NASA shoots for the moon as private companies reach for the stars

At the dawn of the space industry, there wasn’t a space industry: There was the government.

The early days of American space exploration were dominated by the federal government, with the main goal of beating the Soviet Union into orbit, and eventually the moon.

As the industry evolved and NASA’s budget shrunk, private companies stepped into the fold.

Having already gone to the moon, NASA set its sights…higher, which has contributed to an ongoing boom in the space industry—growing to $469 billion in 2021—while also allowing NASA to focus on ambitious goals like Moon and Mars missions.

“​​It used to take the resources of entire countries and a lot of years and enormous amounts of money to do anything in space,” Morgan Bailey, director of communications at Rocket Lab told Emerging Tech Brew, adding that as “corporate organizations have been able to develop technologies—not just governments—that’s kind of brought down the cost of access to space and as a result kind of broadened the horizons of what we can achieve in orbit.”

Now that rockets can be built as little as a year, depending on the type of rocket, and the price to launch vehicles like Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is as low as $5 million, NASA has entered a phase of public-private partnerships, aiding private companies like SpaceX.

According to Alex Fielding, CEO and chairman of Privateer Space, the push to the privatization of space, led by SpaceX, has dropped the cost of orbit significantly.

“[SpaceX] built the highway system to space for everybody…SpaceX is a little bit like taking the train. If you’re going where they’re going, it’s the cheapest option, and it’s really reliable…None of this stuff existed 10 years ago,” Fielding said. “I think if launch cost wasn’t so pervasively low, no, I don’t think we or any of the other commercial companies could exist.”

While SpaceX launches NASA tech into space, it has also assisted universities and other private companies launch their own satellites. In 2022, for example, SpaceX’s launches have accounted for more than the combined missions of any other country and lead any other commercial entity.

In June’s issue of Wired, Lori Garver, NASA’s former deputy administrator, said that the relationship between the public and private sectors was an outcome, not a goal, of all parties looking to reduce the cost of space transportation. That, in turn, lets the agency do “ more cutting-edge, unique, interesting, important things in space.”

Bhavya Lal, NASA associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy, told us this represents a “tectonic shift” in the way that NASA conducts itself, and pointed to the upcoming Artemis moon missions as a demonstration of what NASA can now focus on. Artemis I takes off August 29.

“We now have an opportunity to work as a catalyst that accelerates innovation both in-house and outside, growing the space economy and leveraging outcomes to meet NASA’s objectives,” Lal said, and mentioned that those objectives include Artemis, mining water on the Moon, providing power and other amenities to NASA astronauts and other space tourists, and developing future Mars missions.

NASA wants to get humans back on the moon for the first time since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, by way of its Artemis missions. The first Artemis missions will test the cislunar orbit around the moon and the flight path to get there, and subsequent missions will focus on building a future orbital station and lunar base.

In the case of the Artemis missions, private companies like Advanced Space and Rocket Lab have contributed to the CAPSTONE project that launched in May, developing a trial run for the cislunar object that will be used for Artemis.

Dallas Kasaboski, consultant at Northern Sky Research, told Emerging Tech Brew that for the Artemis missions, NASA has emphasized a collaborative style that has commercial partners relying less on NASA to develop and build technology like robotics, landers, orbiters, rovers, or communication satellites.

Kasaboski said that NASA’s collaborations have been a massive boon to the industry, as contracts for lunar missions through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program have more than doubled from 125 to more than 250 over the next decade, as NSR expects business on and servicing the moon to become a $105 billion industry by 2032.

“The hope is for continued and growing human presence in deep space, driven by governments, supported by commercial players, and potentially later on for commercial players to have a stronger space in that market, where there's continued presence at or around the moon driven by commercial players, not just government programs,” Kasaboski said.