Two themes dominated the story of the first American pioneers who ventured into space. The first was the remarkable bravery and heroism that the world’s first generation of space explorers displayed in breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravitational force, both literally and figuratively. The second was the national character of the endeavor.

　　The men who first ventured into space were no mere mortals. The late Tom Wolfe has mostly slipped out of our consciousness, but perhaps no author could better capture and articulate the zeitgeist of the space age. In his first major book, The Right Stuff, he tried to explain the early participants in America’s space program. Virtually all of them began as military test pilots, who had mortality rates that were frankly terrifying. The first few chapters of the novel discuss the experiences of Pete Conrad’s wife, Jane, living with the constant fear of her husband’s death as he pursued a career as a military test pilot.

　　Wolfe explains to his readers in graphic detail the gruesome, sudden, and frequent deaths that test pilots suffered during this era. He notes that during bad stretches, squadrons of these aviators would sometimes experience more than 20 percent death rates due to crashes and malfunctions as they consciously tried to “push the envelope” of the performance limitations of their new aircraft. They were thrill seekers and socialized exclusively together because virtually no other living people could understand the risks they were taking and the constant looming specter of sudden death. It was so common they had a tradition: when one died the others would don their bridge coats—a heavily decorated, ornate, aristocratic jacket —and wear them to the funerals of their fallen comrades. It was a ritual to honor bravery and sacrifice that few of us are drawn to, but collectively, we all need people to do it.

　　Those early Apollo astronauts were selected from this group partially because they were deemed to be the best pilots and also because they did not fear the enormous risks associated with strapping oneself on top of a large collection of explosives and doing something humans had scarcely dreamt of doing for millennia—traveling to the stars. It took extraordinary skill, real courage, and a very distinct personality to assume those risks and pursue those goals.

　　The second theme was that space exploration was a national endeavor, promoted by politicians, funded and researched by governments staffed by those modern-day warriors and demigods whom Wolfe unveiled and made real. Locked in a Cold War and fueled by the excessive military capacity the US still carried after World War II and continued to fund in our armaments race with the USSR, America set its sights on going to the moon to “beat” the Russians and establish our scientific and marshal superiority over our competitors. It was a pursuit of national greatness and pride.

　　That success in being the first nation to make it to the moon—and again it was not an individual accomplishment but rather the work of a community—galvanized the country around the engineers and scientists at NASA along with the brave, courageous souls who piloted those rockets, including those who died in testing and accidents along the way. It was an adventure that we could share as Americans.

　　Now, space seems very different, both in terms of the who and the why. While we are not engaged in a hot war directly against Russia, neither government has the interest or capacity to begin another space race. Rather, the two countries still weirdly share some international space goals. Recently, American and Russian astronauts traveled together into space because of problems with America’s new planned space vehicle designed by Boeing, the company that makes airplane doors with minds of their own and engines that mostly work.

　　The stars lost their luster as the national attention span shifted to more urgent issues.

　　While NASA isn’t as controversial as, say, the Department of Education or the CDC, at the moment it is hardly the revered institution that put Americans on the moon. Part of the shine came off NASA when the Challenger exploded after liftoff in 1986, killing its crew, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Then the shuttle Columbia had a heat shield failure in 2003 which killed all seven of its crew. Since those tragedies, the agency has seen its funding cut and its mission meander. Space slipped out of the national consciousness, along with the institutions that took us there. The military seemed to refocus on fighting here on Earth and pilots were replaced by Navy Seals hunting down Osama Bin Laden. The stars lost their luster as the national attention span shifted to more urgent issues.

　　And then, slowly, the focus began to return to outer space, but it was not the government who pointed us there. Nor was it heroic individuals risking their lives to travel to other planets. No, it was engineers, people of science, and geeks, some of whom had made billions in tech and other businesses. As the private sector replaces government monopolies over communication (remember Ma Bell’s monopoly or the necessity of the USPS?) and people flee public schools for private options and homeschooling, we have seen the same phenomenon in space. The nerdy engineers who can comprehend the challenges of space travel, as well as glimpse the commercial possibilities, are now the driving force behind the next space boom.

　　Although the engineers still haven’t quite achieved the mythical hero status of the first generation of American astronauts, they are making progress. On October 13, the space exploration company owned by the never-dull Elon Musk performed one of the most remarkable, borderline magical things most of us have ever witnessed, as long as you don’t let your political or personal views of him distort your perception. A tower equipped with mechanical fingers (or chopsticks, claws, or whatever term you prefer) caught a solid rocket booster from a SpaceX launch and placed it safely on the ground, where it could be reconditioned and used again.

　　Publicly, Musk has said that his substantial investments in space technology are to achieve a plausible human colony on Mars. But he has also invested heavily in this business because he knows he can make money doing it. Shooting satellites into space is something for which both the public and private sectors pay good money. Musk himself has a satellite Internet business that his space business supports in the short term, and the government contracts he can get by serving as a reliable alternative to NASA/Boeing have made the business profitable and highly valued by market analysts who can envision a lucrative future for a company that can reuse rockets and transport increasingly large payloads into orbit.

　　And Musk is not the only billionaire getting into the space business.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and serial entrepreneur Richard Branson are also developing space travel vehicles.Bezos spoke to Lex Fridman about why he started a space company. His explanation was that he and all of the other tech gazillionaires have made their fortunes on the Internet infrastructure that many tech pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s built through their efforts and investments. At least for himself, that’s his purpose, to make space commercially viable for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Rather than a “Bond villain” model of developing space travel, Bezos believes he’s building the new Internet.

　　But how quickly costs will come down and allow other small-scale entrepreneurs to take advantage of their groundbreaking work is pure speculation at this point. Compared to NASA during the days of the Apollo moon missions and later the Space Shuttle, costs have dropped from tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to SpaceX’s costs at about $1,500 per kilogram. The business model emphasizes reusable rockets that are much less expensive to build. While Musk himself has a stated goal of lowering costs to $10 per kilogram, a market analysis by Citibank from 2022 estimates that costs will probably be somewhere between $30 and $300 per kilogram each launch depending on how durable the reusable rockets turn out to be. Nonetheless, that is a remarkable decline in costs.

　　But is this a good way for billionaires to be using their wealth? Is it preferable to investing their wealth here on Earth in so-called “noble causes”? The critique of private space companies by many on the left is frequently that those billions could be better spent helping the poor or other philanthropic goals. Of course, the Hayekian answer to that question is we don’t know. Predictions about outcomes based on investments are speculative, but there are two points in favor of the space billionaires overusing public money in the pursuit of opening up space. First, the billionaires have track records building successful institutions and seeing market opportunities. That doesn’t mean private sector investment is always right—take the Segway as a good example of that. But they have done it before.

　　The second reason is that private money is much more agile and responsive than public money. When space exploration is driven by private actors and investors rather than bureaucrats, market signals will be received by people with a vested interest in acting upon them. Bezos, Musk, and Branson have experience with building on successes and ending failures. Bureaucracies rarely die and aren’t nearly as innovative as the private sector.

　　Where will all this investment in space lead? Can we compare this kind of leap forward to the breakthroughs when railroads could transport goods across countries or ships over the vast oceans? It opens up new, unimaginable possibilities and opportunities for exploration and commercial growth. This isn’t merely about living on Mars, it’s about how to leverage the commercial needs of the Earth with the unknown opportunities that space will almost certainly provide.

　　A skeptic might reasonably ask if this new space race will generate anything like the enormous sense of national pride that NASA created during the Apollo days.

　　Whether you think of Musk as a Bond villain or a hero, he is almost certainly something far more practical and single-minded: he’s a serial entrepreneur. He sees market opportunities and, as his wealth expands, he takes larger risks and pushes boundaries. All of his large bets are still peanuts compared to what Chuck Yeager and John Glenn did. But make no mistake, all of them will be large parts of the histories of space travel that will be written in the future—a future that government agencies could never imagine or nations fully control.

　　A skeptic might reasonably ask if this new space race will generate anything like the enormous sense of national pride that NASA created during the Apollo days. It’s important to remember that today a significant portion of the population does not view the nation favorably. It might be a lot to ask of private space companies, run by recently active political allies of President Trump, to help unify the nation.

　　Even though America and its military heroes are no longer leading us into space during some costly competition with a foreign rival, Americans, individually as entrepreneurs and innovators, are leading the way into space instead. While intellectuals, college faculty, and media talking heads may not be proud of the nation or its economic model that has created the wealth to get us here, most Americans still are. Those individuals will view SpaceX and Blue Origin as signs of America’s continuing international leadership. The stunning success of America’s social and economic model has created the conditions for this new space adventure. I think that speaks volumes to what is very much right and better about our country now than it was in the ’60s and ’70s. Our economic growth model has created what promises to be a remarkable future and one that continues to show what wealth creation and imagination can build. The era of national control over space is over. What we and future generations will do in space is a story we will write ourselves.