Let's try a
little thought experiment. Suppose that a stranger walked up to you with the
following pitch:
"Good
morning. I and some friends of mine are planning a trip to Antarctica. We'd
like to ask your help. It'll be great fun, a great adventure, the trip of a
lifetime, really. I'm sorry we can't invite you along, but it's very
expensive, and there's room for just a few of us on the boat. So you can't go
- in fact, you can never go - but we'd like to ask you to help financially. We
figure if everyone we talk to chips in with a few bucks, we'll be able to make
the trip. And in return, we'll send you back some postcards.
"They're
really great postcards..."
Would you
be inclined to help this fellow out? Or would you be rather more likely to
tell him, with varying degrees of profanity depending on your upbringing, that
since he's the one who wants to make the trip, he should whittle
himself a canoe and stop bothering you?
There are
some generous souls who would reach into their wallets. But I suspect that
this pitch lacks great appeal for most of us, myself included. Yet it is
pretty much the same pitch we've been using with the general public to sell the
idea of a space program using government funds.
We will
never make it to the stars on handouts. We need to take responsibility for the
financing of our own dreams.
An entrepreneurial
spirit
It is very
true that getting to space in any big way will require a lot of money (though
people like Burt Rutan are in the process of proving that it can be a lot
cheaper than previous methods). But that's not a reason to throw up our hands
and haul out the begging bowl. It's a reason to educate ourselves in the ways
of wealth.
We have
role models showing us the way - people like Paul Allen
of Microsoft, who gave Burt Rutan the
funds to build Spaceship
One, and Elon Musk
and Jeff
Bezos, who are shelling out large sums from their own fortunes to develop
launch systems that will be cheaper to operate, and open space transportation
as a profitable business. We need more financiers like them every bit as much
- perhaps even more than - we need more engineers like Burt Rutan.
All three
of these entrepreneurs made their fortunes in software, but that's only the
newest route to wealth. Richard Branson,
the money man behind Virgin Galactic
and The Spaceship Company, made his own fortune in several other businesses
before he turned his gaze in our direction.
The
mathematics of making money is a lot easier to grasp than physics and
engineering. You don't even have to be particularly good at making money, you
just have to be good at saving it. When Albert Einstein was asked what the
most powerful force in the universe was, he replied, "Compound interest."
Yet
whenever I attend a space convention, the finance track seems to be one of the
least well-attended. Most of the space crowd would rather sit in on another
panel with brand new viewgraphs of exciting new spaceship designs, most of
which will never - never ever - make it off the drawing boards because our
community isn't devoting an equal amount of time and effort to the question of
funding.
A reason
to get rich
If you really
want to get to space, I have a simple suggestion: devote at least half as much
time and study and effort to making yourself wealthy as you give to whatever
else you're doing to get there. It's fine to start small, but start. Add a
subscription or two to business and financial magazines to your subscriptions
to Space News and Ad Astra. Join an investment club. Start
saving money, and look for ways to invest.
It would be
great to have a few more billionaires on the rockethead team, but a few
thousand millionaires will be just as good. Begin planning and working now to
be one of them. Even if you don't wind up with enough money to fund The
Spaceship Company, you just might wind up with enough money to buy a ticket.
Getting
rich(er) isn't just the practical way to get there sooner, it's the morally
right thing to do. This is our dream. We should be the ones to pay for it.
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