Space Commerce: Where Public Meets Private
By Edgar Zapata
It is 2012 and the first commercial and (less said) privately-owned spacecraft has just docked at the International Space Station. NASA has just hitched a ride on an Uber rather than use their own car. More so, rather than build their own car. And to be precise, it was driverless. With this small public and private step, space commerce of a new sort leaped from too many unknowns to so many possibilities. This is a world of difference. Whereas too many unknowns are a barrier, possibilities are doorways. Yet, with endless new possibilities for space sector commerce comes uncertainty. It is a contradictory relationship where we are unsure in which direction the characters are going and what they want, but we must read on.
Since that first cargo spacecraft docked, there have been pronouncements about a coming trillion-dollar (or multi-trillion dollar) space economy. Right along, distinctions are drawn between the size of the space economy versus its broad impacts. Now we know the answer is somewhere between unimaginable and fantastic.
There is no loss of poor words trying to define new space commerce, as so many words tell one story only if we forget another. We might foresee something akin to the industrial revolution, even if only to convey scale, but knowing the space sector must do better. Are you inviting everyone to be a cog in a machine or improve lives now on Earth? The final frontier is always a fallback, yet a word like an orange squeezed of all its juice. The notion of a colony on the Moon falls quickly, given the history of colonies, leaving us running back to mere outposts, villages, and stations. Life off-world as only a lab for scientists is not an open and compelling vision of space commerce, a place we all might go too. Similarly, analogies to public-private railroads must create a spike that is now just another possibility, connecting trains to passengers (and revenue).
Still, our new space commerce memes are adapting as quickly as the sector. New visions come with new words and twists. Jeff Bezos envisions a time when “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial.” Elon Musk wishes to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”. SpaceX drone ships used for reusable booster landings are named after the artificial (yet conscious) minds from the sci-fi novels of Iain Banks. This is more than appropriate, as Banks takes everyone off planets, limited in resources as they are, to where they are zoned wilderness. Forget planets as residential and light industry; think places we visit before heading back to the comforts of home in the orbitals between the stars.
All these possibilities and uncertainties rest on a particular set of amazing circumstances.
“…denial seems no longer the baseline plan.”
On the public side, NASA has embraced new relationships, giving up control for something better. NASA’s biggest operational project in human spaceflight is international, the International Space Station. NASA buys rides to get cargo and crew to the ISS, the launchers and spacecraft owned by the private sector. All this has created a robust one-of-a-kind supply chain to low Earth orbit and back. Civil space agencies from across the globe and the US private sector all come and go together. New NASA programs continue down this path of partnering, from a lunar lander to lunar cargo services to a private space station, and maybe even spacesuits. Denial seems no longer the baseline plan. The budget numbers never added up to any iconic mission, not without dramatic change, so NASA spaceflight is changing.
On the private sector side, there appears, for now, to be abundant capital. From the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing to low-interest rates, current monetary policy creates a historic opening for new ideas. Space commerce, if anything, could be the poster child for where easy money should flow, creating new growth versus just over-watering what is already established. Fiscal policy is not too far behind, with massive federal investments in technology around the corner. In a space economy that is in the few hundreds of billions a year, a crowded eco-system already, seedlings not only have to diversify, they have to travel far. Space is about as far as capital can go to get away from simply increasing the value of existing assets. The problem may not be wild ideas, but not being wild enough, with innovative leaps around barriers - from launch to spacecraft to all the value and analytics in-between.
I was fortunate to see parts of these problems (and changes) in my time at NASA, and sometimes in the US DOD - or as we said, “these are the problems you are looking for.” Possibilities may mean uncertainty yet also create the opportunity for advances of the kind we can look back on with amazement. Numbers, graphs, valuations, and analysis will monopolize many a discussion on space commerce. But I also saw how change starts in-between the things that trend, in relationships public and private, taking root before the bright green shoots.
(Edgar Zapata is a retired NASA engineer who worked extensively on the Space Shuttle Program and multiple other projects)