have looked at our data and said — sorry. Some people have looked at the data and don’t see a signal. Other people have looked at the data, see a signal, but claim it’s not phosphine; it’s another gas, sulfur dioxide.

So it’s still a bit controversial, but it has shone a light back on Venus. And there have been many people who, for a long time, have been very enthusiastic about going back to Venus. You know, something like 20 missions went to Venus up until about the early ’80s, either flyby or landers. And after that, there’s been three, and none of them have gone inside the atmosphere.

So we haven’t truly gone down into the Venus atmosphere in four decades or something. So it is really time to go back. And we actually have a small team, like a handpicked team, and we’re privately funded to — not send a mission there yet, but we’re actually designing a mission, a series of missions that could go to Venus and look for signs of life or maybe even life itself in the atmosphere. And we are actually teaming up with Rocket Lab, who are going to Venus. They’re going to launch — planning to launch, in 2023, a privately funded mission to go to Venus. We’re helping with the science payload on that mission.

James Pethokoukis: I mean, there’s been a lot of news we’ve been finding — we’ve been finding planets. You mentioned the Venus news. Is all of that together, do you think, creating — and everyone can answer this — part of the sort of momentum that we might see more funding for this kind of thing in the future, even beyond sort of the space economy and global politics? There’s just a lot exciting things going on, on the science side of things.

Sara Seager: I mean, there kind of always has been in a way. And we still see ourselves as a luxury science, like a luxury field. And we also have this phrase, you know, “All ships rise

with the rising tide.” So I won’t say we’re happy, but we sort of deal with — we get the sort of small slice of the pie. But think about Hubble, you know, the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a household name. And so I feel like, I hope anyway, that the science has always been exciting to people.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah. I think that’s been one of the bright spots, right. I mean, if you think of people being relatively disappointed with the shuttle and what it became relative to its expectations, nevertheless some of the science it enabled, you know, thrilled people for decades. And so I think that’s always been a big part of what’s kept us interested in space.

James Pethokoukis: Tim, is there a big pro-space lobby at this point in either party in Washington that you’re aware of? Who’s excited about it in Washington that wants to spend a lot of money?

Tim Fernholz: Everyone. I mean, space is bipartisan because it is usually an opportunity to funnel billions of dollars to a private company like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, who maybe has the factory in your district. But no, I mean, space is bipartisan for a lot of reasons. It’s obviously the legacy of Apollo, it’s national greatness, it’s symbolic, it’s science, which generally everybody loves. And so, that can sometimes backfire.

We saw in the last four years the discussion of the Artemis program, going to the moon, and we’d usually have four years of NASA saying, “There’s bipartisan support for this,” and NASA giving a decent amount of funding but not quite enough to actually do the mission. And so we had four years of bipartisan support and not necessarily a lot of progress. And the same for the SLS. So it will be interesting to see if there’s going to be a bipartisan consensus around a more dynamic or differently prioritized space program beyond sort of the economic development of the “my district” approach.

James Pethokoukis: Matt, what would you like to see Washington do to enable a vibrant space economy?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Right. So I guess there’s a couple of things. So the first is — I’ve sort of hinted at this already — but this idea of, let’s try to understand the broader industrial ecosystem here. There’s a million road maps out there to the development of a space economy, lots of think tanks, put them together, companies, put them together. You know, if you take the intersection of all of those, there’s various things that we think need to happen. It’s hard for each of those to get going. There’s what we call co-innovation risk. The federal government can help fill some of those gaps by providing a little bit of funding as the first customer. So I think that’s the biggest thing, because it all kind of comes together in some way.

The second thing gets back to the regulation we talked about, both around risk-taking and around, say, property rights and taxation and things like this. We just need to know the rules of the game. We need to have these rules, the kind that will facilitate risk-taking in some of the ways we’ve already discussed. So those are the two functions.

James Pethokoukis: We have a few questions — actually quite a few — from people watching it. One is sort of also a question of mine, so I will ask it from both their perspective and my own perspective. As someone who’s been interested in this topic for a long time — interested in the idea of there being intelligent life out there for a long time — it seems that

there’s been more happening in that area over the past 18 months to two years than I could ever remember, whether it’s ‘Oumuamua, whether it’s those Navy pilots seeing something over the Pacific zipping around their planes. Sara, what do you make of those things, ‘Oumuamua and the Navy pilots seeing those “Tic Tac” UFOs? Is that something you’re interested in, or you’d rather just focus on what you’re doing, sort of more traditional —

Sara Seager: Well, for me, it’s a bit of a baited question, but everyone loves the idea of UFOs, right? We all want to believe. We want to meet aliens. But I don’t think we have an answer. You know, we don’t — ‘Oumuamua, I can’t even pronounce it very well. You know, we don’t have enough information on what that object is to say one way or the other really. So we’ll wait and see.

Stan Veuger: Jim has a lot of experience saying that word.

James Pethokoukis: I mean, to read about the Navy pilots and UFOs on the front page of The New York Times, I don’t remember that ever happening before.

Sara Seager: I’m not sure why that’s on the front page of The New York Times. I do try to avoid that, actually, because otherwise I get too many phone calls for either interviews or just people wanting to tell me about their own UFO experience. But I think the reality is that a lot of people have seen a lot of weird phenomena, and it doesn’t mean it’s a UFO. It just means, as the U stands for, it’s something unexplained.

And back to the asteroid — I’m not going to try to say it again — I actually personally don’t think it’s a UFO. I don’t think it’s, you know, an alien artifact, but whatever it is, it’s absolutely insane. It has to be something we’ve never seen before, one way or the other. And we think we’ll see more of those as new telescopes that survey the night sky repeatedly come online, and we’re hoping we’ll have spacecraft satellites, like, ready in space, you know, ready to maneuver and go in and take a quick look.

James Pethokoukis: Another question. I don’t know if anyone knows about this, but I’ll ask it. Is there an advantage to collecting solar power in space for terrestrial use compared to collecting it on the ground, creating big reflectors, gathering it, and like maybe beaming it back to the ground in some fashion? Does anybody know about that and whether that can be done and be economical?

Tim Fernholz: This is an interest of Jeff Bezos, the idea of collecting solar power in orbit and beaming it down to Earth. The technology is unproven. The US Air Force has launched a demonstrator satellite this year to try and test it out. China reportedly is investing a lot in this. It is a very cool utopian-sounding scheme, and I hope it works. But I think the jury is still out on whether it is actually efficient and effective.

James Pethokoukis: Tim, I’m going to assume you’re the expert on big utopian-sounding schemes, so I’m going to ask you another one. What is the likelihood of a space infrastructure project comparable to the transcontinental railroad? And what might such a project look like? I will call that the space elevator question, or perhaps the person asking this means some other kind of object. What do you think about that?

Tim Fernholz: Well, I guess I will say that when Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin, for the first couple of years he wasn’t thinking about rockets. He was thinking about nonchemical means

of going to space, like space elevators or the weird hook thing that wrote about in his book “Seveneves.” And he couldn’t get those to work even with his billions of dollars and decided chemical rockets were the most efficient. In terms of, like, an infrastructure project on par with the transcontinental railroad, I think Elon Musk would tell you reusable rockets are that.

I don’t have the cost comparisons in my head right now, but it’s certainly a metaphor he used in the past. And you could think about it being — you know, creating a reliable and regular transportation system to the moon if there is a cislunar economy. You know, it’s the back and forth and making it very cheap and getting the economies of scale out of it. So I think it would be that or to, like, the dreams of like a big, you know, rotating space habitat where thousands of people work. But I think all of those things are many decades in our future.

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah, Jim, sorry, I’ll just jump in, because the space elevator is super fascinating. So for whoever asked that question, if that’s what they were thinking about, you know, it’s a sci-fi dream, decade after decade, and it does just seem like the people who know the most roll their eyes the fastest when you mention space elevator to them. So I think skepticism is warranted.

I would also just say, for infrastructure, another important thing is refueling stations in space. So when we talk about water on the moon, one of the key ideas is that we should have gas stations. And so that really is almost like the transcontinental railroad or maybe our highway system.

James Pethokoukis: And with this one, because this is — certainly, every time I talk about this issue or tweet about it, and people have asked these questions for a long time, what is the case —

Stan Veuger: Sorry, Jim, not to be too negative, but on the previous question, to me, the things that are being discussed as the equivalent of the transatlantic railroad sound, to me, more like the initial phases of stagecoaches with, you know, a few passengers here and there, maybe places where you can stop. Not like, you know, mass transportation mechanisms that lead to the settlement of everything that’s on the other end of the railroads. I think —

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah, that’s the problem: We’re not going to San Francisco or wherever the railroad was going, right? There is no other settlement we’re connecting. And so that, you’re absolutely right, that’s a big obstacle.

James Pethokoukis: Well, let me sort of hook off that question. Matt, or anyone else who wants to answer it, how long before we believe there would be 1,000 people in space? Is that possible by the end of this century? By then, would we have more than 1,000 people? Would we have 10,000?

Tim Fernholz: I think United Launch Alliance is on the record — this is the Boeing- Lockheed Martin joint venture — saying that’s feasible by like the late 2030s, early 2040s, which makes me think 2050?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: Yeah. I’m not sure I’d be quite that optimistic even, although I’d love to be. I mean, you stick like 1,000 people sort of at a time in space, it’s obviously impossible to say. But yeah, by the end of the century, I guess I would be surprised if we

weren’t there. That’s quite a ways away. And there are very deep-pocketed folks with a lot of passion and a lot of technology who really do want to make that happen. So I’d be surprised if we weren’t there.

Tim Fernholz: 9,992 more.

Stan Veuger: As Jim knows, the golden rule of financial punditry is that you give a number or a date, never both.

James Pethokoukis: Never both, never both. Let me finish off and let’s go around, anyone who wants to answer this or not answer it. What’s the best case for space — for doing something about it — when there are certainly a lot of problems right here on Earth? It’s an old question but one that’s going to keep on being asked. I’ll start with Dr. Seager. What is the case for being interested in space and devoting a lot of effort to exploring it?

Sara Seager: Well, it’s two separate things. One is, you know, as a society shouldn’t we do great art and music and exploration? And I think it’s part of what it means to be human. And so I think it will always happen. And a more mundane answer I’ll give is that it’s a jobs program after all. Like someone else on the call said, it’s, you know, taking money and redistributing it, which trickles out.

James Pethokoukis: Anyone else want to make a case for space?

Matthew C. Weinzierl: I guess I’ll say something related, which for the econ wonks who might be watching, you know, there’s a lot of concern about secular stagnation, which has a variety of interpretations and potential causes and solutions. But if you think about some of the things people point to, the lack of a frontier, the lack of capital-intensive investment, the lack of, you know, needing to push really hard with high-fixed costs, space has all of that going for it. And so, if you think about what really drives progress forward, there’s a huge opportunity out there just for future human flourishing and experimenting with different ways of doing things that we don’t really have any more on Earth because we lack the frontier. So that would be my case.

James Pethokoukis: All right. Tim, Stan, any two cents or any final thought on the topic as we finish up?

Tim Fernholz: Yeah. I would just say that probably never before in history have people’s daily economic fortunes been linked to space like they are today, and I think that’s only going to increase. I mean, whether it’s GPS, increasingly internet access, remote sensing, all of these things are making people’s lives better right now and will hopefully continue to do so. I think it’s also still a good technology development system for a lot of fundamental research and science that’s important, aside from the science that it’s actually designed to do.

But I think what Sara said — kind of said it best, you know: We live in a world where there are many people who are very interested in space, and some of them are hugely wealthy and powerful. And they’re going to be doing stuff, and it behooves the rest of us to know what they’re doing and make sure it is in society’s best interests.

James Pethokoukis: All right. Dr. Veuger, any final thoughts before we —

Stan Veuger: I think I agree with Sara’s first motivation, you know, that part of our purpose as a species is to explore the universe and discover its meanings. I think we should do that. Obviously, you know, Matt’s point about the side advantages of scientific progress and adding to aggregate demand — if that’s something you’re concerned about, then that is helpful, but I think the first and foremost purpose is the generation of knowledge about the world that surrounds us.

James Pethokoukis: Sara, Matt, Tim, Stan, thanks a lot for the panel. And to everyone watching, thanks a lot. Have a good rest of your day.