How Going to Space Can Enhance Human Flourishing, with Dr. Robert Zubrin
I recently interviewed Dr. Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society about why freedom and space colonization are essential for the future of human flourishing.
I recently interviewed Dr. Robert Zubrin—aerospace engineer, president of Pioneer Aeronautics, and founder and president of the Mars Society—about why freedom and space colonization are essential for the future of human flourishing. I’ve edited the transcript for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the original conversation on the “Innovation Celebration” podcast.
Thomas Walker-Werth: In your recent book The Case for Space, you talk about how freedom is essential for scientific development and about how private-sector involvement in spaceflight has advanced it technologically over the past decade or two. What do you think the role of private companies in spaceflight is, and what impact have they made in an industry historically dominated by government?
Dr. Robert Zubrin: We have a revolution in spaceflight right now caused by freedom—free enterprise and the creativity that it brings to bear on any problem it faces. The cost of spaceflight was astronomical at the time of Sputnik. By the time of the Moon landing, not twelve years later, it had declined significantly to about $10,000 per kilogram launched—still rather high. It stayed there for forty years, and it was still $10,000 per kilogram in 2010. It was like a law of nature.
But since 2010, the innovations by SpaceX (in particular, the development of the Falcon rocket, each variant of which is more reusable than the last) have brought the cost of space launch down from $10,000 per kilogram to $2,000 per kilogram. Now SpaceX is working on Starship, which promises to bring the cost down to $400 per kilogram, or even less.
Starship is extraordinary: a fully and rapidly reusable, mass-produced system capable of launching one hundred tons into orbit. That’s comparable to the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo to the Moon, but at 1 percent of the cost. This will make extraordinary things possible. It will make real the vision of orbital research labs. NASA put forth that vision with the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle combination, but that was far too expensive to implement and hindered by the regulatory environment and lack of commercial incentives. But now it will happen. The ISS cost around $100 billion. Now it will be possible for companies to create orbital research labs, their own space stations, for less than $100 million—not pocket change, but well within the budget of a Fortune 500 company. So, we’ll have a Pfizer orbital research lab, a Hyundai orbital research lab, and so forth. There’ll be dozens of these things where companies can take advantage of the zero gravity, hard vacuum environment of space to develop all sorts of innovations, from pharmaceuticals and fiber optic cables that are far better than anything we build in gravity, to fusion power, because one of the main costs of fusion is the large vacuum chambers that are required, and vacuum is free in space.
Not only will people innovate in space, but they’ll explore and settle the Moon and Mars. Here’s the thing: If you have reusable launch vehicles, that means you also have used launch vehicles. If it costs SpaceX $10 million to build a Starship, and it sells for $20 million new, it’ll probably be available for $5 million used. So, if you and a hundred friends want to start a Mars colony, $5 million between one hundred people is $50,000 each. You could even use the ship for starter housing, or for transport around Mars, for asteroid mining, or for anything you want to do.
Walker-Werth: There’s a wonderful quote in your book to the effect that there are no natural resources—it’s human beings that are resourceful. Human industry creates resources.
Zubrin: Correct. There’s no such thing as a “natural resource,” only natural raw materials. Human creativity transforms materials into resources. Land was not a resource until people invented agriculture. And the value of that resource has multiplied as our agricultural technology has advanced. Oil was not a resource until people invented drilling, refining, and machines that run on oil. Warlords in Napoleon’s time, contemplating conquest of some country, would not have considered oil a resource of that country. It wasn’t a resource for them, to say nothing of uranium, or even aluminum, which was unknown to science until the 1820s and unknown to the public in any significant way until the 20th century.
Creativity creates resources. The resources of the universe, and even of the Earth, are virtually infinite. But we have to show people this. A main threat to human existence today is the idea that resources are limited—that there’s not enough for everyone, and we need to take what’s there for ourselves. But if we can show that it is possible to grow those resources by opening up space to human settlement and development, then it becomes clear that there’s no reason to kill each other fighting over provinces when, working together, we can open up planets.
Walker-Werth: We live in a world where there is no land that’s not under the control of states, all of which stifle innovation through regulation. There’s no new place left to do what the United States did, which is to set up a new kind of society—a freer society—but Mars and other celestial bodies offer a chance to do that again. Do you think the new frontiers of space will facilitate the creation of freer societies?
Zubrin: Frontiers are pressure cookers for innovation, because they are places where people have to innovate to survive, and where they are free to innovate, because they are more distant from authorities that restrain such innovation. The American frontier was a place of tremendous innovation. In addition to all sorts of challenges coming from the environment itself, one of the most obvious challenges of the American frontier was a labor shortage. A labor shortage is very good for workers: It means high pay. And high pay, for employers, means the need for labor-saving machinery. So, 19th-century America became famous for such machinery, which then multiplied the productivity of labor and led to higher living standards. This not only enabled the settlement of the American frontier, but it benefited the entire world, because inventions made anywhere sooner or later come to use everywhere. And by multiplying how much each person can produce, you multiply how much each person can consume. This directly caused the rise of living standards in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Mars will have a labor shortage that will make the American frontier look very tame indeed. There will be huge demand for automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, all these things that multiply efficiency and specialization. These inventions, which will be absolutely necessary to meet the challenges of Mars, will have extraordinary effects in advancing human society on Earth. Further, there likely will be social innovations, which we also saw on the American frontier. Women on the American frontier were allowed to become schoolteachers because there was a labor shortage. This then propagated east during the labor shortages of the Civil War.1 Then, during WWII women worked in many professions that previously had only been open to men, vastly expanding their opportunities.
The governments on Earth today have erected all sorts of barriers preventing people from practicing professions. They exclude people who could do those jobs. On Mars, they won’t be able to put up with that kind of thing. You’ll see a much greater freedom to practice your talent without giving up years of your life and various fees and expenses to be allowed to work.
Mars cities will be founded by people with diverse ideas on what the proper social structure should be. The Mars Society recently published two books, Mars Colonies and Mars City States, which were collections of people’s designs for Martian city-states. They range from social democratic to quite libertarian. People will try all these things. The ones that work will draw immigrants. The ones that afford people the best way of life will draw the most. The ones that deny people the opportunity to exercise their creativity will not. These structures will be sorted out through a kind of natural selection. The best ideas will give rise to the largest cities, an example to others not only on Mars, but on Earth.
The founders of the United States called our system the noble experiment. They were implementing the ideas of 18th-century liberalism, which were well known in Europe but not widely implemented because the existing power structures prevented it. But we gave it a try in America. And it worked well enough that millions of people voted with their feet to come here, and we became, ultimately, a superpower and an exemplar of what modern society could be.
Walker-Werth: Yes, emigration and freedom to move enable innovation where it otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t happen. SpaceX’s advancements, for instance, were only possible because Elon Musk, born in South Africa, was able to move to the United States where he had the freedom and the resources to do what he’s done. So, there’s an interdependence between freedom and innovation—people need to be free for innovation to happen.
Zubrin: The case for space is freedom. Freedom will give us space, and space will give us freedom.
Walker-Werth: Going back to SpaceX and reusability for a moment, I often think: Imagine if United Airlines threw away its planes at the end of every flight and built a new one. That’s basically how NASA and other government space agencies have always operated. Why did it stay that way for so long? In the 1960s, people expected Mars colonization by the 1980s. Why were government agencies unable to make more progress?
Zubrin: Well, the government-led Apollo program succeeded in landing on the Moon, unlike the Soviet program, because Apollo could take advantage of the far greater creativity in our industrial sector. So, although it was led by the government, it was supported by free enterprise.
Many new things are motivated by a vision. The genius of the free-enterprise system is that it allows individuals with a vision to attempt to implement it without needing a government’s consensus. We don’t need all of Congress to agree that reusable space vehicles are necessary if one person thinks they’re necessary and can mobilize the capital to do it. That’s what happened with SpaceX.
Walker-Werth: Because government agencies are funded by force, they’re not incentivized to satisfy customers and create value. One aspect of this that you discuss in The Case for Space is “cost plus contractor funding.” Can you talk about how that crony process has held us back all these years?
Zubrin: Let’s compare it to a private business. I run a small aerospace company, and I make use of vendors for various parts, but I don’t let them tell me how many parts I should buy. I decide how many parts I should buy, and I try to buy as few as possible, not as many as possible. If you take the ISS program, NASA’s implicit requirements amounted to: It must take at least thirty years to build, it must cost at least $30 billion, and it must involve at least thirty Shuttle flights. If you came along with a plan for the ISS that enabled it to be launched in one go, as Skylab was, they’d have said, “No!” The whole point of the program was for it to go as long as possible and spend as much as possible.
“Cost plus contracting” was instituted by well-meaning reformers who saw aerospace and defense contractors making large profits. People saw contractors selling fighter jets at 100 percent profit, and said, “That’s unfair! Ten percent profit we could understand, but 100 percent, that’s ridiculous. So, we’re changing the rules: They can charge us what it costs plus 10 percent.” At which point the aerospace companies said, “OK, we can deal with that.” And they increased their costs, because the higher their overhead was, the bigger their take would be.
One of the first things that SpaceX did, even before it had reusable launch vehicles, was say to the government, “We’re not going to do cost plus contracting, we're going to charge a fixed price.” And the government said, “Well, how do we know you’re not making excessive profit?” And they said, “It’s none of your business. We will offer you a launch at a lower cost than you’re paying. You should like that and not worry about how much we’re making.” Which, of course, is how things are done in the open market. When you buy something at the store, you don’t check to make sure the company is not making too big a profit; you check to make sure that it’s the best price for the item.
Walker-Werth: In the book, you discuss the unexpected benefits of space exploration and astronomy, such as Galileo discovering the moons of Jupiter and thereby helping humans navigate the Earth, and how suborbital spaceflight aimed at wealthy tourists, such as Jeff Bezos is doing with Blue Origin, might soon give us a quicker way of going from London to Sydney. Could you talk about the less obvious benefits of exploring space?
Zubrin: The most obvious unseen benefit of any form of exploration is knowledge. Astronomy gave us the ability to accurately navigate the world, calculating longitude using the moons of Jupiter as a universal clock. Our knowledge of physics has largely come from astronomy—everything from the laws of gravitation to nuclear fusion. That’s because the universe is the best lab there is. All sorts of phenomena that are not easily observable in a lab on Earth are observable in space. There’s no better place to do astronomy, for example, than in space. The Hubble Space Telescope has made extraordinary discoveries, but if it were on the ground, it would be a third-rate telescope. But in orbit, where there’s no atmosphere to obscure the view, Hubble outclasses practically every telescope humanity has. Imagine if we had telescopes in space comparable to what we now have in Chile, for example, with 100 times the light-gathering capacity of Hubble. Imagine the discoveries we could make.
And believe me, there are discoveries waiting to be made. We are surrounded by enormous unanswered questions, and they imply the existence of additional laws of physics we don’t currently comprehend. When you understand new laws of physics, that gives you new powers over nature. We’re having this conversation, you in England, me in Colorado, and we’re looking at each other and talking instantaneously. This would be complete magic to someone from three hundred years ago. They had no knowledge of electricity whatsoever. When you understand electromagnetism, or in the case of computers, quantum mechanics, then these sorts of feats of “magic” become possible. The possibilities are beyond imagination.
The same is true of biology. Our understanding of biology right now is quite limited. One of the reasons it’s limited is because we are acquainted with only one type of life—all Earth life uses the same information system: RNA/DNA. Compare that to human languages: We speak English, we use the Latin alphabet, and so do the French, Spanish, Germans, and so on. If all you knew was America and Europe, you’d think the Latin alphabet is the alphabet. But if you go a little further east, you run into the Russian alphabet, partially the same as the Latin alphabet and partially different, but based on the same set of principles. And if you go still further east and encounter Chinese . . . now that is different. It not only looks different to our alphabet, but it works on a completely different set of principles. But it still does the same job—you can still write books in it.
If we get further away from Earth, we may finally encounter life that does not share a common origin with terrestrial life, and it might have a different information system. We’ve started to learn how to read the genome and even to program it, programming bacteria to produce various synthetic substances. Imagine if we had knowledge of a much wider variety of biological information systems. Space exploration leads to discoveries that can absolutely revolutionize human existence.
Walker-Werth: That’s a wonderful description of how space exploration may enhance human flourishing. You mentioned the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1993, years later than it was supposed to. Hubble was extremely expensive to build and costly to get into orbit on the Shuttle. Wouldn’t private companies do a better job of innovating in space than government agencies?
Zubrin: They both help. I don’t want to say the government can never do anything useful. The government has done useful things, when it’s had a clear purpose, which isn’t often. Hubble, for example, has been an enormous success. It has served as a demonstration of what space astronomy can do. Now that companies are making it easier to reach orbit, I think that wealthy private donors to astronomy will start funding space telescopes. Then we’ll have an extraordinary number of space telescopes of different kinds, covering different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on.
Walker-Werth: Elon Musk talks about “backing up the species,” in other words, securing humanity’s future by becoming multiplanetary. What are your thoughts on the idea that inhabiting space is important for survival of the species?
Zubrin: My take on this is somewhat different than Musk’s. Musk talks about a “backup for the species.” Perhaps I’m strawmanning him, but there are people out there who say “we need to ensure that humanity survives if the Earth is destroyed.” That’s not my position. We’re not going into space to desert the Earth. We’re going into space to protect and increase the potency of human civilization.
Everything in space is moving around at high velocities and occasionally crashing into each other, like kids in bumper cars, except that it’s a lot more consequential. It can cause mass extinctions. If we want to preserve human civilization on Earth, we need to be able to divert asteroids, and the only way to do that is to be spacefaring. They’re massive objects, and you have to divert them when they’re far enough away that a little push can make them miss.
But it’s not just survival. It’s flourishing. If we go into space, three hundred years from now, there will not only be city-states on Mars, there will be new nations of people on planets orbiting stars in this region of the galaxy. Thousands of new nations with new languages, new literatures, new ideas on human social organization, vast contributions to technology and invention that will be shared across interstellar space—new heroes, new stories, that will inspire people to do ever greater things. We’re talking about creating a grand human interstellar civilization.
That’s the ultimate value of it, but it also has near-term value, because if people understand that this Star Trek-like future is possible, it affects what they do now. Once again, the major threats facing humanity today are not the things people talk about: climate change, resource exhaustion, overpopulation. Climate change is real, but if the world’s temperature goes up another degree or two, it won’t destroy civilization. Resource exhaustion is not real, and overpopulation is certainly not real. And none of those things caused the great disasters of the 20th century. The great disasters of the 20th century were caused by the idea that resources are limited. That caused the people of Europe, who were living much better in 1914 than they ever had been in human history, to destroy each other. It happened again in 1939. It could happen yet again.
But a better kind of future is possible, if we understand that we don’t need to be enemies. Inventions made anywhere are used everywhere. China is progressing madly right now due to inventions made in the West, but the West’s renaissance and scientific revolution were greatly facilitated by inventions such as paper and printing that were made in China. It’s not a problem for us, but a benefit, if the sons and daughters of Chinese parents become scientists and engineers, because then China will start contributing to human progress in a way comparable to Western nations.
Walker-Werth: I appreciate your distinction between Musk’s aim to “back up humanity” and yours to “help humans flourish by becoming an interstellar species.” I think that integrates interestingly with what you were saying about the two world wars. A lot of what caused those wars and the suffering in the 20th century was the idea that the group is more important than the individual, that “my country matters,” not the well-being of individual people. I think this is the same issue. Musk seems to accept the idea that the species is what matters, whereas you seem to want individual human beings to have flourishing lives. That was evident throughout your book—that human flourishing is the goal, that the standard of value is how wonderful a human life can be.
Zubrin: The idea of going into space to escape a catastrophe on Earth is really defective. Obviously, it’s offensive to the people who get left behind. But it’s also absurd. We should try to prevent the catastrophe on Earth. And we will do that by greatly enhancing human flourishing by revolutionizing human systems to make ourselves a spacefaring species.
Walker-Werth: Thank you so much for this human-flourishing-oriented discussion. It makes me optimistic in many respects.
Zubrin: Thank you.