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On February 8, 2018, the eyes of the world once again,
fixed upon Cape Canaveral.
This time people watched with anticipation
as SpaceX launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket.
The near-simultaneous landing of its two booster rockets
was like something out of a sci-fi flick.
It looked like the future.
The subsequent view of a cherry red Tesla Roadster drifting
through space was like something out of a Douglas Adams novel.
The landmark launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket
is a milestone in a new space race, not one between nations,
but instead between private companies.
Is this the best thing for the future of human space travel?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The private funding of space is not something new.
In fact, this was the case in the beginning of rocketry.
Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry
funded his research out of his own paycheck.
The idea of governments funding private aerospace companies
is also not new.
In fact, modern commercial air flight
is a direct result of this relationship.
World War I spurred great leaps in airline technology
and manufacturing capability.
To encourage commercial use of this new capacity,
the US Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1925.
Private companies quickly took over the air mail industry.
This spurred more technological and business innovation.
And before long, commercial passenger flights
became a thing, a big, big thing.
Just as with air flight, the US government
has taken steps over the years to pave the way
for commercial space flight.
Ronald Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act
of 1984, which for the first time
made commercial launches legal.
Under each of the following presidents,
NASA's monopoly on space flight was further diminished.
The agency's directive became increasingly focused
on science and deep space travel,
while private industry was encouraged
to take over the day to day business of transport
to Earth orbit.
To spur private competition, NASA
implemented its Commercial Orbital Transport Services
Program in 2011.
COTS awarded government contracts
for resupplying the International Space Station.
And this is where SpaceX made its grand entrance.
Funded by COTS, its Dragon Module
was the first private spacecraft to dock with the ISS in 2012.
Orbital ATK followed closely.
And now, both companies regularly resupply the ISS.
The Sierra Nevada Corporation is expected
to join the ISS Private Club when it docks its Dream Chaser
spacecraft in late 2020.
This is considered a big win for NASA.
The shuttle program costs around $4 billion a year.
But these resupply missions run closer to $50 million a pop.
But what about manned space flight?
Well, at some point both Dragon and Dream Chaser
are expected to carry actual people to the ISS,
and perhaps beyond.
But that hasn't happened yet.
To date, only one privately developed craft
has carried a person to space.
This was SpaceShipOne.
In 2004, the first private astronaut, Mike Melvill,
blasted this rocket-powered plane
into a suborbital trajectory, topping
100 kilometers in altitude.
And only just kissing space.
But it counts.
SpaceShipOne's adventure won its maker, Scaled Composites,
the cool $10 million of the Ansari XPRIZE.
Virgin Galactic teamed up with Scaled Composites
to form the spaceship company, with the plan
to turn its SpaceShipTwo into a regular space tourism vessel.
That hasn't happened yet, for reasons I'll get back to.
So why hasn't private manned spaceflight become a thing yet?
Because money.
Almost all private companies are driven by the profit motive.
And besides the distant dream of space tourism,
there isn't much money in sending people
to space, at least compared to launching satellites.
That's where the profit is for the moment.
And as a result, there are many private companies
in the business of slinging satellites into orbit.
Private industry's also eyeing the heavens
for its vast natural resources.
In 2015, Barack Obama signed the US Commercial Space Launch
Competitiveness Act, which will allow
US companies to own materials extracted from space.
Asteroid mining seems likely to drive
the next wave of private enterprise,
because the potential profits are astronomical.
That's a whole other topic though
and it's deserving of its own episode.
So here we get to the main argument for public
versus private space programs.
It's long been perceived that in order
to do important, but unprofitable, work
we need collectively funded and administered agencies,
like NASA.
Grant enterprises, like the Apollo moon landings,
inspired generations.
But didn't turn a dime.
The Hubble Space Telescope and other space-based observatories
have revealed the deepest mysteries of our cosmos
and keep a watchful eye on our own fragile planet.
But these will never excite shareholders.
We've sent probes to every planet in our solar system
and landed on several, but not a single CEO got rich doing it.
National space agencies have done incredible things.
But is their role diminishing, even
for the big low-profit stuff?
There appears to be a new model emerging for some
of these moonshot ventures.
And I'm talking about private funding
by idealistic billionaires.
Elon Musk is getting the most press right now.
He seeded SpaceX with cash from his first project, PayPal.
Now that SpaceX has a working heavy launch
vehicle with reusable boosters, Musk
is eyeing colonies on Mars and beyond.
But Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and his Blue Origin
company, is neck and neck in the whole relanding rockets thing.
In 2015, his New Shepard rocket performed
the first successful vertical landing after a spaceflight.
SpaceShipOne was solely funded by Microsoft co-founder, Paul
Allen, while its successor SpaceShipTwo is now
owned by billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.
Then, there's Russian billionaire Yuri Milner
with his breakthrough Starshot Program.
His seed funding may put the first robotic probe
in another star system.
We talk about that project in this episode.
But is this the way we want to go?
Shouldn't our most grand enterprises
be funded and operated collectively,
chosen by humanity, or at least those we vote for in elections.
Or is it OK to cede these important decisions
to individuals and private companies?
Well, there are arguments on both sides.
On one hand, private industry is less constrained
by politics and public opinion.
The last few US presidents have ordered NASA to redefine
its goals at some level.
First, it's Mars.
Then, it's back to the moon.
Then, Mars.
And then, the moon again.
Massive human effort is wasted every time
a large program is scrapped, often
for poorly informed political reasons or as publicity stunts.
Government agencies are also a little more constrained
by public opinion.
For example, the shuttle program was shut down for years
after the Challenger disaster.
Private companies can afford to take more risks.
For example, SpaceshipX recently put out
a video of how not to land a booster
and estimated that the Falcon Heavy
had a 50-50 chance of blowing up on the launch pad.
Musk hit that launch button anyway.
Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo is still forging ahead, even
after the fatalities of a test flight crash and an earlier
tank explosion.
Aerospace billionaires see themselves as the new Wright
brothers and see risk and sunk investment as necessary
for true innovation.
And they want to move quickly.
They want to move quickly, not necessarily to turn a profit,
but to see the fruits of their labors before they die.
And this gets us to one of the main dangers
in over reliance on rocketeer billionaires.
They won't always be around to see their visions through.
Despite its struggles with shifting politics,
NASA has been at the forefront of science and space
exploration for 60 years.
And its motto, for the benefit of all, is still held dear.
Will this be true of the space programs built
by today's billionaires after control
slips to boards of directors?
These are not known for their idealistic tendencies.
And whether our aerospace executives
are idealists or not, they have a huge influence
on the future of our species.
Should that influence be something
you can seize with hard work and cash,
but without a single vote in a public election?
I'm not sure I know the answer.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Although, I'm actually not sure we'll
have much choice in the matter.
Private spaceflight is here to stay.
And that's pretty exciting, wherever
you stand on the issue.
The next step may be to figure out
how to best marry public will and private enterprise,
so that we may ensure the benefit of all
in our next steps in exploring outer space time.
Thank you to Curiosity Stream for supporting PBS Digital
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The future of human space travel is starting to look promising.
And you know what we have to thank for that?
We have the history of human space travel to thank.
As it happens, Curiosity Stream has an excellent documentary
on the dangerous early days of putting people in space.
It's called "Rocket Men."
Check it out.
Get unlimited access.
And for our audience, the first two months are free,
if you sign up at CuriosityStream.com/SpaceTime
and use the premier code spacetime during the sign up
process.
Speaking of private space funding,
I want to give a huge thanks to all of our Patreon supporters.
Every little bit really helps and you make it much easier
to keep the show running.
And today's extra huge thanks goes
to Roman Pinchuk, who contributes at the Quasar
Level.
Roman, we're channeling your contributions
towards starting our own aerospace company.
We'll start small, maybe a skateboard tied to a weather
balloon and work up to launching sportscast
to the asteroid belt. Baby steps, right?
In a recent episode, we talked about the death of the sun.
You guys had some great questions.
Stimuli asked why stars get brighter
as they age if their fuel is depleting.
Well, it's pretty unintuitive.
As the hydrogen fuel in the sun's core
gets diluted by helium, the fusion rate
does decrease and the core shrink.
But that re-ups the fusion rate again.
In fact, to support the increased gravitational crush
of the smaller core, the fusion rate
has to be even higher than when it started.
[INAUDIBLE] wants to know how the least
mass of stars, red dwarfs, die.
So red dwarf are entirely convective.
Plasma currents swirl throughout the interior.
That means new hydrogen flows down to the core,
while the helium produced in core fusion
is mixed through the star.
By contrast, the sun is only convective in its outer layers.
No new fuel is carried down to the core
and the fusion products remain stuck there.
That leads to a layering, an inert core,
surrounded by a fusing of hydrogen,
which results in a dramatic death cycle.
But by the time a red dwarf finishes using its fuel,
the entire star is made of helium.
When fusion switches off, the star
contracts, until electron degeneracy pressure
stops the collapse.
At that point, the whole thing becomes a white dwarf,
but without the dramatic cycle of shell burning and red giant
phases that the sun will go through.
Of course, we've never seen the results of this,
because no red dwarf has ever died in this universe yet.
These stars consume their fuel thousands of times more slowly
than the sun, which means they can live hundreds of times
longer, even though they have less fuel to start with.
The first red dwarf will end its life
when the universe is something like 100 billion years old.
And regarding our Trebuchet Challenge question,
[INAUDIBLE] laughs at physicists with their frictionless
trebuchets in a vacuum, while Don Sample
suggests we start by assuming a spherical trebuchet.
Hey, if I was physicing right, I would've used natural units.
Elementary trebuchets cast a stone of mass 1 at distance 1.