 The dynamism of the emerging private space industry, with its eye-popping aircraft designs and new approaches to launch, is rejuvenating excitement around space travel. Once monopolized by a budget-busting federal bureaucracy, the new leaders in space are wealthy philanthropists with boyhood dreams of space flight, as well as entrepreneurs who believe they can make money selling tickets to the edge of space. Admittedly, when Reason first declared the dawn of private ventures in space, we were off by a number of years. But in the last decade, tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos have been working through costly failures and lengthy experiments to arrive at workable approaches to a commercial service. In 2019, investors poured a record $5.8 billion into hundreds of space ventures. Unless you take big risks, you'll not invent anything new. You'll not have breakthroughs. A pioneer in private space travel, Bert Rutan is a renegade aerospace engineer whose unconventional risk-taking designs redefined what a spacecraft could look like. Rutan, who was the winner of Reason Foundation's 2019 Savas Prize for Privatization, designed Spaceship One, the first reusable manned craft to reach space not underwritten by the government. How many aircraft have you designed and built? Okay, I've designed 391 now. I've built and flight tested 49. Five of Rutan's aircraft now hang in the National Air and Space Museum, including Voyager, the first aircraft to fly nonstop around the world, and Spaceship One. I remember watching that initial flight and also thinking, even as a layman, thinking that aircraft looks bonkers. The only thing that's done for beauty is the paint trim. Everything about Spaceship One, it's shape that looks bonkers. There's a reason for that. The reason that it looks like a bullet is it's a very lightest structure that you can pressurize without having bending moments and stress concentrations and so on. You can't put big windows on it without taking big risks. So I put a lot of little windows on it and I double-pane them. Everything about it, particularly its feathered reentry, is there for a reason to not only allow it to be done with a tiny budget for Paul Allen, but to make it possible, really. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and private space enthusiast, partnered with Rutan and their team went on to win the Ansari X Prize, becoming the first non-governmental organization to successfully launch a reusable manned spacecraft. You know, the government didn't develop an airliner. The government didn't run an airline business. But the government has always developed manned spacecraft and always flown them. You know, there's just an assumption that since this is so horribly expensive that it has to be done by huge outlays in the taxpayer. When I said, I think I can do this, Paul Allen realized this was a huge risk. But he had the vision of saying, well, you know, Rutan's not asking for much money here. You're worth 26 billion. Not much money. It can still be quite a lot of money. 18 million isn't much. Sure. You've talked about, though, that we should probably have, I hope this is a fair characterization, a higher tolerance for risk than we do now in space travel. Well, if you don't take risks, you're not going to have breakthroughs. Bezos and Musk, even though the industry, the world, all the primes, all the governments, had concluded that it's impossible to reuse rocket boosters. Okay. They took enormous risks and tried anyway. And, you know, they all crashed at first and kept crashing. But, wow, they figured it out. And now, by reusing rocket boosters, it changes the entire outlook on what's going to happen for the public as far as flying in space. Reusable rockets and similar advancements are largely being bankrolled by a cadre of billionaire philanthropists. Do you think it's fair to say that the fact that we have billionaires is why we have a private space industry? It's why we have a lot of things. There's nothing wrong with folks making huge amounts of money. For example, would we have an oil industry if it wasn't for someone that got very rich? Would we have had that? We'd be a third world country in terms of energy if it were up to the government and the taxpayer voting to fund it with their taxes. So, I don't feel embarrassed that the first decade or two of space tourism is just something for billionaires to have as a toy or as a fund. That's all right. We'll figure out what they're for later on. Our freedoms in this country are enormous compared to any other country. What country could you, could you with your own money fly your Tesla Roadster beyond Mars? You know, that's weird. Who would have thought that we'd ever see that? NASA wouldn't fund that. That couldn't be done in Russia. That was done because of the freedoms in America. It's all right for a guy to make horrendous profits. You know why? Look what they do with them. They not just create jobs, but they create the future. Elon Musk has said that what he's doing on rocketry is a hundred times more important than curing cancer. Is he right? Well, if you cure cancer, you save what 14% of us? If you can colonize another planet and humans can learn to survive there, you could save all of us.