I haz space cash.
Look, we’ve known how to get into orbit, and beyond, for a while now. But while our grandpas ran out of science to do up there and were just playing golf on the moon (yawn), modern-day space nerds have other interests: billions and billions in cold, hard, space cash!
Space nerds gotta get PAID. This all started one day when Elon Musk decided it wasn’t enough just to save the whole damn world from carbon emissions by creating Tesla, and put into place a plan to eventually get us off this doomed planet entirely by doing the theretofore unthinkable and founding a private space company that would reduce the costs of spaceflight and one day actually make launches profitable. I’ll let the man speak for himself:
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If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred. A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.
And then, as though Elon almost willed it into existence (just kidding, it took hundreds of engineers and scientists, years of research and development, millions of dollars, a number of unexpected explosions, and lots and lots of math), in March of 2017 SpaceX achieved the very first reflight of an orbital class rocket. On March 30, 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket placed a geosynchronous communications satellite into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, after the first-stage rocketry hardware had been previously used to support a space station cargo resupply mission. A new space age was quietly born.
Elon Musk isn’t the only one working in this space. Less-cool billionaire Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin company come to mind. (Richard Branson’s Virgin also recently took what is apparently a step forward for its small satellite launch program: flying a 747 around with a rocket strapped under its wing.) But the really exciting news this month was the success of the scrappy space company Rocket Lab from a New Zealand launchpad. On November 11, Rocket Lab had its third launch, and this time it successfully lobbed six small satellites into low earth orbit. Pre-SpaceX, Bloomberg reports that the only really viable path to space was through several large organizations backed by governments, with hellish scheduling issues and a price tag of between $150 million and $300 million per flight. SpaceX took the cost down to more like $60 million per flight, on a much shorter timescale. Rocket Lab purportedly charges just $5.7 million per launch. Comparing Rocket Lab’s 56-foot-tall Electron rocket to SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon 9 workhorse, Rocket Lab is still no match for SpaceX when it comes to larger payloads. And SpaceX is itself continuing to cram down the costs of spaceflight, with the historic first-ever third launch for a SpaceX reusable rocket core currently pending. But any way you slice it, it’s an exhilarating time in the development of space technologies, and the pace at which the cost of reaching space is falling is going to open up business in heretofore unreachable parts of the cosmos.
Even our president is getting on board with one of his less-worse ideas! Sure, Space Force is stupid as a name, both as a separate military branch and as an empty slogan to unthinkingly chant at a rally in between taking huffs of paint fumes, but the concept of making wise investments to protect America’s assets in space isn’t at all dumb. Neil deGrasse Tyson says so, and that’s good enough for me.
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Which brings me to my final point: you can’t yet directly invest in these private space companies, as they are not publicly traded, and you can’t yet sign on to serve your country as a Space Force cadet, but as a legal professional, maybe you can get in on the ever-expanding space hype (and the space bucks) nonetheless. Space law is already a thing, to an extent. But like the stale state of rocketry before SpaceX seized the momentum, despite having been around since the 60s, not much has been happening in space law. With outer space increasingly within the reach of business interests, that is going to change.
When Elon Musk was searching for talent, he found one of his chief engineers building a liquid-fueled rocket engine in his garage. The guy was bored and his innovative ideas were unappreciated and ignored in his day job at an old, staid aerospace company. Sound familiar? I hope when lawyers do seriously get into the space game, it’s not the same stodgy old names who are involved in everything else. The law as we know it is built upon precedent, but the legal framework governing asteroid mining or colonizing Mars or a fishing expedition to Europa is going to be unlike anything that has come before. I want to hear legal dreamers thinking about what space law should be, and can be, not the ongoing tired refrain from the legal profession about the way things have always been. If you’re among the lawyers spending your lunch breaks scratching out legal concepts that could govern a one-way extraplanetary expedition (they do still give you breaks to eat in Biglaw, right?), we might need you. SpaceX and Rocket Lab have demonstrated that there is space for disruptors in the space space; now it’s up to you to seize some of it. Dream big. To get your hands on some of that space dinero, you’re going to have to reach up.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].