A Stagnant Industry Ripe for Disruptive Change
Recently, Elon Musk of SpaceX gave some insight into his business philosophy. He noted that many people considered the space industry to be moribund. The United States has been using essentially the same rocket technology for decades. This past week NASA sent its Curiosity rover to Mars on an Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V and the Delta IV are the most capable launchers we have and they are both almost old enough to collect Social Security benefits. I can vividly remember walking through the Atlas factory in the 1960s in San Diego, which was the building next to the one that housed my cubicle. There was a row of gleaming metal rockets in varying degrees of completion.
Sure, the Atlas V of today is an improved version of the one that we were building in the 1960s, but it is the result of a series of incremental improvements, nothing radically different. All the traditional space companies are doing essentially the same thing they have done since Yuri Gagarin woke up the USA by flying over our airspace without asking for clearance. They are depending on cost plus fixed fee contracts from the US government. For decades there has been no incentive to make radical improvements in the way things are done or to cut costs. After all, the government would pay whatever was charged, and cost overruns had come to be expected as normal.
In a word, the space industry had become stagnant. Musk cited such an industry as one ripe for disruptive change. He founded SpaceX and set about designing rockets from scratch, with no preconceived notions and no ties to legacy launchers which had started life as nuclear bomb-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.
SpaceX has become a powerful disruptive force in the launch business, despite efforts by the old guard and their allies in government to keep on doing business as usual. SpaceX is severely undercutting the competition in launch costs, and is working aggressively on cutting costs even more, by developing fully reusable boosters.
SpaceX is only one of a number of new companies, headed by visionary leaders, which are finding new ways to reach and operate in space. This so-called NewSpace movement is causing a major disruption in the way the space business is done, and it is about time. Forty three years ago, NASA sent Apollo 8 to the Moon. Six of the subsequent Apollo missions landed on the Moon, the last one returning thirty nine years ago. Since then, no American has gone beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). It’s about time to break out of the doldrums and start reaching high again. Private companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Bigelow Aerospace are the catalysts to an industry that will get us out there. The Federal bureaucracy and Congress would serve us best by getting out of their way, rather than handing down mandates of how things should be done.
Let the disruption happen. If that means laying off engineers who have obsolete skills, so be it. It’s good to move out of your comfort zone anyway. Learn something new and then start to make a real contribution.
