Aviation contributes $1.5 trillion—more than 5%—to the national economy. (Federal Aviation Administration, “The Economic Impact of Civil Aviation on the U.S. Economy,” June 2014)
Read MoreThe space industry generates more than $300 billion in revenue, an amount that continues to grow 5% to 15% a year.
Read MoreFor every dollar spent on space, the knowledge ore brings back as much as $8. And that’s not counting the 65,000 jobs created by the space program.
Read MoreSeeing the overall mission as one of conquering and then escaping the Gravity Well lets us focus also on the need to settle as well as explore. It is this connection that makes this investment so practically valuable for everyday citizens.
Read MoreTo regain our competitive leadership, we need to build our economy on something new, using a quality and degree of expertise no other nation has obtained. What could that new economic engine be? And are we capable of creating it?
We have a brilliant precedent: the flying machine.
Read MoreAs a rule of thumb, ten pounds of rocket fuel are required to push one pound of equipment or human into low Earth orbit.
Read MoreMost of today’s space economy occupies low Earth orbit, a 1,200-mile-wide band that’s a slice of less than one one-thousandth of the Gravity Well.
Read MoreThe risks in space are socialized while the rewards are privatized, a famous economist argues. We taxpayers bear the risks, and private companies reap the rewards.
Read MoreIn 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an influential paper declaring that American-style democracy, a radical reinvention of the classically inspired republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers, had been created by the expanding frontier. Turner could not realize that, ten years after he wrote his thesis, the Wright brothers would enter a new frontier of an entirely different dimension: the air.
