...To The Moon!

Speaker 2

and fill Magnus' economy. Artemis I think is the old Greek saying

Speaker 1

And they just made history. believe they traveled the, is it the furthest into space that any, any.

Speaker 2

human being has ever made. They did a big loop around the moon, way to the dark side of the moon, and returned to Earth, and they surpassed the original Apollo missions from the 1960s and early 70s, which famously made the similar ⁓ course when they were doing ⁓ exploration of the moon, but this one went further out. So it's really interesting. Here we are all these years later.

Speaker 1

Silly me, I thought, ⁓ didn't we do that already?

Speaker 2

We did, but we went further this time. It was a bigger spaceship.

Speaker 1

A few feet? Is it only a couple feet? Are we doing inches?

Speaker 2

few, many thousands of feet, but full distance out behind the moon.

Speaker 1

Well, in the news, you for the past few years, mean, really what I've been hearing most about is ⁓ SpaceX and the rockets that they've been shooting. So this is kind of like the first time I've heard about NASA in a while. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, historically speaking, I mean, when it comes to the space program, mean, NASA was the space program. ⁓

Speaker 2

It's like, ⁓ we still do that. I mean, we have to go back to the Cold War for that. Remember in 1959, the Soviet Union beat us to space. They ⁓ threw a couple of ⁓ first milestones. First is they actually put a satellite into orbit. This was the Sputnik program. And it really caught America off guard. You you have to put yourself back in the mindset of that era. It's the dawn of the nuclear age. Space travel also signifies intercontinental ballistic missiles. And if you're in a giant struggle with another superpower, and that superpower is a hostile Marxist regime. Well, military spending was very focused and intent upon how do you shoot stuff up into the air and maintain your strategic position against this other hostile regime. So that's all going on in the background. But space travel itself, the space race also becomes an international contest to show whether the capitalist West or the Marxist Soviet ⁓ block in the East ⁓ scientific dominance and superiority. So the Soviet Union launches the Sputnik satellite into orbit. It really catches everyone off guard in the sense that, you know, U.S. attempts to put things into orbit up until that point had not gone so well. And then shortly after, Yuri Gargarin, who's the first Soviet cosmonaut, launches into space. So they put a man into space. And the United States is just kind of looking at this like, wait a minute, they're already putting satellites into orbit, human beings into space. We got to get our act together and catch up. So it spawned a whole wave of government investment in what is known as the space race that comes to a culmination, like the next target after they put satellite in space, man in space. Well, then we have to put an astronaut in space. And there's a succession with the Mercury program. There's Alan Shepard and John Glenn are the major figures there. They're drawn out of basically Air Force test pilots. They become the heroes of the year. through to 1969 when we have the next big milestone is putting a man on the moon. The Apollo 11 program lands on the moon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as we all famously know the videos and the recording. That is seen as the culmination of the space race.

Speaker 1

Pardon.

Speaker 2

By the time that's concluded, well, the Soviet Union clearly is not going to make it to the moon. And the big question geopolitically is, well, what happens next after that milestone? And there's some other things that happen. Both countries put space stations up in the 1970s. We move. ⁓ NASA redirects some of its resources, especially as the Soviet Union starts waning as a power. Remember the whole space shuttle era? This is the reusable spacecraft. But they're doing scientific experiments in outer space. And so, well, what can we learn up there under different conditions than what we have here on Earth? And what's interesting, the most recent thing, the Artemis mission, it's kind of a move back in that direction of, let's go toward new milestones, new exploration, rather than ⁓ putting stuff in orbit for scientific investigation and discovery. There's still a scientific element, but it's like, let's push the frontier in a new direction. But again, heavily subsidized by the government, and there's an open question of putting taxpayer resources into something like this.

Speaker 1

Yeah, the ⁓ discussion of NASA, especially the, you the early astronauts, it just makes me think of Tom Wolfe's, the right stuff for any, anybody out there who's just looking for a writer who was just everything he writes, you could just read out loud. It's just really spectacular. And he has a, ⁓ book of essays called, ⁓ mauve gloves and mad men clutter and vine, which is a very Tom Wolfian way of, ⁓ titling things. And in one of the. chapters. I believe it's the truest sport jousting with Sam and Charlie. It's about jet fighter pilots in Vietnam. And I bring that up only to kind of point out something I think is, I don't think we talk about enough, but the type of person you need to be to be willing to go in a fighter jet and then go out into space. You know, we're talking about the beginning of space travel. Nobody has done this before. And you have guys with cojones that I don't even know how the capsule can contain their cojones. It really takes a very special, adventurous, courageous person to step into a rocket and be blasted off into space.

Speaker 2

Yes, yes, and there are multiple incidents in the early parts of the space program, both in the United States and the Soviet Union, of catastrophes like that. Gargarin, the first guy in space, is a test pilot, and he actually later dies in a piloting accident. There are incidents in the Soviet Union of a capsule malfunction and reentry, and the last radio transmissions are the guy cursing the Soviet government for sending them up there in this a rickety, malfunctioning thing on top of a rocket ship. The United States had accidents ⁓ really at the outset of the Apollo program. They had a malfunctioning door on one of the tests and three astronauts died in a fire that consumed the capsule while it's on the launch pad. So it was a very, very dangerous task. It still is. mean, strapping yourself to the top of a giant rocket ship that's stacks and stacks of fuel to launch you into space. There's something scary about that. But I was looking at the history of this and you know, ⁓ there's back in the Apollo era, the flight director at NASA is this guy by the name of Gene Kranz. And have you seen the Apollo 13 movie with Tom Hanks? He's the Ed Harris guy in the control room that's sitting there ⁓ like trying to solve the problem after the mission goes wrong. Well, he's apparently still alive. He's in his 90s and when the Artemis ⁓ mission launched. I guess he went down to mission control or something at NASA and they interviewed him and he's like, I remember doing this before. But the other thing he was famous for was he established the standards for the selection of astronauts and the standard that became associated is he wanted people who were both tough. You know, had the conies, they had the skill and the wherewithal to do this and knew the risk, but were also extremely competent. In other words, they could solve problems on the fly in space, which is what really happens in Apollo 13. Something goes wrong and, you know, they're unloading the box of this is what we have to work with to fix it, to get us home. So you need an entrepreneurial mind shift and you also need a ⁓ risk-taking mindset.

Speaker 1

And I remember that scene. mean, it was it was like, here's a toilet paper roll and some gum.

Speaker 2

Can we stuff this into the filter?

Speaker 1

I do wonder, know, a man of that stature, you know, being, you know, 90 years old, I wonder, does he have trouble with his email? Does he have to ask his grandkids how to use his phone? You know, somebody who has, you know, ⁓ such an incredible distinction when it comes to technology. I mean, a rocket scientist. You know, I wonder if AI is tricking him.

Speaker 2

He figured out how to kind of MacGyver a spaceship back from the moon in extreme circumstances of crisis and did so only over radio signals using like 1970s technology. Can he open his email? That's an interesting question.

Speaker 1

That's me being ageist. I'm being ageist, but I believe he can take it. And I know that he's a big fan of the show, Happy Hour Econ. He's listening to it. He can't figure out how to turn off Happy Hour Econ. That's why he's listening to us right now. ⁓ You know, with all of this, I think that the culmination, it all comes down to is the moon ours now? Does the United States own the moon? Because, I mean, I think we have a pretty good stake in there.

Speaker 2

We'd to have them on if you wanted to interview. only country that's been there. No, it's, well, we did claim the Gulf of America. That's right. Just by presidential decree. You know, the running joke is the president, President Trump, signed an order and declared the moon's new name as Space America.

Speaker 1

Yeah, forget about, you know, everyone was talking about Canada being the 51st state and Greenland possibly. It's a no, let's just let's do the moon. Let's just do it. How does that work as far as, you know, ownership of celestial bodies?

Speaker 2

Yeah, think really it's kind of uncharted territory in a literal sense, mainly because there's not really an outpost established on a permanent basis. We went there in the 60s and 70s. We planted a flag. That's the other interesting thing of ⁓ last week with the mission is they ⁓ had high resolution photographs where they found some of the previous landing sites and they're still intact and they're still undisturbed on the surface of the moon. So yeah, there's an American flag on the moon. Does that make it ours? It's like we got there first, we stuck a flag in it, have never been back, but therefore we own it.

Speaker 1

Do we to homestead? Is it like a homestead?

Speaker 2

Yeah, you're homesteading the moon, you know, ⁓ new territory. And these are open questions, like eventually if we get to Mars, does someone get to claim, I'm the king of Mars now? But the flip side to that is we're also still in a technological age where it's not quite yet feasible. to establish a homestead on the moon, let alone Mars. You know, I think there's talk about doing that, but you kind of put yourself back in world history. This is like going off to a new continent. You pack everything you own onto a ship, all your survival supplies and everything, because you know there's not going to be much there when you get there. And maybe you're going to encounter hostile inhabitants that live there. Hopefully you could trade with them. And that was the original, some of the original success stories is there was trade, but there was also lot of violence and repression. Now, I'm not saying there's aliens on the moon or Mars. that we're going in to conquer, but it's kind of like unclaimed territory in the sense of that there's just an island out there that no one has ever set up on before. And one of the oddities here, I think the de facto reality is ⁓ the first person that can get there and set up, as long as they can enforce that property right, their stake or maintain their presence there, they're going to claim it. And there's not much else anyone else can do about that.

Speaker 1

I mean, I wonder how bullets act in zero gravity, right? Because if you might, you might have a real life situation where, yeah, he's shooting at us, but we can just move. We can dodge it, you know, kind of Matrix ⁓ style. When it comes to, I mean, you know, space and in pop culture, I mean, the amount of books and movies and TV shows, it seems like people have a real desire to get away from this place called Earth, even though there's plenty of really, I mean, I'm a big fan of Earth. I kind of want to stay here as long as I can.

Speaker 2

I'm happy here too. But I think there is an ethos around that. And it's often likened to the settling of the American West or the settling of the New World. Going out there and being one step ahead of where the end of civilization was. Civilization was in the East. If you jumped in the covered wagon and went West, there were no roads out there. There were no ⁓ established settlements. You could go for hundreds of miles and not see another person. And then you finally make it to the trading post It's like, aha, or you get stuck in the past over winter and you're in the daughter party. So there's a lot of things can go wrong, but the ethos behind it was also that, ⁓ you know, this was a freer territory that you could enter into. the old thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, who's this historian around the turn of the 20th century. And he made this point, he said, well, we've settled the West now. The closing of the West has closed off of our entire frontier. going to change Americans' mentality toward the world, because there's nowhere to go to to escape. I think there's some elements of truth into that. One of the downsides is that it turned attention toward like, we need progressive social policies that we can do ⁓ with the force of government. But the old ethos of the West was that maybe if you're on the margins of society, you move out beyond the reaches of government. It's not like social interactions and norms cease to exist. The West isn't the violent, wild, wild West, blood and guts and gore place that we hear and see in Hollywood movies so much as it's an exercise in self-government. people that have moved beyond the reach of Washington DC, they still have to figure out institutions, how to trade with each other, how to peaceably resolve disputes and differences, how to establish property rights on this plot of unclaimed land that they're ⁓ setting up and maybe digging a mineshaft on or... using for cattle grazing. ⁓ Does it mean that I got there first, therefore it's mine? Did I improve upon it? Is it mine? Did I meet the legal standards? But those legal standards are maybe filing with the Homestead office a thousand miles away in Washington, D.C. and there is no internet, there is no telephone line, there barely is a telegraph line, but you have to go several towns over to get to it. So self-sufficiency is kind of built into the system when you go out into the frontier. And the idea here is that space may be that next frontier that no matter what it develops is like this exploration pattern, whoever's up there in space, don't have the assistance of ⁓ a government back at home that's going to come in and get them out of problems.

Speaker 1

So much of like speculative fiction seems to be very cynical when it comes to like the nature of man. I've been watching old episodes. Well, they have to be old episodes of the outer limits. mean, from the, you know, from the sixties, I've been watching with my son and it's just like, wow, humanity is bad. And aliens are there to show us how bad of humans, ⁓ how bad of humans we are.

Speaker 2

The Star Trek aliens, the Klingons, are like the outlaws, the bandits in the old western movies. Roving and violent people that are there to, that are going to cause problems. But yeah, like the real history of that is just much more complicated. And I love this little book, it's called The Not So Wild Wild West. It's by Terry Anderson and PJ Hill, where they look at ⁓ all the classic myths of the Western frontier. And they go through one by one and they kind of demolish them. said, well, actually, the West wasn't. this terrible violence-ridden place where people are just preying on the wagon train. Yes, the people were armed and the guns, but what do we know about the economics of guns? An armed society is actually a safer society because you know someone is there that has that tool that could use it. If you try to rob them, there's a good chance they're going to fight back. So that dynamic was at play in the West in the 1870s and 1880s. It's not ⁓ shooting up the saloon and robbing the bank so much. Those are the exceptions. And one of the other things that comes out of this history is the main place where violence does manifest, it's when the government stepped in and tried to do things, like to forcibly remove Indian tribes. and relocate them. Well, yeah, you're kicking people off their land. They're going to fight back. And some of the worst atrocities we see in the West, they're not private citizens. It's the cavalry coming through and slaughtering the Indians that were on land that they wanted. Or it's the corrupt government-funded railroads that are manipulating their route, as we talked about in one of the previous episodes, that are scheming to steal somebody else's land. Those are where the problems exist. have civil society solving its own problems on the frontier removed away from ⁓ the influence and the political instruments of the state, it turns out people gravitate much more toward peaceful coexistence than the resorting to violence.

Speaker 1

And when it comes to... the space program, it's responsible for a lot of advancements that are beneficial to society. on its website, if you go there on NASA's website, they posted, for example, 20 inventions that came from space research. And if you go to the website, something you'll notice is that for a bunch of rocket scientists, they couldn't figure out how to actually make the 20 inventions readable on their page. What I did was I clicked on it and brought it to my desktop and then I enlarge the image so I could actually read but you know some of the things to come out of the space program include CAT scans, foil blankets which any campers out there you know how important those are, dust busters for ⁓ clean freaks like me, wireless headsets which we could use more of definitely on the subway which are little rocket ships that go underground, ⁓ portable computer so there's been a lot of stuff that's come out of the Space Corps program, you know, in addition to going where no man has gone before.

Speaker 2

Exactly, exactly. So there's all sorts of elements that come out of the space program. And it's just by necessity of the type of technology. you're strapping people to a rocket and shooting them into space, you're going to need new technology. But you know, I'm also a skeptic of massive public investment. You have to always have to ask the question, know, compared to what? the government had not funded this, how would these inventions have evolved?

Speaker 1

The dust buster, come on, Phil. A tiny vacuum cleaner.

Speaker 2

tiny miniature vacuum cleaner. Maybe there's a need for it. So there are spillover benefits by the fact that we did go into space because the technological need of launching a rocket into the atmosphere and beyond and getting it back home safely means that you have to solve new exigencies, new circumstances that the technology previously didn't address. ⁓ the circumstances of space flight itself become the impetus to invent solutions to problems that exist in space but are not as pronounced here on Earth. And then, yes, you get a feedback loop. Some of that comes back home. Now we have a dust buster. Now we have the camping blankets. It's like, ⁓ well, this thing that was ⁓ useful for flying around the moon is also useful on your... camping trip. And that's all fine and great, but the question is, suppose you had a different situation where SpaceX had evolved earlier on as a private company, acknowledge the fact that yes, they take massive subsidies and a lot of their contracts are with the federal government. But I think the interesting thing about something like SpaceX... is it also takes a lot of contracts, also Jeff Bezos' he has a competitor company. They also take a lot of private sector contracts to launch telecom satellites into space. Elon Musk has a whole division of ⁓ internet access that he's done through satellites that reach remote parts of the world where you don't have landlines and Wi-Fi cables. Starlink is fascinating in that respect and it's great new technology, but notice ⁓ there's a private economic impetus for it that's coming about. What that tells me is that a lot of the stuff of launching things into space, compared to what is, yes indeed, private commercial ⁓ exercises in space technology are indeed viable. and they do have economic uses. It doesn't just have to be a giant government agency that does it all. And that's one of the big transformations we've seen in recent decades, is it's no longer just NASA and its Soviet equivalent are the only games in town. Now it's private companies, private... public partnerships, again, I'm skeptical of the tax dollars, but nonetheless, I think ⁓ it's better arrangement than just having a government monopoly on space flight. And commercial uses of putting things into orbit, testing things in space, are clearly viable and they're bringing things back to us at home. can get internet almost anywhere on the planet now, instant streaming of services through satellites. ⁓ I can listen to satellite radio in my truck. have dreamt of that 20 years ago, 25 years ago.

Speaker 1

That reminds me of something that the actor Anthony Anderson, star of the sitcom Black-ish, had to say about the Artemis space mission. And obviously you know how important the opinion of Anthony Anderson, star of Black-ish, is when it comes to space travel. But I believe he was stopped at an airport, maybe it was LAX or somewhere else, was questioned about his thoughts on it. And basically he said, you know, what's it all for? need here and at home ⁓ for society.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

You know, still drive around, I still see homelessness, know, I still see dilapidated buildings in city, I see programs that need funding. And then me, I couldn't help but think, you know, if it comes down to money being better spent elsewhere, you know, I think we didn't need all those seasons of Black-ish. I enjoyed, I think, like the first two or three seasons, didn't need the rest. But what are your thoughts on this idea that, you know, spending so much money for space travel,

Speaker 2

I

Speaker 1

when there's homelessness back on earth, when there are people in need here on earth.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Resources are finite and public sector resources especially so. ⁓ Again, I always ask this compared to what question. ⁓ If the choice is between launching a rocket to the moon and launching a rocket with a giant bomb on it at another country, I will always go for launching a rocket to the moon. If on the other hand, know, public resources ⁓ could be expended in other ways, I tend to defer to, well, why don't we use this to cut taxes and eliminate bureaucracy and get regulation out of the way? And that in itself becomes a more effective tool of the fighting homelessness and to lifting people up out of poverty. by expanding opportunities and removing government obstacles that are keeping them there. I would much rather do that. ⁓ the approach. So I think there's a mistaken assumption there when you get into some of these games that say, well, could we spend money on sending a rocket to the moon or do we dump it into ⁓ poverty alleviation and homelessness? There's a mistaken assumption that the government's approach to poverty alleviation and ending homelessness actually works. When we know and practice it really doesn't. It often backfires. It often becomes co-opted by government agencies that spend a whole lot of money on doing very little. The problem that we see in particular, like in California and some of the states in the West, is not a result of a lack of public resources to address homelessness. They've dumped billions of dollars over decades and decades, and yet the problem hasn't gone away. It's all because they are doing it the wrong way and ⁓ misusing resources in counterproductive ways. So again, the trade-off is not solve homelessness or go to the moon. The trade-off is ⁓ go to the moon or dump bunch of money into ineffective government programs that aren't really solving the problem that they claim to be solved.

Speaker 1

Perhaps one solution is to send the homeless to the moon, you know, a homeless space program.

Speaker 2

What was the old Robert Heinlein novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where they kind of send the dregs of society?

Speaker 1

I don't know.

Speaker 2

Well, you know, the historical anecdotes called Australia, this is what the British Empire did is they kind of emptied out their prisons and said, ⁓ well, we're going to send you to Australia instead. So you're no longer wards of the government here at home where we have to keep you in the poor house or the prison. It's like you committed an offense, you're on a ship, you go to Australia and you can settle this nearly empty continent that had weird creatures and snakes and poisonous frogs and lizards and things on it. Good luck!

Speaker 1

To that, what is the future of space travel look like? Author Reiner Zittleman has a forthcoming book called New Space Capitalism, The Entrepreneurial Paths to the Stars as a way to make it to Mars and beyond. And we've been seeing that as we've been talking about the privatization of space travel with SpaceX. was some years back, I know there was a member of NSYNC that was launched into space. Yeah, yeah, Jeff Bezos, as you said, had Blue Origin with Katy Perry and other non astronauts. know, is space capitalism the way that we're going to ⁓ make it?

Speaker 2

The space tourism. Every time there's a story when Bezos or one of these ⁓ private companies, launch a multi-billionaire into space or a celebrity like Katy Perry or something, they're talking and people are going, ⁓ well, this is just the Gilded Age, this ostentatious wealth. But I think there's another side to that story. The fact that ⁓ it's becoming increasingly commercially viable to do that is a sign that space travel is becoming less expensive. It's becoming more in the domain of a market as opposed to just a government monopoly. And you think about like the very first transatlantic commercial airplane flights, what was the price tag on those? It was something that was available only to the richest of the rich. And before that, it's like first class on the fancy ocean liner. Why were all these multi-millionaire billionaire types on the Titanic? Well, that was the most elite way of crossing the Atlantic at that time. and they spent ostentatious amounts of money. It didn't end up so well for them because a ⁓ iceberg happened on the way across. But compare that to plane travel today. I just booked a flight for a conference coming up in London. And we're in a time of ⁓ high prices because of fuel. But how much, guess how much I paid for that flight to get to London? About $900.

Speaker 1

Round trip?

Speaker 2

Yeah, $900 round trip. Of course, I'm going on a Tuesday or something like that. So it's not prime time. But $900 give or take round trip. I got a ticket to London. I could not have done that at all in 1950. They had plane travel, but I could not have afforded that. And then in 1900, I would have had to book like steerage on the bottom rung of the ocean liner to go across.

Speaker 1

I'd have to be a harpooner on a whaling ship. Well, makes me think of what the impact new technology is going to have on even just commercial flights. Because if you could, if we can get to a point where launching rockets is so cheap or much cheaper, where you can kind of launch into space and then kind of come back down to earth and possibly shorten a, you know, a flight. Like if you can make it to say from Virginia to to London in an hour with a properly ⁓ placed rocket, I mean, that's going to be just huge.

Speaker 2

It'd be crazy. It's, you know, you have to think about these things entrepreneurial. What are the new technologies that will be discovered? And there's some elements of this, you know, the original space flight program kind of grew up in tandem with the airline industry. There's a reason for that. There are overlapping technologies. There's a reason why ⁓ test pilots were the original astronauts. There are overlapping technologies. Before we went into space, we had ultra-high altitude aircraft that were pushing the edge of the atmosphere to see what human endurance could be and what it could bring. Now that's like a routine thing as you go well above what used to be the Flight altitude in the 1930s is now like where the thunderstorms happen. Now you go in a pressurized cabin, thousands of feet above that. Technological discovery comes across solutions that were not even envisioned at the time the original technology is launched. This is the greatness of entrepreneurship. It's the person that's able to recognize something that no one else has seen before that and say, aha, here's a better way to build it or a more efficient way to arrange things. in different combinations and deliver something better that we didn't even realize that we needed yet. And if that is an hour-long flight across the Atlantic because of some new technology that emerges, know, somebody in the future will take advantage of that. their instinct and their incentives will be to commercialize it, to ⁓ market it, not to extract money out of the zero-sum game of, ⁓ you know, like the socialist world looks at whenever an entrepreneur does something, is, they're trying to get our money in. and appropriate it from us. The reality is, they're delivering a product and trying to make it commercially viable, and the pattern of that is as it becomes commercially viable, the technology improves, the cost of doing it reduces, and eventually you get to the point where I can buy a $900 ticket to fly to.

Speaker 1

Amen. As co-captain of your flight crew, thank you all for tuning in to Happy Hour Econ. We will see you next week for a whole new episode wherever you're located in the galaxy.