justanyone's Journal: Economics and Space

Golly. I read Scientific American and The Economist regularly, as well as slashdot and a couple of other news sources. Whenever there's a story about space, it's a story in one of several veins:

1. "Why don't they..." wishing for the government (or some large corporation) to spend more on space development.

2. "If Only We Had..." wishing for some technology to magically appear that would dramatically change the cost/benefit ratio of a space launch.

3. "Golly it's cool that..." hero worship of the braniacs that have done this or that new technological or scientific feat.

What I don't see is:

4. "A good revenue-neutral incentive would be..." Changing gov policy or funding allocation from one specific thing to another to encourage developent in that area.

We don't have enough of number four. Off-planet resources are obviously vast but uncharted, financially and personally risky, and costly to access. What kind of policies should we enact to change the equations here?

How do we encourage people to move anywhere? Given them an incentive. Make it economically beneficial to everyone and you've created a net increase in the GDP. That's a primary role of government, to make the bigger, longer term investments, to set up the economic laws and system to benefit everyone.

What if we treated space like a pacific Island? Hmmm. What do we want from space? What are our goals, long and short term? How much do we want to spend (monetary and political costs) to achieve those goals? What kind of risks are we willing to take?

What are the larger political winds blowing in our country? How would space development further those goals?

Hmmm. I ought to write a paper on this. But, I'm not in school any more. Alas.