| No, because the economics are different. To put some things in context: - Cost of the Saturn V development program: $6.417bn then / $35.4bn in 2020 dollars - Cost of TSMC's Arizona fab: $12bn now - The Saturn V program launched a handful of humans into space for $0.185bn then / $1.23bn now per launch. TSMC's fab may cost a lot, but it produces a very large number of chips and, most importantly, it's reusable. The most density- and performance-sensitive applications use the newest fabs first, but the fabs are not thrown out immediately after a newer process is developed. Instead, the older fabs start making cheaper chips that don't need leading-edge performance. All of that up-front cost is amortized over a decade of continuous use. If investors had poured money into rockets instead of chip fabs, we wouldn't have had everyone going to space. The investors would have just lost their shirt. Space has inherent costs we can't engineer around (e.g. fuel) and getting there is primarily a scientific endeavor rather than a consumer good. Keep in mind, there's nowhere to go[0] in space once you get there, except back to Earth. Meanwhile, chips are something everyone needs now, and owning a fab is still a profitable venture even when the R&D costs go up - at least, for as long as the manufacturing technology works and people are willing to pay a premium for better chips. It's not purely an R&D arms race. [0] I am leaving the possibility of terraforming Mars out of this, as that has enormous problems on its own. |