House Committee on Science: "STATEMENT OF ELON MUSK, SPACEX CEO BEFORE THE JOINT HEARING ON COMMERICAL HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT; U.S. SENATE SCIENCE, COMMERCE AND TECHNOLOGY SUBCOMMITTEE ON SPACE; U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SUBCOMMITTEE ON SPACE AND AERONAUTICS JULY 24, 2003
Senator Brownback and members of the Senate Science, Commerce and Technology Space Subcommittee; Congressman Rohrabacher and members of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee; on behalf of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation I would like to express my thanks and appreciation for the opportunity to come before you today to address issues related to access to space.

It is despairing to consider that the cost and reliability of access to space have barely changed since the Apollo era over three decades ago. Yet in virtually every other field of technology, we have made great strides in reducing cost and increasing capability, often in ways we did not dream existed. We have improved computing costs by a factor 10,000 or more, decoded the human genome, built the Internet and made inter-continental flight available to the average citizen for no more than a few hundred dollars. The exception to this wave of development has been space launch, but why?

My best guess at the origin of the problem relates to a breakdown of a process that the economist Schumpeter called 'creative destruction'. He postulated that the way an industry improves is that new companies enter a market with a lower price or superior product. This creates a forcing function for the whole market to improve. Looking at space launch vehicles, we see a situation where there has been not one single, successful new entrant in four decades, apart from one firm established in the late 1980s. Even in that case, the solid rocket motors that constitute a majority of the manufacturing costs of its launchers are in fact built by existing aerospace companies. So we have really seen no truly new entrants to the American launch vehicle market and, as such, should not be surprised that costs have not been reduced.
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