Sovereign Wealth Funds and Space Exploitation

[Northstar1989]

Ok, so I'm not sure exactly what the rules are regarding topics like this in the Lounge section, so any moderators please forgive me if I'm breaking a form rule by bringing this up here, and just wuietly kill this topicand let me know why it was inappropriate...

Anyways, I've been thinking for a while the US should have a Sovereign Wealth Fund to take advantage of the extremely low interest rates available for government borrowing right now, as well as a way to force reinvestment in the economy (raise taxes, invest the revenues in the SWF- that way the money is being invested in growing the private sector rather than in buying luxuries...)  And this got my to thinking- perhaps such a Sovereign Wealth Fund could also be used as a method to stimulate exploitation of outer space...

Sovereign Wealth Funds have the potential to become VERY large, as they invest the surplus resources of an entire nation into generating economic growth.  And as such, they have the potential to be used to build entire industries from the ground up by investing in multiple synergistic enterprises that increase each other's value... (this is known as co-investment)  So what if the US started a Sovereign Wealth Fund and used it to build space-inindustries like asteroid-mining and space-tourism from scratch?

The advantage of doing this with a Sovereign Wealth Fund, rather than direct government funding, is that it ensures that the government collects more of the profit from its investment- in the form of capital gains of seed money invested in startups and dividends from public corporations, as WELL as taxes on the executive salaries and profits of those corporations...

Space Tourism is a potentially very lucrative industry if SpaceX can realize fully-reusable launch vehicles, for instance.  If the government were to invest in developing a space-tourism industry it could not only push the development of reusable launch vehicles along, but also realize considerable profits that could be reinvested here on Earth in things like education and healthcare.

Similarly, if the US invested in the enterprises of asteroid-mining startups, it could not only help to provide cheaper fuel in Low Earth Orbit for purposes like Mars missions and upper stage reusability- it could also provide a Return On Investment for the government in growth of valuation of its stock shares in such companies- which could be held onto for the dividends or sold to private investors for a profit...

 

In short, if space is such an untapped market, maybe the government should take an approach to ensure it gathers a larger share of the profits from exploiting it than what can be achieved merely by taxing the profits...

 

Edited October 26, 2017 by Northstar1989