Glenn Reynolds recently published a handy pamphlet on America’s New Destiny in Space. Although longer than a magazine article, the tract benefits from his easy writing style, is a quick read, and packs a lot in. He offers insights for both the current moment and the future.
Command economies. In his quick tour through the history of space travel, from what he calls the visionary era of Goddard and Tsiolkovsky through the command economies of the Apollo and Shuttle programs to the current blossoming of entrepreneurial space, he makes a particularly pithy point about the command economy. Even though the command economy phase of government-funded programs showed the visionaries’ concepts could be brought to life, it was an expensive phase. And thus not sustainable:
Sold as a way of making spaceflight routine and inexpensive, [the Shuttle program] failed at both, winding up fragile and more costly. The entire Apollo/Space Shuttle space program was a species of command economy and though command economies have their virtues, they don’t hold up well over time. (A command economy is sort of like using steroids for a body builder–everybody “oohs” and “aahs” over the visible muscles that pop up, but nobody sees the shrinking national testicles underneath.)
Now, however, we have commercial space, and with it the hope that it will birth what Reynolds calls the sustainability era. That’s because commercialization will make space affordable for the rest of us.
Space colonization. I truly appreciate one observation he makes about the term “space colonization.” Occasionally, I hear of folks finding it objectionable on historical grounds. It’s probably those same people who now object to the innocuous “space settlement.” I have long puzzled over this concern. Surely, the damage of colonization was because somebody suffered from it? Our solar system appears to house no sentient beings outside of Earth. We haven’t even yet found proof of life. Reynolds breezes through this faux morass with one trenchant point:
While there may be no space colonizers, there will be no space colonized because, unless we make a truly startling discovery, there will be no native inhabitants to exploit.
Policy. Both the Obama and Trump administrations, Reynolds says, have provided good policy oversight for commercial space. He recommends expanding the government’s role as a customer so that the U.S. government isn’t “buying or building spaceships but purchasing launch services from people who do.” He approves of the pressure for minimal regulation (and is perhaps a tad more optimistic than I am that we’re achieving the minimum). He also likes the space prizes modeled on the one Charles Lindbergh won for his flight across the Atlantic, noting that the biggest prize of all is the official U.S. recognition of property rights.
Spiritual case. Most importantly, Reynolds makes the spiritual case for the benefits of a frontier on the American and human psyche. He does it so swiftly and beautifully that I would not do it justice if I were to attempt a summary. I must, instead, heartily recommend reading it yourself to feel uplifted, inspired, and invigorated to get out there and do more of what you’re doing to get to space.
They want nine dollars for a fifty-0ne page pamphlet on Kindle? No way am I going to pay that.
I’ve heard of Encounter Books before. I may even have bought from them sometime or other. Seeing that they make such stupid pricing decisions makes me much less likely to ever buy from them. Just as paperbacks are significantly lower priced than hardcovers, Kindle versions should be significantly lower priced than paperbacks. Any publishing company that can’t figure that out deserves to go out of business.
The price of a good or service is whatever someone is willing and able to pay. If this is more than the cost of the product, the producer makes a profit. When setting the pricing, cost does come into play but so does whether or not people are willing and able to pay for the product. Traditional publishing have established prices people are willing to pay for a book. This is why you see such a wide variety of e-book prices and not a traditional hierarchy based on materials.
Is $9 too much for an e-book? The market says no. Is it too much for a 50 page e-book? Possibly.
Whether the book sells 50 copies or 500,000 most of the costs are the same but they need to make a reasonable guess at sales at different price points to cover their costs and turn a profit.
I found the review to be as concise as Reynold’s writing and that last paragraph has me thinking that I need to read the book but perhaps I will wait for a sale.