Ever since Robert Heinlein published “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” back in 1950, sci-fi has held to two tenets. First, space exploration is bound to be made commercial: The romance of exploration alone isn’t enough. Second, governments are the wrong kind of institution for space anyway. They’re too risk-averse, too penny-pinching, and—as famously pointed out by Richard Feynman after the Challenger shuttle disaster—too reliant on managers, not engineers. That looks prescient now, with swaggering space barons like Elon Musk...

Source: Wall Street Journal May 17, 2019 20:26 UTC