🚀 My chat (+transcript) with economist Matt Weinzierl on the growing business of space

The space business landscape is changing. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving at breakneck speed toward goals Americans have dreamed of since the 1960s. At the same time, a whole host of smaller startups are arriving on the scene, ready to tackle everything from asteroid mining to next-gen satellites to improved lunar missions.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, I’m talking with Matt Weinzierl about what research developments and market breakthroughs are allowing these companies to thrive.

Weinzierl is the senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program at Harvard Business School. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Weinzierl is the co-author of a new book with Brendan Rosseau, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier.

In This Episode

* Decentralizing space (1:54)

* Blue Origin vs. SpaceX (4:50)

* Lowering launch costs (9:24)

* Expanding space entrepreneurship (14:42)

* Space sector sustainability (20:06)

* The role of Artemis (22:45)

* Challenges to success (25:28)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Decentralizing space (1:54)

. . . we had this amazing success in the ’60s with the Apollo mission . . but it was obviously a very government-led, centralized program and that got us in the mode of thinking that's how you did space.

You’re telling a story about space transitioning from government-led to market-driven, but I wonder if you could just explain that point because it's not a story about privatization, it's a story about decentralization, correct?

It really is, I think the most important thing for listeners to grab onto. In fact, I teach a course at Harvard Business School on this topic, and I've been teaching it now for a few years, and I say to my students, “What's the reason we're here? Why are we talking about space at HBS?” and it's precisely about what you just asked.

So maybe the catchiest way to phrase this for folks, there was one of the early folks at SpaceX, Jim Cantrell, he was one of the earliest employees. He has this amazing quote from the early 2000s where he says, “The Great American Space Enterprise, which defeated Communism in defense of Capitalism, was and is operating on a Soviet economic model.” And he was basically speaking to the fact that we had this amazing success in the ’60s with the Apollo mission and going to the moon and it truly was an amazing achievement, but it was obviously a very government-led, centralized program and that got us in the mode of thinking that's how you did space. And so for the next 50 years, basically we did space in that way run from the center, not really using market forces.

What changed in various ways was that in the early 2000s we decided that model had kind of run its course and the weaknesses were too big and so it was time to bring market forces in. And that doesn't mean that we were getting rid of the government role in space. Just like you said, the government will always play a vital role in space for various reasons, national security among them, but it is decentralizing it in a way to bring the power of the market to bear.

Maybe the low point — and that low point, that crisis, maybe created an opportunity — was the end of the Space Shuttle program. Was that an important inflection point?

It's definitely one that I think most people in the sector look to as being . . . there's the expression “never waste a crisis,” and I think that that's essentially what happened. The Shuttle was an amazing engineering achievement, nobody really doubts that, and what NASA was trying to do with it and with their contractors was incredibly hard. So it's easy to kind of get too negative on that era, but it is also true that the Shuttle never really performed the way people hoped, it never flew as often, it was much more costly, and then in 2003 there was the second Shuttle tragedy.

When that happened, I think everybody felt like, "This just isn't the future." So we need something else, and the Shuttle program was put on a cancellation path by the end of that decade. That really did force this reckoning with the fact that the American space sector, which had put men on the moon and brought them back safely in 1969, launching all sorts of dreams about space colonies and hotels, now, 40 years later, it was going to be unable to even put a person into orbit on its own rockets. We were going to be renting rockets from the Russians. That was really a moment of soul searching, I guess is one way you think about it in the sector.

Blue Origin vs. SpaceX (4:50)

I guess the big lesson . . . is that competition really does matter in space just like in any other business.

I think naturally we would lead into talking about SpaceX, which we certainly will do, but the main competitor, Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos company, which seems to be moving forward, but it's definitely seemed to have adopted a very different kind of strategy. It seems to me different than the SpaceX strategy, which really is kind of a “move fast, break things, build them back up and try to launch again” while Blue Origin is far more methodical. Am I right in that, is that eventually going to work?

Blue Origin is a fascinating company. In fact, we actually opened the book — the book is a series, basically, of stories that we tell about companies, and people, and government programs, sprinkled in with some economics because we can't resist. We're trying to structure it for folks, but we start with the story of Blue Origin because it really is fascinating. It illustrates some really fundamental aspects of the sector these days.

To your specific question, we can talk more about Blue in many of its aspects. The motto of Blue from its beginning has been this Latin phrase, gradatim ferociter or, “step-by-step, ferociously,” and Bezos in the earliest days, they even have a tortoise on their company shield, so to speak, to signal this tortoise and the hair metaphor or fable. From the earliest days the idea was, “Look, we're going to just methodically work our way up to these grand visions of building infrastructure for space,” eventually in the service of having, as they always said, millions of people living and working in space.

Now there's various ways to interpret the intervening 20 years that we've had, or 25 now since they were founded. One interpretation says, well, that's a nice story, but in fact they made some decisions that caused them to move more slowly than even they would've wanted to. So they didn't continue working as closely with NASA as, say, for instance SpaceX did. They relied really almost exclusively on funding from Bezos himself issuing a lot of other contracts they could have gotten, and that sort of reduced the amount of external discipline and market competition that they were facing. And then they made some other steps along the way, and so now they're trying to reignite and move faster, and they did launch New Glenn, their orbital rocket, recently. So they're back in the game and they're coming back. That's one story.

Another story is, well yes, they've made decisions that at the time didn't seem to move as fast as they wanted, but they made those decisions intentionally. This is a strategy we will see pay off pretty well in the long run. I think that the jury is very much still out, but I guess the big lesson for your listeners and for me and hopefully for others in the sector, is that competition really does matter in space just like in any other business. To the extent that Blue didn't move as fast because they didn't face as much competition, that's an interesting lesson for the private sector. And to the extent that now they're in the game nipping at the heels of SpaceX, that's good for everybody, even for SpaceX, I think, to have them in the game.

Do you think they're nipping at the heels?

Well, yeah, I was just thinking as I said that, that might have been a little optimistic. It really does depend how you look at it. SpaceX is remarkably dominant in the commercial space sector, there's no question there. They launch 100 times a year plus and they are . . . the latest statistic I have in 2023, they launched more than 80 percent of all the mass launched off the surface of Earth, so they run more than half the satellites that are operational in space. They are incredibly dominant such that concerns about monopoly are quite present in the sector these days. We can talk about that.

I think “nipping at the heels” might be a little generous, although there are areas in which SpaceX still does have real competition. The national security launch sector, ULA (United Launch Alliance) is still the majority launcher of national security missions and Blue is looking to also get into the national security launch market. With Amazon's satellite constellation, Kuiper, starting to come into the launch cadence over the next couple of years, they will have demand for lots of launch outside of SpaceX and that will start to increase the frequency with which Blue Origin and ULA also launch. So I think there is reason to believe that people in the sector will have more options, even for the heavy-lift launch vehicles.

Lowering launch costs (9:24)

[SpaceX] brought the cost of getting a kilogram of mass into orbit down by 90 percent in less than, really 10 or 15 years, which had been a stagnant number for going on four or five decades.

People in Silicon Valley like talking about disruption and disruptors. It's hard to think of a company that is more deserving, or A CEO more deserving than Elon Musk and SpaceX. Tell me how disruptive that company has been to how we think about space and the economic potential of space.

We open our chapter in the book on SpaceX by saying we believe it'll go down as one of the most important companies in the history of humanity, and I really do believe that. I don't think you have to be a space enthusiast, necessarily, to believe it. The simplest way to summarize that is that they brought the cost of getting a kilogram of mass into orbit down by 90 percent in less than, really 10 or 15 years, which had been a stagnant number for going on four or five decades. It had hovered around — depending on the data point you look at — around $30,000 a kilogram to low earth orbit, and once SpaceX got Falcon 9 flying, it was down to $3,000. That's just an amazing reduction.

What's also amazing about it is they didn't stop there. As soon as they had that, they decided that one of the ways to make the business model work was to reinvent satellite internet. So in a sector that had just over a decade ago only 1000 operational satellites up in space, now we have 10,000, 6,000 plus of which are SpaceX's Starlink, just an incredibly fast-growing transformational technology in orbit.

And then they went on to disrupt their own disruption by creating a rocket called Starship, which is just absolutely massive in a way that's hard to even imagine, and that, if it fulfills the promise that I think everyone hopes it will, will bring launch costs down, if you can believe it, by another 90 percent, so a total of 99 percent down to, say, $300 a kilogram. Now you may not have to pass those cost savings on to the customers because they don't have a lot of competition, but it's just amazing

What's possible with those launch costs in that vicinity? Sometimes, when I try to describe it, I'm like, well, imagine all your 1960s space dreams and what was the missing ingredient? The missing ingredient was the economics and those launch costs. Now plug in those launch costs and lots of crazy things that seem science-fictional may become science-factual. Maybe give me just a sense of what's possible.

Well first tell me, Jim, which of the ’60s space dreams are you most excited about?

It's hard for me, it's like which of my seven kids do I love more? I love the idea of people living in space, of there being industry in space. I like the idea of there being space-based solar power, lunar mining, asteroid mining, the whole kit and caboodle.

You've gone through the list. I think we're all excited about those things. And just in case it's not obvious to your listeners, the reason I think you asked that question is that, of course, the launch cost is the gateway to doing anything in space. That's why everyone in the industry makes such a big deal out of it. Once you have that, it seems like the possibilities for business cases really do expand.

Now, of course, we have to be careful. It's easy to get overhyped. It's still very expensive to do all the things you just mentioned in space, even if you can get there cheaply. Once you put humans in the mix, humans are very hard to keep alive in space. Space is a very dangerous place for lots of reasons. Even when there aren't humans in space, operating in space, even autonomously, is obviously quite hard, whether it's asteroid mining or other things. It's not as though, all of a sudden, all of our biggest dreams are immediately going to be realized. I do think that part of what's so exciting, part of the reason we wrote the book, is that there is a new renaissance of enthusiasm of startups building a bit on the SpaceX model of having a big dream, being really cost-conscious as you build it, moving fast and experimenting and iterating, who are going after some of these dreams you mentioned.

.So whether it's an asteroid mining company — actually, in my course later this week, we're having Matt Gialich, who's the CEO of AstroForge, and they're trying to reboot the asteroid mining industry. He's coming in to talk to our students. Or whether it's lunar mining, we have Rob Meyerson who ran Blue Origin for more than a decade, now he’s started up a company that's going to mine Helium 3 on the moon; or whether you're talking about commercial space stations, which could eventually house tourists, manufacturing, R&D, a whole new push to bring the cost savings from the launch sector into the destinations sector, which we really haven't had.

We've had the International Space Station for 20 plus years, but it wasn't really designed for commercial activity from the start and costs are pretty high. So there is this amazing flowering, and we'll see. I guess I would say that, in the short run, if you're trying to build a business in space, it's still mostly about satellites. It's still mostly about data to and from space. But as we look out further, we all hope that those bigger dreams are becoming more of a reality.

Expanding space entrepreneurship (14:42)

The laws of supply and demand do not depend on gravity.

To me, it is such an exciting story and the story of these companies, they're just great stories to me. They're still, I think, pretty unknown. SpaceX, if you read the books that have been published, very harrowing, the whole thing could have collapsed quite easily. Still today, when the media covers — I think they're finally getting better —that anytime there'd be a SpaceX rocket blow up, they're like, “Oh, that’s it! Musk doesn't know what he's doing!” But actually, that's the business, is to iterate, launch again, if it blows up, figure out what went wrong, use the data, fix it, try again. It’s taken a long time.

To the extent people or the media think about it, maybe 90 percent of the thought is about SpaceX, a little bit about Blue Origin, but, as you mentioned, there is this, no pun intended, constellation of other companies which have grown up, which have somewhat been enabled by the launch costs. Which one? Give me one of those that you think people should know about.

There's so many actually, very much to your point. We wrote the book partly to give folks inside the industry a view they might not have had, which is, I'm an economist. We thought there was room to just show people how an economist thinks through this amazing change that's happening.

Economics is not earthbound! It extends above the surface of the planet!

The laws of supply and demand do not depend on gravity. We've learned that. But we also wrote the book for a couple other groups of people. One, people who are kind of on the margins of space, so their business isn't necessarily involved in space, but once they know all the activity that's happening, including the companies you're hinting at there, they might think, “Wait a minute, maybe my business, or I personally, could actually use some of the new capabilities in space to drive my mission forward to have an impact through my organization or myself.” And then of course the broader population of people who are just excited and want to learn more about what's going on and read some great stories.

But I'll give you two companies, maybe three because I can't help myself. One is Firefly, which just landed successfully on the moon . . . 24 hours ago maybe? What a great story. It's now the second lander that's successfully landed, this one fully successfully after Intuitive Machines was a little bit tipped over, but that's a great example of how this model that includes more of a role for the commercial sector succeeds not all the time — the first lunar lander in the program that was supporting these didn't quite succeed — but try, try again. That's the beauty of markets, they find a way often and you can't exactly predict how they're going to work out. But that was a huge success story and so I’m very excited about what that means for our activity on the moon.

Another really fascinating company is called K2. A lot of your listeners who follow space will have heard of it. It's two brothers who basically realized that, with the drop in launch costs being promised by Starship, the premium on building lightweight small satellites is kind of going away. We can go back to building big satellites again and maybe we don't need to always make the sacrifices that engineers have had to make to bring the mass down. So they're building much bigger satellites and that can potentially really increase the capabilities even still at low cost. So that's really exciting.

Finally, I'll just mention Varda, which is a really fun and exciting startup that is doing manufacturing in automated capsules right now of pharmaceutical ingredients. What I love about them, very much to your point about these startups that are just flowering because of lower launch costs, they're not positioning themselves really as a space company. They're positioning themselves as a manufacturing company that happens to use microgravity to do it cheaper. So you don't have to be a space enthusiast to want your supply chain to be cheaper and they're part of that.

Do you feel like we have a better idea of why there should be commercial space stations, or again, is that still in the entrepreneurial process of figuring it out? Once they're up there, business cases will emerge?

I was just having a conversation about that this morning, actually, with some folks in the sector because there is a wide range of views about that. It is, as you were sort of implying, a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, it's hard to know until you have a space station what you might do with it, what business cases might result. On the other hand, it's hard to invest in a space station if you don't know what the business case is for doing it. So it is a bit tricky.

I tend to actually be slightly on the optimistic end of the spectrum, perhaps just because, as an economist, I think you are trained to know that the market can't be predicted and that at some level that is the beauty of the market. If we drive down costs, there's a ton of smart entrepreneurs out there who I think will be looking very hard to find value that they can create for people, and I'm still optimistic we'll be surprised.

If I had to make the other side of the case, I would say that we've been dreaming about using microgravity for many decades, the ISS has been trying, and there hasn't been a killer app quite found yet. So it is very true that there are reasons to be skeptical despite my optimism.

Space sector sustainability (20:06)

Space does face a sort of structural problem with investing. The venture capital industry is not really built for the time horizons and the level of fundamental uncertainty that we're talking about with space.

It’s also a sector that's gone through a lot of booms and busts. That certainly has been the case with the idea of asteroid mining among other things. What do you see as the sustainability? I sort of remember Musk talking about there was this kind of “open window to space,” and I don't know what he thought opened that window, maybe it was low interest rates? What is the sustainability of the financial case for this entire sector going forward?

It is true that the low interest rate environment of the early 2020s was really supportive to space in a way that. Again, opinions vary on whether it was so hot that it ended up actually hurting the sector by creating too much hype, and then some people lost their shirts, and so there was some bad taste in the mouth there.

On the other hand, it got a lot of cash to a lot of companies that are trying to make really hard things happen. Space does face a sort of structural problem with investing. The venture capital industry is not really built for the time horizons and the level of fundamental uncertainty that we're talking about with space. We don't really know what the market is yet. We don't really know how long it's going to take to develop. So that's I think why you see some of these more exotic financing models in space, whether it's the billionaires or the so-called SPAC boom of the early 2020s, which was an alternative way for some space companies to go public and raise a big pile of cash. So I think people are trying to solve for how to get over what might be an uncomfortably long time before the kind of sustainable model that you're talking about is realized.

Now, skeptics will say, “Well, maybe that's just because there is no sustainable model. We're hoping and hoping, but it's going to take 500 years.” I'm a little more optimistic than that for reasons we've talked about, but I think one part we haven't really mentioned, or at least not gone into that yet, which is reassuring to investors that I talked to and increasingly maybe an important piece of the puzzle, is the demand from the public sector, which remains quite robust, especially from the national security side. A lot of startups these days, even when capital markets are a bit tighter, they can rely on some relatively stable financing from the national security side, and I think that will always be there in space. There will always be a demand for robust, innovative technologies and capabilities in space that will help sustain the sector even through tough times.

The role of Artemis (22:45)

Artemis is a really good example of the US space enterprise, broadly speaking, trying to find its way into this new era, given all the political and other constraints that are, of course, going to impinge on a giant government program.

I can imagine a scenario where most of this book is about NASA, and Artemis, and what comes after Artemis, and you devote one chapter to the weird kind of private-sector startups, but actually it's just the opposite. The story here is about what's going on with the private sector working with NASA and Artemis seems like this weird kind of throwback to old Apollo-style way of doing things. Is Artemis an important technology for the future of space or is it really the last gasp of an old model?

It's a very timely question because obviously with all the change going on in Washington and especially with Elon's role —

Certainly you always hear rumors that they'll cancel it. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I certainly see speculations pop-up in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times from time to time.

Exactly, and you probably see debates in Congress where you see some Congress-people resistant to canceling some contracts and debates about the space launch system, the SLS rocket, which I think nobody denies is sort of an older model of how we're going to get to space. On the other hand, it's an incredibly powerful rocket that can actually get us to the moon right now.

There's a lot of debate going on right now. The way I think about it is that Artemis is a really good example of the US space enterprise, broadly speaking, trying to find its way into this new era, given all the political and other constraints that are, of course, going to impinge on a giant government program. It's a mix of the old and the new. It's got some pieces like SLS or Gateway, which is a sort of station orbiting the moon to provide a platform for various activities that feel very much like the model from the 1980s: Shuttle and International Space Station.

Then it's got pieces that feel very much like the more modern commercial space era with the commercial lunar payload services clips contracts that we were briefly talking about before, and with some of the other pieces that are — whether it's the lander that's also using commercial contracts, whether it's those pieces that are trying to bring in the new. How will it all shake out? My guess is that we are moving, I think inexorably, towards the model that really does tap into the best of the private sector, as well as of the public, and so I think we'll move gradually towards a more commercial approach, even to achieving the sort of public goods missions on the moon — but it'll take a little bit of time because people are naturally risk averse.

Challenges to success (25:28)

We're going to have some setbacks, some things aren't going to go well with this new model. There's going to be, I'm sure, some calls for pulling back on the commercial side of things, and I think that would be a real lost opportunity. . .

How do we not screw this up? How do we not end up undermining this momentum? If you want to tell me what we can do, that's great, but I'm also worried about us making a mistake?

There are threats to our ability to do this successfully. I'll just name two which are top of mind. One is space debris. That comes up in virtually every conversation I have. Especially with the increasing number of satellites, increasing number of actors in space, you do have to worry that we might lose control of that environment. Again, I am on the relatively more optimistic end of the spectrum for reasons we explain in the book, and I think the bottom line there is: The stakes are pretty high for everybody who's operating up there to not screw that part up, so I hope we'll get past it, but some people are quite worried.

The second, honestly, is national security. Space has always been a beacon, we hope, of transcending our geopolitical rivalries, not just extending them up there. We're in a difficult time, so I think there is some risk that space will not remain as peaceful as it has — and that could very much short-circuit the kind of growth that we're talking about. Sadly, that would be very ironic because the economic opportunities that we have up there to create benefit for everybody on Earth and are part of what hopefully would bring people together across borders up in space. It's one of those places where we can cooperate for the common good.

How could we screw this up? I think it's not always going to be smooth sailing. We're going to have some setbacks, some things aren't going to go well with this new model. There's going to be, I'm sure, some calls for pulling back on the commercial side of things, and I think that would be a real lost opportunity. I hope that we can push our way through, even though it might be a little less clearly charted.

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