Florida Should Sponsor a Race to the Moon: Without an Edge, State Will Lose Billions After 2010 - August 5, 2005
by Douglas O. Jobes
According to Winston Scott, executive director of the Florida Space Authority, a big economic loser of the 2010 Space Shuttle phase-out could be the state of Florida. To help head off this potential crisis, Governor Jeb Bush has tasked the new Commission on the Future of Space & Aeronautics in Florida (also known as the Florida Space Commission) with finding ways of attracting private space enterprises to the state. But with companies such as SpaceDev, SpaceX, XCOR, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, TGV and so on having already selected bases in California, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and other western states, the state of Florida might be in trouble. Florida must pull out all the stops or risk permanently losing billions of dollars in annual space industry revenue and tens of thousands of space-related jobs. To firmly establish Florida as the "Gateway to Space", the state legislature should boldly implement one incentive no state or government has ever attempted - sponsoring a private industry Race to the Moon, through passage of a lunar land claims recognition law.
Through passage of a bill similar to The Space Settlement Prize Act, the Florida legislature could spark a Florida-based, private sector space race. The bill would declare that the state and the state's courts would immediately recognize a 600,000 square mile land claim on the Moon made by the first privately financed international consortium to build a permanent lunar base and regular space line open to all paying passengers. By declaring that the state would back up the consortium's claim in its courts, Florida would become a magnet for space entrepreneurs with long-range plans for founding lunar businesses. A land claims recognition law would create the ultimate economic incentive for space businesses - the proposition that billions of dollars worth of lunar real estate would be theirs to sell or mortgage to investors, speculators, and the public once a permanent lunar presence and transportation open to all was established. Currently land on the Moon has no value, because no basis for ownership exists. Such a law would create an enormously valuable real estate market in the claimed lunar regions. Floridians have seen this all before: when it was announced by Walt Disney in 1965 that the 43 square miles of worthless swampland he had been secretly buying up was to become the site of Disney World (think "site of the first permanent Moon base"), the value of the surrounding equally "worthless" swampland immediately shot up to over $80,000 an acre.
There are plenty of entrepreneurs who would like to start lunar businesses, too. Today, though, there are simply no viable ways of financing the costs not only of getting to the Moon but also paying for the space infrastructure that businesses will need. In a July 18 Time magazine interview, CEO Sir Richard Branson summed up the dream of many of these entrepreneurs: "I hope that in my lifetime, Virgin Galactic will be taking people to a beautiful hotel on the Moon." The prospect of one day recouping their massive initial investment through real lunar land sales later would be an enabling paradigm.
At first blush, a lunar land claim based on recognition by a single state might not seem to have much legal force, and if sovereignty were the basis that would be true. But a distinction must be made between "recognizing" a claim versus "granting" a claim. A land claim based on sovereignty (that is, the state granting the land to the claimants) would be highly suspect. After all, Florida does not have any land on the Moon to give. In any case, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty in very direct language forever bans government sovereignty over land in space. The ban of government sovereignty opens the door to private ownership through the civil law "use and occupation" standard. Use and occupation means the claimants mix their labor with the soil, creating property rights that are independent of government. Currently there is no system of property rights in space. By recognizing a privately funded lunar base, the state of Florida would be setting the first legal precedent for off-Earth private property rights. In a literal and figurative vaccuum where there is no legal consensus, Florida courts would literally have the power to set the standard. While there might be challenges later on, the first precedent would remain with the state of Florida and the claimants.
Unless Florida takes radical action, it is very likely that the state will take a bit hit economically when the Shuttle is scuttled in 2010. There is no guarantee that Florida will receive a significant share of the NASA pie for the planned Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), either. USA Today reported in its July 14 editorial, "SpaceX Founder: Florida Needs More Aerospace Talent," that at the Florida Space Commission's first meeting NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was clear on this point. Griffin matter-of-factly stated that NASA's $16 billion annual budget is not likely to increase much in the coming years, and that NASA's contracts and expenditures will be spread out in many states, not just Florida.
But is Florida's position really dire enough to warrant an idea as radical as a lunar land claims recognition law? Governor Bush and other state officials know that too much is at stake to allow the state to lose out. Recently Bush proclaimed, "Florida has proudly championed our nation's space industry from the very beginning, and we are determined to remain a vital player as we enter into this new era of space exploration." But it might not be so simple. State Sen. Bill Posey has declared that a "paradigm shift" in strategy is needed to cut the red tape and high cost of doing business at Cape Canaveral to attract private business. "Unless we can carve out some piece of ground at the Cape ... we're not going to get any of them [the private space companies]," Posey said.
There can be no doubt of serious economic consequences for the state if Florida's star is allowed to fade. According to the report, Economic Impact of NASA in Florida - FY 2004, the "large number of highly paid employees and the high dollar contacts that are awarded within the State created [in 2004] both a direct effect for state businesses and residents and a strong indirect impact on businesses and households that were not directly associated with the 'space industry.'"
The annual economic impact of NASA on the state of Florida is stunning:
In FY 2004 KSC and other NASA space operations associated activities created a total economic impact for the State of $3.3 billion in output, $1.6 billion in income, and 33,000 jobs.... These numbers should leave little doubt that NASA continues to represent one of the most important economic engines in Florida's economic base.
Recently, the suborbital tourism company Space Adventures announced in a press release that they would be locating a suborbital spaceflight development office at Kennedy Space Center. That is a promising start, but to get to the multi-billion dollar level capable of supporting tens of thousands of jobs, the state of Florida will need to attract far, far more investment of this kind. (Indeed, Florida is not even getting a monopoly on Space Adventures' activities. As CEO Eric Anderson noted in the same press release, "Ultimately, we'll be operating suborbital spaceflights from several locations.")
Two of the responsibilities of the Florida Space Commission, as defined in the governor's Executive Order, include:
Review current federal, state, and local laws, ordinances, and rules that affect the aerospace industry and recommend actions to promote growth and diversification of the industry in the state, and
Examine the ways to attract or expand aerospace industries, including the component elements of manufacturing, assembly, marketing, servicing, maintenance, logistical support, human resources, and related research and development, and recommend actions by the state and local governments to acccomplish this goal.
A state-sponsored race to the Moon sparked by a lunar land claims recognition law would be a direct implementation and response to both these mandates.
The Florida Space Commission is required to present its final recommendations to the governor, speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and president of the Florida Senate by January 31, 2006. If the members of the commission want Florida to outcompete other states when it comes to attracting space companies, the commission's list of recommendations will need to include provisions that other states cannot easily match. The other states are not sitting idly by; some have a huge lead over Florida already. Oklahoma's Space Industry Development Authority, formed back in 1999, has long touted its "Steps-to-Space Strategy" and has already implemented many significant economic incentives for attracting private space enterprise to that state. (Just ask the founders of Rocketplane, Inc.)
But as yet no state has declared itself the official launch pad for a private industry Race to the Moon....
For information about the lunar land claims recognition concept, see the Space Settlement Initiative, including the Questions & Answers section on that website. A summary is also available on the Institute's LCR Abstract page. Draft legislation, ready for consideration by Congress, is also posted online.
