YES. JOEL KOTKIN: Can Space Save Earth?
The world economy is in the doldrums, pessimism is rife around the world, and most young people, according to one survey, believe climate change means the end of human life on Earth.
Yet a better future beckons, if we can only begin to look outside ourselves, and even beyond our planet. It is in space that we may find solutions to some of our most pressing problems, including a workable energy strategy and access to the precious minerals needed to sustain our prosperity.
Space has always held a special place in our collective imagination. Missions to Mars, the mining of asteroids and the development of space-based human societies have been the subject of TV shows and movies for decades, all speaking to the notion of a human “manifest destiny” that will transcend the inertia of our Earth-bound society.
Despite a decades-long torpor at NASA, the space industry is making a major comeback. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has just announced that it is formally tracking the industry’s growth, which it estimates contributes approximately $200 billion annually to the U.S. economy and already employs 354,000 people. The global space economy could reach $1 trillion by 2040, according to new research from Morgan Stanley.
This rapid growth reflects not so much the desire to “boldly go where no one has gone before” but — as in the westward expansion across America of the 19th century — our hunger for riches, precious metals and minerals. It has less to do with exploratory zeal and more with maintaining and feeding our terrestrial habitat.
Well, it’s both. Plus:
SpaceX is preparing to establish a permanent presence on the moon and launch a crewed mission to Mars, but other players are also driving change. NASA, for instance, is planning new unmanned deep-space exploration. Japan has already started small-scale efforts to test the feasibility of retrieving metals from asteroids, the first attempt to shift mining away from our fragile planet to the vast and, as far as we know, empty areas in space.
These activities are already helping Earth in profound ways. Perhaps the most evident benefit has come in the form of satellite communications. SpaceX, through its Starlink constellation of satellites, beams broadband service to customers around the globe.
The efforts of space companies to provide orbital communications networks have, among other things, begun to bring cyberspace to the developing world. Aerospace engineer and consultant Rand Simberg says the Starlink system is why “Ukraine has maintained the internet through the war.” Sadly, the U.S. government recently rejected a Starlink project to serve rural America.
But telecommunications are just the one of benefits of the space industry. As the industry matures, it could help solve Earth-bound problems, such as how to harvest metals, particularly relatively inaccessible ones like cobalt and lithium. Lithium, for example, is very abundant in the asteroids and moons of the outer solar system and perhaps on Mars as well. Two asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to one recent scientific report, have more iron, nickel and cobalt than exists on Earth.
Ultimately these products could be not only mined but also processed in space, reducing pollution of both the air and water on Earth. Space also could provide the solution to solar power’s intermittency problem. Out in space, the sun always shines.
Where the space industry ultimately locates itself will become a huge source of competition both internationally and within the U.S. Our geopolitical and economic rivals — China, which is contemplating the construction of mile-long spaceships, and Russia — are not going to concede the heavens to us.
Nope. It’s the new space race.