BrianGarst.com

I’ve written in the past on why we should not fret over the decline of NASA (which I’ve also argued is inevitable), and instead embrace the power of the market when it comes to space flight, as explained in this New York Times piece:

If all goes as planned, within a couple of years, tourists will be rocketing into space aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane — paying $200,000 for about four minutes of weightlessness — before coming back down for a landing on a New Mexico runway.

Sitting in the next seat could be a scientist working on a research experiment.

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.

A $200,000 ticket is prohibitively expensive except for a small slice of the wealthy, but compared with the millions of dollars that government agencies like NASA typically spend to get experiments into space, “it’s revolutionary,” said S. Alan Stern, an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute’s space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colo.

Now these won’t actually achieve orbit and offer only a few minutes of weightlessness. But that’s the power of markets. If it’s possible, they offer the service that is actually needed for an affordable price, rather than only what centralized bureaucrats decide should be done. There is apparently solid demand here, and it’s markets that have to get it done for a reasonable price.

So for many experiments, what takes government millions, markets can do for $200,000. Now imagine what markets could do with the really big government budget items.

NASA