By Joe Langabeer, Lincoln Labour CLP
Space X, Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturing company, has recently been hailed as “revolutionary” in its recent contribution to the resurrection of space travel. Alongside Musk’s efforts, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has also been involved in aeronautical developments, through his company Blue Origin. Both Bezos and Musk are in the top five of the richest individuals in the world. They have ample money to spend on space ventures not only from their companies, but also from government subsidies.
Their technological strategy has been to design re-usable rocket parts to reduce costs for missions into space. Elon Musk has said that he believes that eventually his company’s innovations in space design will make space more ‘accessible’, to the point where space travel would become available to all – at least to those who can afford it.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic
We have already seen similar attempts by Richard Branson, with his Virgin Galactic, to become a commercially-viable proposition for public consumption. His has been constantly delayed due to cost factors and by the fact that at the present time there is insufficient return on investment for mass space travel.
The enormous economic power of these mega-rich capitalists has started to change the narrative around government subsidies and the government investment that that made space travel possible in the first place. It is also re-calibrating the dominant position in rocket technology formerly held by Russia.
It is important that socialists discuss and re-examine the role of these private companies and the alleged benefits of ‘space capitalism’.
The U.S military, who have given out most of these government subsidies, recently accused Russia of firing an anti-satellite weapon into space. Russia have claimed that it was a device to inspect other satellites. The same U.S Military, have already sent anti-satellite weapon in 2008 that destroyed a broken U.S satellite. This demonstrates that the Space arms race is still well and truly alive.
Expanding human knowledge
There is every justification in a modern society for the promotion of space exploration as a means of broadening the range of scientific and technological knowledge. It is never a bad thing to expand human knowledge and increasing the intellectual and scientific resources that are available for the survival and flourishing of humanity. Space exploration has already helped us to understand our world better, including its place in the solar system and its relationship to the Sun. It has made big contributions to understanding weather and climate systems and it has made enormous contributions to communications and a whole range of sciences. But this must remain the purpose of space technology, not just a means of ego-boosting the mega-rich or (at this stage) looking for a means of ‘commercialised travel’, again for the super-rich.
NASA was a government agency
When the space race of the 1950s and 60s first began, many people saw it as a fight against the American ‘free-market’ system and the state planning of the Soviet Union. However, neither space program was ever based on the free market. The National Aeronautics Space Administration – NASA – was a government agency that was committed to the “expansion of space technology in aeronautics” and it was entirely paid for, all its billions of dollars, by the US state.
When the space race started, it originally came out of the technology of ballistic missiles, itself a science that grew out of the technology of the Second World War. It was the ability of the two great nuclear powers to launch nuclear missiles in the outer hemisphere and thereby across continents, that tested and developed the technology.
It was the Soviet Union that gained first advantages by successfully launching firstly an artificial satellite, the Sputnik, soon followed by Vostok 1 with the first human being sent into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. The United States felt themselves threatened by being behind Russian technological developments and in the Kennedy era, they threw all their resources into NASA, with the aim, not only of catching up with the Soviets, but also aiming for a successful manned mission to the moon.
Kennedy reluctant to fund crewed flight
Eventually, America also successfully launched an astronaut into space and the race to the moon had officially begun. At first, Kennedy was reluctant to fund a crewed flight to the moon because it was deemed too expensive. But with the Soviets progressing much faster than their American counterparts – the Russians sent the first rocket around the moon and back – he began to give huge amounts of funding to NASA and this eventually became the Apollo program. His famous speech to Rice University, when he said, “we choose to go to the Moon”, was in 1962.
Kennedy proposed a joint space programme between the US and the USSR, ad the USSR initially agreed, but after the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, the idea was dropped and was never resurrected. Instead, with massive government funding for NASA, the USA were able to break new techological ground and successfully made it to the moon with the Apollo programme before the USSR.
So who won the space race? Some would argue that it was the USSR because of its ‘firsts’ in manned flights. But certainly most American politicians would claim the United States for its trips to the Moon. In reality, no one won.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eventual dialling back of the space administration to give breath to free-market capitalism in both countries, their space programs have been weakened to the point of little-to-no production.
Commercially-driven outlook
In 2004, George Bush addressed the nation with a “vision” for a viable future in space exploration. This eventually devolved into a commercially-driven outlook which would allow private companies to develop commercial aeronautical vehicles for space exploration. At the time of his address, Congress was against the use of private enterprise reaping the rewards of space exploration, but Obama eventually closed the NASA space exploration programme in 2011, the excuse being costs and insufficient advances being made.
There has been a fairly steady stream of unmanned space exploration probes, including some to the Moon and to Mars, in the last two decades, but manned space exploration has been far more limited than we might have expected after the rapid advances of the 1960s and 1970s. It has even been left to Russia, under Putin, to send US astronauts to the International Space Station because their launch vehicles have been the largest ones still operational.
Trump, more recently, has insisted that he would fund and revisit the space administration program, but as it is with most of Trump’s bluster, nothing substantial has come from it.
The only ‘advance’ in space vehicles in recent times has come from Elon Musk’s company, Space X. This has been continuously supported by most public money, although this backing of his projects is never mentioned when the billionaire ‘entrepreneur’ is praised. Since the first launch of Space X in 2002, The Los Angeles Times has reported that Elon Musk has received almost $5bn in government subsidies, not only for Space X, but also for his other companies, including Tesla. “On a smaller scale,” The Los Angeles Times, says, “SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, cut a deal for about $20m in economic development subsidies from Texas to construct a launch facility there. (Separate from incentives, SpaceX has won more than $5.5 billion in government contracts from NASA and the U.S. Air Force.)”
Shorting Tesla stock
Mark Spiegel, hedge fund manager of Stanphyl Capital Partners is ‘shorting’ Tesla’s stock – meaning that he is betting on a fall in its value – saying, “Government support is a theme of all three of his [Musk’s] companies, and without it none of them would be around…”.
Elon Musk is strongly anti-union, and has threatened to remove benefits from his employees if they vote to unionise Tesla. Yet the same man proclaimed himself a ‘socialist’ when he supported Andrew Yang as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. With all of Musk’s actions: threatening his employees’ rights to unionise, taking government subsidies to fund his own private ventures, and not least by joining the lists of the mega-rich, the term ‘socialist’ leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
We should not never forget that when Musk and his company were developing the Dragon spacecraft which was launched two months ago, it was only developed with massive financial support from government and support from NASA.
Many contracts given out to private sector
Jeff Bezos’s suborbital flight vehicle, Blue Origin, has been around for two years longer than Space X and it has also received many contracts and subsidies from NASA and the United States government, amounting to around $200-$300m. Blue Origin seems to be seen by government officials and scientists as less substantial than Space X, but that then begs the question as to why it continues to receive so much government funding.
It may be because Blue Origin is pivoting its development towards a security program, one which the state therefore could heavily invest into, as part of its own military-based space security system.
Either way, without the serious intervention in the form of state subsidies, companies like Elon Musk’s Space X Bezoz’s Blue Origin would not exist
Massive military expenditure
Military spending in the United States is already ridiculously high, but in 2019 it saw a 7% increase, to $650bn. This is seen as a necessity from the point of view of imposing US strategic, economic and political dominance over the globe. Its expenditure is as much as the next four states all put together.
But most of this vast amount of money is actually spent on private contractors, providing weapons, motor vehicles, buildings, equipment, hardware, IT infrastructures and all the other paraphernalia of the military. When we say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost a trillion dollars, it was taxpayers’ money, largely paid to private companies: one could say – leaving aside the awful human cost of the wars – that they represented a shift of a trillion dollars in wealth from the public domain into private hands.
Here in the UK, Cornwall council have agreed to provide £12m for a site for launching Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, his latest money-making scheme aimed to provide commercial travel in suborbital space. Virgin Orbit’s subsidiary, VOX Space, has also been given a US government contract of $35m to produce three suborbital launches. Virgin, like Blue Origin, is planning to offer the US military technologies for ‘national security launches’.
Government-subsidised agencies like NASA
A recent article on the website reason.com, looked at the Space Race. In it, the authors support the capitalist system and argued that free enterprise has been good for space travel, and likewise for the continuing trajectory of space exploration. But they contradict their own article completely by admitting that the all prior human exploration in space was only possible through government-subsidised agencies like NASA. This begs the question: why do we need capitalist intervention in space science, when we have perfectly capable government-funded organisations doing it?
The argument of the capitalists is that companies like Space X have found cheaper sources and have developed re-use rockets to make space travel more affordable. But even re-use is not a new feature of space technology – the entire Shuttle programme was based on re-use.
Technological developments
Private companies only invest in research to boost profits. There is a case for true, state-ownership of science and research companies that can be used to benefit the technological developments in human expansion. This does not just to apply to space, but to environment, education, health and other issues. All the infinite possibilities of the human experience could be made better.
Socialism and a nationalised programme of research, science and innovation is the only way forward to push research for the development of humanity. Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media and author of the book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, (see our review here) makes a few of these points, but it needs the elimination of private company domination of research and science to allow that to happen.
The future of space research may not seem top priority at the present time, but with a world on the brink of climate crisis and the inevitable social and economic problems that will flow from that, it will become more important than ever. We need to have a socialist program for these industries so the research, development and technological advances can be planned and utilised for everyone’s benefit and not for a few billionaires.
August 23, 2020
