TOC on Rutan:

Report from the Front
September 29, 2004

Private Space Triumph
By Edward Hudgins
Washington Director
www.ObjectivistCenter.org
ehudgins@objectivistrcenter.org
Editor, "Space: The Free-Market Frontier" (Cato Institute book)

Private entrepreneurs again have triumphed! On September 29 SpaceShipOne, built
by Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites and financed by Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen, completed it's first flight in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X
Prize. This money was secured by private individuals to be paid to the first
private party to put into space twice in a two-week period a craft capable of
carrying three individuals. Rutan's rocket had its first test flight over the
100-kilometer limit on June 21 and with the success of the latest launch the
clock is now running to see if his ship can do it again in a fortnight.

If Rutan's company wins the prize the public's view of space will be irrevocably
altered. Instead of thinking of space as a wasteful government program, more
people will see it as a place to which individuals can travel (and -- in the
future -- work, study, vacation and live) through the efforts of private
enterprise. But already changes are taking place.

As extraordinary as the flights has been the news coverage of those flights.
From Nightline to network news to cable the coverage has been positive and
reporters have played the story straight. To begin with the profit motive has
not been portrayed as something low and base that somehow "cheapens" any
achievement. Rather, most coverage mentions the $25,000 Orteig Prize that
Charles Lindbergh won when in 1927 he became the first individual to fly
non-stopped across the Atlantic and treats cash prizes as a sound way to create
competition and innovation. Reports mention that Rutan wants to expand his
pioneering efforts into a business to carry individuals into space and that
Richard Branson, the British pioneer who runs the successful Virgin Atlantic
airlines, plans to partner with Rutan and Allen and to provide flights into
space for some 3,000 individuals in the next five years.

Further, the private entrepreneurs are treated as true innovators, with a
special focus on their novel and cost-effective vehicle designs - products of
human reason. As important, similar treatment is accorded to Peter Diamandis,
the president of the X-Prize Foundation, whose vision is sparking a private
sector revolution.

There also seems to be a special appreciation for the fact that the competitors
for the prize are risking their own money and their own lives, with no guarantee
of success, because they so passionately want to achieve something great. And
here the reporters seem to share with their audience a thirst for the sight of
human achievement, something that they can simply celebrate rather than sneer
at.

Even if Rutan were to fail to win the X Prize, one of the two-dozen competitors
likely will triumph, with pride and rationality in pursuit of profits, and in
the process help make us a true space-faring civilization!

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The Objectivist Center is a national not-for-profit think tank promoting the
values of reason, individualism, freedom and achievement in American culture.
For more information, please visit www.ObjectivistCenter.org.

Update: let me add some brilliant comments from Glen Reynolds' TCS column:

It's probably no coincidence that we made rapid progress in space back when the attitude was "win at all costs," and that our progress slowed down drastically once the attitude became "no mistakes allowed."

You don't want to risk people's lives, or expensive equipment, foolishly, of course. But we often learn the most from trying projects that stretch our knowledge and capabilities, not from playing it safe. And, at any rate, the urge to play it safe usually doesn't come from concerns about protecting people or equipment, but from concerns about protecting bureaucrats from criticism.
...
I expect that SpaceShipOne will be successful, whether or not it's on schedule. And I wouldn't be surprised if several of the X-Prize competitors manage to fly successfully, even though only one can win the prize. I also expect that even those who don't win will demonstrate technologies and approaches that someone else is likely to find useful.

It's hard to structure government programs so that they produce this kind of an effect, and even harder to maintain them in the face of a political and media environment when learning from failure is seen as indistinguishable from failure alone. But in all sorts of areas -- from space and jet aviation in the 1950s and 1960s, to computers in the 1970s and 1980s, to the X-Prize today -- it seems that we make faster progress when we have lots of parallel efforts, with freedom to experiment, and to fail. Sometimes we got that sort of thing within a government program; other times it happened outside. But it seems to be an important formula for success. That's something we might want to keep in mind.