The Space Problem

The Problem

The private space industry is struggling to get off the ground.

Hobbes waits anxiously for news in Houston.

The Backstory

In 2010, Barack Obama halted existing plans for manned missions at NASA, reduced their funding and announced a new focus for the organization -- to help the nascent private space industry.  NASA will continue with certain goals itself -- scientific projects, new rocket prototypes and landing a probe on an asteroid -- but American astronauts will have to hitch a ride on another country or company's rockets.  This was largely due to a reduced federal budget in the wake of the Great Recession.  Companies like Virgin Galactic, Scaled Composites, Boeing, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are taking the lead, but progress has been slow.

Some predict the first commercial sub-orbital flights will start as early as 2012, but that will still leave private companies a long way away from landing on the moon or even docking with the International Space Station.  In the meantime countries like China, with booming economies, have ambitious plans for space.  China intends to be not just landing on but mining the moon sometime in the 2020s, which would probably involve them building a large moon base there as well.  The commercial space industry is lagging behind government-sponsored drives like that because their funding can't compete.  So the question becomes, with a hollowed out US economy, how can we fund the private space race until they can reasonably fund themselves?

The Solution

Large investments or buy-outs should come from the two companies that will benefit most from safe, cheap, reliable and frequent sub-orbital and orbital flights -- FIFA and the NBA.

The unification of basketball and space -- another childhood dream becoming a reality.

What the private space industry is essentially working on now is a space plane.  A reusable launch vehicle that can take off and land on its own and is cheap enough for commercial purposes.  One of the goals of a space plane (in addition to simple, hop up hop down space tourism) is the ability to fly from New York to Hong Kong in two or three hours.  This is likely feasible now, it's just not cost-effective.  And that's a big problem, one that NASA has spent decades trying to solve.  Now it's private industry's turn.  So the next question we have to ask is, who needs the ability to fly around the world in two or three hours and has the money to make it a reality?

The answer is FIFA and the NBA (as the two sports organizations best poised for international success right now.)  Why isn't there a world soccer league right now?  Why is all major club soccer centered around Europe when many of the best players and most rabid fans are in South America, Africa, and Asia?  Why does the NBA import players from around the world instead of playing them on their own courts (usually)?  Imagine a league where the club team from Britain played the club team from Chile in Chile and then the next day, played Beijing's team in Beijing.  The potential for profit in expanding into true world leagues is enormous.  Right now 87 percent of FIFA's profits come from one giant event -- the World Cup -- because it is the only event that the entire world is interested in.  What if they could command that kind of interest all the time?  It's possible with a space plane.

I believe the thing that has been holding back both FIFA and the NBA from trying to institute something like this is the air travel involved.  It would be expensive, impossible to schedule and incredibly draining on the players to fly up to 30 hours for normal league games.  Even transatlantic flights are a lot to ask.  But if one of these leagues bought a controlling stake and invested heavily in a company that is on the verge of successfully manufacturing a space plane, international leagues will get real very quickly.  A true world league would take something that is already incredibly profitable to a factor of ten or more.  This is why FIFA and the NBA have the most to gain from getting a space plane (and thus a 2-3 hour round the world flight time) working as fast as possible, and why they should back it up with the billions they have.

Yeah, I'm in a comics mood today.

An investment in space companies isn't exactly throwing away money either.  It is an investment like any other -- it could be profitable or not -- which means there is a possibility that not only will the leagues get their affordable space plane but also that they won't lose any money in the process.  Increasing profits by a factor of ten and making money while doing it.  Even if the ventures are unprofitable, as long as they succeed with the space plane it will still be more than worth it for the international leagues.  And it's exactly what the private space industry needs right now.  This is a merger with serious upside for both parties.

Notes

I didn't crunch the numbers to figure out what are truly the most popular sports in the world, just made an assumption, but I don't think it affects the analysis much.  If it happens that Cricket or Rugby or Baseball are that popular too, they could certainly get in on the action, but the glaring ones seem to me to be Soccer and Basketball.

Also I did not bother to go into why I think speeding up the development of a space plane will also speed up the development of other space vehicles but I think it's logical.  If a successful space plane is developed it will not only serve commercial travel interests (like the leagues) but also space tourism.  Space tourists will want to go deeper into space and to the moon as well so it would make sense for the companies to put their profits in that direction.  Not to mention they've already declared this their eventual goal, and the US and state governments seems willing to help them achieve it.