Should We Commercialize Space?

Space Commercialization Part 6

Drew Jackson

Jan 22, 2025

👋 Hello friends,

Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring:

A Modern Viewpoint and a Nod Towards the Future

Key Question: Given our more extensive knowledge of space in 2025 (compared to the 1900s or early 2000s), should humans be actively trying to commercialize space further?

Thesis: Space has historically provided many benefits, many of which still contain promise for future space exploration and commercialization ventures. The path forward for space commercialization can coincide with other Earth-based initiatives, all working together to build a brighter future. Humans have a large potential when it comes to space.

Credit Air Force Times

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Time to Read: 13 minutes.

Let’s dive in!

Edgar Mitchell summarizes the foundations of this discussion well:

So, we’ve gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn’t slowed down yet.

It’s no doubt that space exploration has had many positive externalities over time and in the period of the Cold War brought hope to a people who had very little.

People have always been fascinated by space, and this fascination has encouraged people to take risks, dream big, and achieve things no human has ever achieved before. Some of the world’s biggest companies and biggest projects today are based on this continued effort to explore and commercialize space.

Are these efforts in vain?

In aggregate, I don’t think so. On an individual project or initiative basis, potentially—there are some outliers in either direction.

Space has provided a unique set of circumstances that very few, if any, projects have exhibited thus far throughout history. Going forward, many of these persist, providing a valuable framework for future space exploration and commercialization efforts:

The Potential For A Multi-Planetary Future

John Young, the 9th person to walk on the moon during Apollo 16, wrote “NASA is not about the ‘adventure of human space exploration,’ we are in the deadly serious business of saving the species. All human exploration’s bottom line is about preserving our species over the long haul.”

I’ve read an increasing amount of articles over the last year that suggest this narrative.

Given all of the issues plaguing humanity today, space, for many, poses a way to restart, to begin anew. Similar to the narrative of New Year’s resolutions, space establishments on other space bodies (planets, moons, etc.) or in space itself (e.g., space hotels), provide humans an opportunity to set new goals and priorities.

These new goals and priorities are, in a very similar corollary with New Year’s, supposed to bring your behavior, your habits, and generally your life into a better place, leaving behind the old and bringing in some new.

It’s not surprising that this idea connects with people.

Humanity relies solely on Earth—vulnerably so. As of this present moment, Earth is humanity’s only home. Existential risks such as climate change, asteroid impacts, pandemics, nuclear war, and ecological collapse threaten our existence, potentially extinguishing human life or severely limiting civilization’s progress.

Earth’s natural resources are finite. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and especially since the 1900s globalization and manufacturing booms, the Earth’s pile of natural resources has been depleting.

Expanding into space could provide access to abundant extraterrestrial resources and the opportunity to expand our footprint to diversify where humans are living (not just on Earth). As Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian rocket scientist and one of the pioneers of astronautics, said, “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”

Similar to John Young’s statement above, space can serve as an insurance policy for humans.

Establishing human settlements beyond Earth (probably on the Moon or Mars) creates a form of redundancy in our system. If, horribly, a catastrophic event renders part or all of Earth uninhabitable, these off-world settlements could ensure the survival of humans.

Going a step further, as much as the general population knows thus far, humans are the only known intelligent species.

Colonizing other places in the universe may not just be about human survival, but about ensuring the stewardship of life—and the potential continuity of Earth’s biosphere in some form.

Continuing the Spirit of Development, Discovery, Invention, Innovation, and Acceleration

Gene Cernan stated, “I often tell young kids, and particularly my grandkids — don’t ever count yourself out. You’ll never know how good you are until you try. Dream the impossible and then go out and make it happen. I walked on the Moon. What can’t you do?”

The Space Race, as noted in some of the quotes from the Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation book above, exhibited many characteristics of a modern-day bubble, especially from an on-the-ground engineering and design standpoint.

This was an era of expansion in all areas. People put abstract theories together to calculate minute trajectories millions of miles away. New technologies, materials, manufacturing processes, and devices needed to be created to accomplish the tasks at hand (more on that in a second).

Viewing the entire enterprise across the globe, each participant, in their own respect, underwent a significant acceleration on a nationwide scale. Hope was given to citizens across the globe during a time when there wasn’t much to go around. The scientific, engineering, manufacturing, and many other industries experienced an increasing amount of ambition through vast funding allocations, nationwide notoriety, and a material belief that their actions could (and eventually would) change the world.

Yet, once the Space Race was “won” when the United States put Apollo 11 on the moon, after a short period of time this space-based enthusiasm, this incredible growth mindset was dwindling.

Space had lost its “shine” and was another realm among the rest of them, not a new shiny object that was yet to be conquered, yet to be accomplished.

And that’s how much of the space narrative has been since the mid-1970s. There have been blips and bumps throughout that when people have stumbled upon improvements and new technologies.

In the last 50 or so years, however, there has not been another space “bubble”, a time where citizens, regions, companies, countries—where the world is united in a goal to develop, explore, discover, and even commercialize space.

Say what you want about the billionaires currently pushing most of the major space developments, their attitude towards space (often shown through their investments in space) at times has echoed this Apollo-era mentality.

For instance, during a 2012 “60 Minutes” interview with Scott Pelley, Elon Musk said, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

More recently, Jeff Bezos, speaking with ABC News after his atmospheric space flight in 2021 said, “What we're doing is the first step of something big, and I know what that feels like, I did it three decades ago, nearly three decades ago, with Amazon. Big things start small, but you can tell when you're onto something, and this is important.”

“We're going to build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build the future, and we need to do that, we need to do that to solve the problems here on Earth,” Bezos added. “This is not about escaping Earth.”

It’s that attitude, that spirit of development, discovery, invention, innovation, and acceleration that makes space exploration and commercialization so powerful. The potential energy in this sector is itching to explode into something great (whether that be landing on the Moon, Mars, or something better).

If current trends continue (such as SpaceX catching a rocket with “chopsticks”), we may be on the cusp of another era of space acceleration and development.

Positive Externalities of Space Programs

As the space race came to an end, and even for some points during it, a new rationale for investment in space exploration and commercialization emerged, focused on the pragmatic use of space for improving life on Earth.

In 1992, NASA administrator Dan Goldin stated, “It’s not about going someplace, it’s about what you find along the way,” he said. “Walk into any hospital and look at the technology. CAT scans, magnetic resonance, intensive care monitoring equipment — all derivatives of Apollo. No wonder Newsweek called Apollo ‘the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketch pad.’”

Many times in the history of space exploration and commercialization, the goal has been difficult to achieve. That prompted many, including Dan Goldin, to emphasize the journey just as much as the destination.

NASA has enjoyed positive regard throughout time, but its benefits to the nation (and to the world) have not been shown as directly or as clearly as other national programs. Since the beginning of the Space Race to the present, many technologies have appeared as byproducts of space invention and technology advancements.

Historically, contrary to popular belief, NASA has been incredibly effective with the resources that it has been allocated (in my opinion). A 2007 study found that respondents, on average, estimated NASA’s percentage of the total national budget to be around 24% of the total national budget (in 2007 NASA was approximately 0.6%).

Side note: One of the people in the study upon hearing this discrepancy remarked, “No wonder we haven’t gone anywhere!”

In the 1970s, weight continued to be a problem in space. Bringing a large supply of water, capable of hydrating the astronauts for the entirety of the journey, was a pain point that needed to be addressed. Special water filters were created, enabling a recycling-type cycle wherein less water was needed to hydrate the astronauts on these journeys.

Space developments have spurred other inventions. NASA developed scratch-resistant astronaut helmets, a technology now used on most sunglasses and prescription lenses. To monitor astronaut’s vitals in space, monitoring systems were developed, which have since been adapted to become the modern-day insulin pump. Shock absorbers used to protect equipment during launches and landings are now used to protect bridges and buildings from earthquakes.

In addition to these stunning inventions and hundreds more, space exploration and commercialization also has provided other benefits.

For instance, a 2022 report by NASA estimates that it supports around 340,000 jobs across the country, jobs that pay higher-than-average salaries, and invest in key industries like scientific research and advanced manufacturing.

In addition, NASA estimated in their 2012 Spinoff Report that over 400,000 lives have been saved because of technological advances due to space programs. An example of this is written in the report:

Shortly before midnight on September 21st, 2010, the small fishing boat Ebby Luz started taking on water. In immediate danger and 8 miles from the shore, its crew activated an emergency beacon that began transmitting their distress signal, identity, and location.

Within minutes, the Coast Guard was notified and launched a helicopter to the coordinates received from the alert. Even though the vessel had already sunk by the time help arrived, and despite it being pitch dark, the rescuers were able to locate and save both crewmembers from the water. These two sailors were among the 295 people in the United States saved through the NASA-developed Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking (SARSAT) system in 2010. Since SARSAT was introduced in 1982, nearly 7,000 have been saved in the United States alone.

SARSAT had its beginnings in a tragic 1972 plane crash in Alaska that resulted in the deaths of two US congressmen. The plane’s disappearance sparked a 39 day search over 300,000 square miles, but to this day the spot of the crash remains undiscovered.

Following the Alaskan plane crash, Congress directed that an effort be made to find a better technology for locating the sources of distress calls—an effort that NASA led. In the latter half of the 1970s, NASA and several other international organizations experimented with the use of satellites to detect and locate emergency beacons.

I can’t begin to explain the entirety of what space exploration and commercialization have done for the world thus far. In 2007, NASA published the Societal Impact of Spaceflight report, an almost 700-page report detailing the vastness of the impact spaceflight has had on the world—purely from a societal standpoint only.

To put it simply, the impact has been incomprehensible.

One Humanity - Fostering a Sense of Global Solidarity

Harrison Schmitt, the most recent living person to have walked on the moon, stated, “We were looking at things that human beings had never seen before or if they’d seen them, they weren’t thinking about them in terms of understanding our earth, and our solar system, and indeed the universe.”

In my first article on space, this was the first reason I cited for why I care about space and why I think you should too:

Reason #1: Understanding space gives us more context into the world we live in, where we come from, and where we’re ultimately going. Yes, this reason is a more big-picture view, but I think it’s interesting to understand more about the natural world and how we fit into it (however small our impact actually is in the grand scheme of things).

On Earth, it may seem like there are many divisions between different groups in society. We have countries, nationalities, ethnicities, continents, compass directions (e.g. Southern), races, genders, etc. that are constantly separating us from our fellow humans.

Yet, when you put things into perspective, as Carl Sagan puts it, viewing the Earth purely as a “pale blue dot”, many of the things that separated us as humans seem to go away.

Alan Shepard, the first American to travel in space, wrote “I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It’s fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it’s tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.”

Humans going to space put the world into perspective for many people.

Michael Collins, the astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 module around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the landing, in a CBS interview explained, “I was flabbergasted. I thought that when we went someplace they’d said, ‘Well congratulations, you Americans finally did it.’ And instead of that, unanimously, the reaction was, ‘We did it. We humans finally left this planet. We did it.'”

We—an incredibly powerful word capable of transforming civilizations.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the first six recipients of the award; Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., John H. Glenn, Jr., the late Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Alan Shepard. In his speech, he stated:

We went to the Moon, in part, as a matter of national pride. But when we got there, we discovered something very interesting. Through the eyes of the cameras of the astronauts, we looked back at the Earth, above the strange horizon of the Moon in a pitch black sky; we saw our own world as a single delicate globe of swirling blue and white, green, brown. From the perspective of space our planet has no national boundaries. It is very beautiful, but it is also very fragile. It is our special responsibility to the human race to preserve it. Of all the things we have learned from our exploration of space, none has been more important than this perception of the essential unity of our world.

This “universal” perspective (what astronauts have called the “overview effect”) has had profound implications for how we might address global challenges going forward. Historically, international cooperation on projects such as the International Space Station has demonstrated how common goals can transcend boundaries.

As Claude summarizes it:

The future of humanity may well depend on our ability to embrace this unified perspective. As we continue to explore space and face global challenges, the words of Michael Collins resonate more strongly than ever. The power of "we" - not as Americans, Russians, Chinese, or Europeans, but as humans - might be the key to unlocking our full potential as a species and ensuring our long-term survival both on Earth and among the stars.

President Nixon, in a telephone call to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they were on the moon stated, “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”

There’s Plenty of Room At the Table

Similar to concerns raised in the 1970s, there is no denying that there are many important issues facing humanity. ChatGPT details the top 9 problems facing humanity in 2025 as the following:

To be explicitly clear, each of these problems matters and should be addressed. But, to deal with those problems doesn’t mean we have to stop looking up at the night sky, stop exploring new realms, and stop making discoveries along the way. If you think that a particular issue should get more attention and investment, go advocate for it.

The path forward lies not in choosing between exploring space and solving Earth's problems, but in recognizing how these pursuits can complement and enhance each other.

There's room at the table for both dreamers and pragmatists, for those who look to the stars and those who focus on immediate earthly concerns.

Together, they form the complete picture of human potential and progress.

That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.

Thanks for reading,

Drew Jackson

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