Space, the Final Economic Frontier
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4028919 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew Weinzierl (Matthew Weinzierl is Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts., corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 173-192 |
| Publication date | 2018-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0895-3309 • E-ISSN: 1944-7965 |
| Publisher | American Economic Association (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1257/jep.32.2.173 |
| OpenAlex | W2802077611 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 21 |
| References cited | 15 |
After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and US policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. NASA garnered more than 0.7 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, but is only around 0.1 percent of GDP today. Meanwhile, space has become big business, with $300 billion in annual revenue. The shift from public to private priorities in space is especially significant because a widely shared goal among commercial space's leaders is the achievement of a large-scale, largely self-sufficient, developed space economy. Jeff Bezos, has stated that the mission of his firm Blue Origin is "millions of people living and working in space." Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has laid out plans to build a city of a million people on Mars within the next century. Both Neil deGrasse Tyson and Peter Diamandis have been given credit for stating that Earth's first trillionaire will be an asteroid-miner. Such visions are clearly not going to become reality in the near future. But detailed roadmaps to them are being produced and recent progress in the required technologies has been dramatic. If such space-economy visions are even partially realized, the implications for society will be enormous. Though economists should treat the prospect of a developed space economy with healthy skepticism, it would be irresponsible to treat it as science fiction. In this article, I provide an analytical framework-based on classic economic analysis of the role of government in market economies-for understanding and managing the development of the space economy
Commercialization · Economics · Frontier · Political science · Revenue · Skepticism · Sociology · Space exploration · Space Policy · Vision · Defense, Military, and Policy Studies · Economic Growth and Productivity · Engineering · Law · Space exploration and regulation · Finance
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Space Tourism - Between Competition and Cooperation of States and Non-State Entities
Settling New Frontiers
Strategic Entry Deterrence in a Finite Orbital Environment
A PIE analysis of China’s commercial space development
An Interplanetary Transplantation , Or, Reloading the Anthropocene on the Red Planet
The complexity of entrepreneurial ecosystem evolution and new venture policy
The privatization of space
The billionaire space race
Dispossession through collision
Market-based instruments to incentivize more sustainable practices in outer space
Eine zukunftsfähige deutsche Raumfahrt“
The organizational ecology of the global space industry
Orbital debris and the market for satellites
Orbital congestion and satellite broadband competition
Space Junk Ethics
A Power Elite Alliance and Local Environmental Policy
Advocacy Coalitions and the Evolution of U.S. Space Policy
Building a space entrepreneurship industry
Space tourism in the Anthropocene
From Value to Valuation
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |