Stars Being Born. Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team

The robots are coming! The robots are coming! Or so we are told. It has rapidly become accepted wisdom that automation will take the place of many jobs across industries, and we must all adapt to the new world brought forward by advances in robotics and machine intelligence. However, there is one industry that serious opinion believes will resist automation. It involves moving things from point A to point B along straight trajectories, uses machines that need to made to identical exact specifications, and that are currently built by an highly tech-savvy workface that would love to automate as much of the process as possible.

Ok, no one actually says that rocketry won’t be automated. What they do say is that space travel will remain impractical and expensive, which is the same thing. Since money is never buried in a mine or a field but rather always paid to someone, the cost of everything is at some level a labor cost. The cost of space launch, however, is predominately labor costs in a more direct way than most. The cost of a pile of metal, oxygen, and kerosene is approximately nothing compared to the skilled and painstaking precise labor from the welding to the software that turns that pile into a rocket capable of taking a payload to space. And unlike in some other industries, the workforce in space has reason to want automation: it takes much fewer labor hours to prepare an airplane for flight than a rocket for launch, yet airplanes employ many more people than rockets since the lower price of flights means people use them more.

So why hasn’t the process of launching a rocket become more automated and launch costs come down sharply? Partially, it’s because some of technology needed has only recently been invented, like 3d printing rocket engine parts and being able to recover and reuse as much of the rocket as possible. More importantly though, it hasn’t really been anyone’s job or in anyone in particular’s interest to drive the process. During the 1960s the goal was to be as fast as possible in order to beat the Soviets to the moon, not to get there as efficiently as possible. Afterwards, political considerations incentivized subcontracting out projects to involve as many congressional districts as possible, and contractors were working on cost-plus contracts that pay them for all their costs and then a percentage for profit. Both strongly discouraged consolidating and optimizing the process. However, the industry is changing. More players are entering the market, both additional countries and private companies, heating up competition and driving all parties, even the traditional U.S. defense contractors, to cut costs and improve efficiency. Every other form of transportation has started off expensive and impractical and become routine. Regardless of what our policymakers decide, space travel will not be any different. Space will open up. All policymakers will decide is whether it is Americans that do it.

Asking space advocates why they want to explore space is often a little bit like asking parents why they want kids. There is no why for it; it is the why. For space advocates, wanting to break limits and push frontiers, explore the unknown, and solve the mysteries of the universe aren’t means to an end, but a fundamental aspect of who they are. It’s not for everyone. If you don’t look up at night sky in wonder, and desire to uncover its secrets, especially if there is life anywhere else in the solar system, nothing I write can cause you to feel it. But in the same sense as you don’t need to want kids yourself to see the benefits of a strong public education system for the next generation, you don’t need to ponder the mysteries of the universe to see why it is vital that America invest in being the first to make space travel practical and routine.

The first reason it is worth the money is what the money will be spent on. The money will be spent on gathering a bunch of smart people across engineering and technical disciplines and having them figure out how to push technology to its bleeding edge: designing and manufacturing machines that will be faster, more powerful, more efficient, more durable, and more reliable than anything that has been possible before. The process would drive technological progress on Earth as well as space. It’s happened before. The last time the U.S. made a major investment in space, during the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, Jack Kilby had just come up with the integrated circuit, but there wasn’t necessarily much demand for something that could do calculations lighter and in a smaller space than before. Rockets, on the other hand, needed as much processing power in as compact a form as possible, and the U.S. space and missile program became the main customers driving the scaling up and improvement of microprocessors, and the information revolution followed. Microprocessors are nowhere close to unique; among other things, the first application for solar cells were communications satellites. Even in its diminished current state the space program continues to drive innovation.

Integrated Circuit. Photo Credit: Zephyris — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17139158

Some might argue technological advancement is great, but why not just invest in those specific breakthroughs directly? Just open the doors to the specific breakthroughs we want, and not the doors that go through a rocket. The problem with that is that we don’t know which door leads where. That’s the way scientific progress has always worked. We do things and we discover things, and that leads down possibilities in areas we don’t expect. No one anticipated that the nature of light would be uncovered by playing around with magnets or that the trick to curing so many diseases was observing that a bread mold gave off a substance called penicillin. Another argument may be that we should instead increase funding for traditional scientific research; give grants to small, specialized teams to do a variety of experiments. This is true, we should, but it’s not a substitute for space. You learn different things from having a specialized group of smart people do experiments than from having a diverse group of smart people figure out how to build stuff. Of course, technology would advance if it was built anywhere, but if it was done in America, then if one wanted to hire the best, most skilled workers to manufacture something or workers that have been trained by the best, that means they would have to hire and manufacture American.

The benefits to American manufacturing do not stop at workers and techniques. Another huge benefit would be access to microgravity. On Earth, gravity is a fundamental constraint on industrial processes. We know from oil and water that certain substances do not mix; we know from Jenga that some structures will not stand. The same rules apply on smaller scales, and the ability to put a step of the manufacturing process in space would allow American manufacturing to create mixtures and structures that are impossible on Earth. Of course, no American manufacturer in their right mind would consider putting a step of their process in space right now given how limited, unreliable, and expensive access to space is. However, if it was possible to turn around a rocket for another flight with even 10 times the labor hours as it takes to turn around an airplane, the calculation would be very different. At the right price point, it might also make sense to access industrially valuable raw materials like the platinum group metals that are scare on Earth’s surface and abundant in space. The potential products from access to microgravity and space resources include some things we’ve imagined such as new pharmaceuticals, phones and laptops whose processors are no longer constrained by overheating and battery consumption, fuel and electrolytic cells that would enable easy storage of renewable energy, and doubtless plenty more that has not yet been imagined.

Yet focusing on the promise and potential of space in the future can be superfluous; space is vital to our national interests right now. We might not think about satellites when we use GPS on Google Maps or check the weather report, but they are there. And there’s one portion of society that particularly depends on them: the U.S. military. American forces coordinate using communications satellites, find their adversaries with spy satellites, and strike them using precision weapons that are guided by signals from GPS satellites. Suppose an adversary had easier access to space than America did, such that they could maintain their own satellites and disable our own. For America’s ground and air forces, a day where their adversaries have satellite intelligence and communications, plus precision weapons and they don’t is a rough day. For the navy, the problem is on another level. The U.S. navy is organized into carrier battle groups, built around the mightiest warships that have ever sailed — America’s nuclear powered aircraft carriers. Or rather, mightiest in all ways other than one: unlike the frigates or battleships of old, aircraft carriers do not have to be sunk to be out. If an adversary punches a hole in the flight deck big enough that aircraft cannot take off or land, the carrier battle group is useless and must retreat for repairs. Further, modern anti-ship missiles are small, fast, and there are no defenses that can block all of them. America’s navy is built around the unstated, but hitherto reasonable assumption that it can detect the enemy fleet before the enemy detects them. Without our satellites working, that stops being true. Without the navy, America cannot use ground or airpower overseas either. If America does not lead in space, America does not lead anywhere.

A Model of Ming Treasue Ship. Photo Credit: User Vmenkov (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In 1400, Ming China was the most prosperous, powerful, and technologically advanced, country in the world. Its fleets consisted of ships far larger and more capable than with what Columbus discovered the New World nearly a century later. Under the command of Admiral Zheng He, Chinese fleets went on great voyages where they fought pirates, established trading relationships, collected tribute, and spread Ming influence. However, the Chinese court eventually decided the fleet wasn’t worth the money. The great ships rotted, new ones weren’t built, and the seas passed to the control of the Europeans. They, not China, discovered America, and the new crops from the New World such as the potato were introduced to China too late to save the Ming from perishing in famine and rebellion. The Ming Dynasty’s successors found that they had no match for the modern warships of the Europeans, and China entered the colonial era. By the time they had left it, China had gone from one of the richest nations in the world to the poorest. However, they’ve clawed their way back in recent decades. Feel like they’ll make the same mistake twice?