Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

When future generations look back on our time, it’s unlikely that they’ll think much about Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General Bill Barr or most of the the 22 candidates currently vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. After all, when we think about the the Age of Exploration, we think about, well, the exploration: Mariners like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, or John Cabot who boldly went where no European had gone before, knitting the entire globe into one network of commerce.

Likewise, future generations are more likely to look at the impact of farsighted tycoons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson in getting us to go into outer space, beginning our own Age of (Space) Exploration. Because after a bit of a false start in the 1960s, things are really starting to, well, take off.

In his new book (it comes out next week), The Case For Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, famed astronautical engineer Bob Zubrin talks about the how and the why of our new exploratory era. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the subject, and will probably be read by historians of our era centuries hence.

How do we get to space? Well, we’ve been doing it for decades using rockets. And the rockets we’ve been using work pretty well except for one thing: They’re very expensive. They’re expensive for two reasons. One is that they’re not reusable. The other is that they’re mostly the product of government contracting. Both of these factors are changing.

As Zubrin notes, reusable rockets are cheaper. A 747 costs nearly $400 million and seats roughly 400 people. If we threw it away at the end of every flight, a ticket would cost a bit less than $1 million. At those prices, we wouldn’t build many 747s. Instead we reuse those planes over and over again, so much so that it’s labor and fuel, not the aircraft, that accounts for most of the cost of each flight. Getting aircraft-style reusability for space would dramatically lower costs.

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We’re beginning to do that with rockets. SpaceX is now reusing its booster stages, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins flies spacecraft that are designed to be reusable. Virgin Galactic likewise flies a reusable spacecraft on top of a reusable aircraft booster.

It also helps that these are commercial, not government craft. We flew government rockets for decades and space flight actually got more expensive, not less. Such rockets were procured via “cost plus” contracting, where the government pays the contractor a modest profit margin on top of its “costs,” but this gives the company an incentive to boost the costs to get more payment.

As Zubrin, a longtime veteran of the aerospace industry, writes, “In the free enterprise world, manufacturers increase profit by cutting costs. In the cost-plus contractor world, manufacturers increase profit by increasing costs. No farmer or maker of widgets would ever staff up his or her operation with four administrative personnel for every field or factory worker. At major aerospace companies, this is done all the time.”

The result is something that looks more like Dilbert than "The Right Stuff." At the new private companies, on the other hand, cutting costs while improving performance is the key goal. Unsurprisingly, they’ve achieved progress at a rate that NASA hasn’t seen since the 1960s.

But what about the why? Why should we be glad that we’re opening up another age of exploration? Zubrin spends quite a lot of time on that. Among the reasons why he thinks we need to spread out through the Solar System (and perhaps beyond):

►For the Knowledge: We know little about the universe, despite our conceit that we have things figured out. The farther we go, the more new things we will encounter, and the more our knowledge and understanding will expand.

►For the Challenge: Zubrin looks at the way the Age of Exploration rejuvenated a stagnant Europe at the beginning of the 16th Century, and the way the American frontier imparted a dynamism to American culture that, since that frontier’s closing, seems to have faded. New frontiers, with their array of opportunities and challenges, make an excellent antidote to stagnation, aristocracy and zero-sum thinking.

►For Our Survival: Last week saw reports that an 1100-foot asteroid will pass within 13,000 miles of earth — that’s closer than many satellites — in less than a decade. (The famous Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was made by an asteroid a fraction that size, and exploded with the force of more than 100 Nagasaki-sized atomic bombs). These asteroid encounters turn out to be much more common than once thought, and the likelihood of a strike is high enough that authorities are rehearsing a response. With a strong space economy, deflecting dangerous asteroids will be easy. Without it, we’re just sitting ducks in a cosmic shooting gallery.

►For Our Freedom: Earth is crowded, and governments (and corporations like Facebook) are getting ever more intrusive as privacy grows every more scarce. The danger of a global tyranny backed by modern technology of surveillance and control is growing. Getting a sizable chunk of humanity off the planet and far enough away — the Moon, Mars, even the asteroid belt — makes it less likely that such a tyranny could become all-encompassing.

I find Zubrin’s arguments compelling, and I think you just might, too. I highly recommend his book, not only for its excellent analysis, but also as a source of perspective on today’s news.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.