Commercial Space Activities

Commercial Space Activities

Brief Introduction

The “Space Economy”

The Space Foundation publishes an annual report with quarterly updates that tracks worldwide spending by governments, the private sector and consumers. The Space Report 2023 Q2  put the “global space economy” at $546 billion comprised of the following segments:

  • commercial infrastructure and support industries, $139.6 billion
  • commercial space products and services, $288.0 billion
  • U.S. government space budgets, $69.5 billion, and
  • non-U.S. government space budgets, $49.1 billion

Detailed data are available for purchase from the Space Foundation.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis also publishes statistics on the space economy, but only for the United States and uses a different methodology. The Space Foundation explained to SpacePolicyOnline.com that among other things “BEA takes a top-down approach, isolating space activities from broad datasets on U.S. industry outputs, while Space Foundation takes a bottom-up approach, combining specific space-related budgets and revenues to value the global space economy.”

The BEA’s June 27, 2023 report covered 2012-2021 and concluded that in 2021 the U.S. space economy accounted for “$211.6 billion of gross output, $129.9 billion (0.6 percent) of GDP, $51.1 billion of private industry compensation, and 360,000 private industry jobs.” An updated report published on June 25, 2024 concluded: “the space economy accounted for $131.8 billion, or 0.5 percent, of total U.S. GDP in 2022. Real GDP grew by 2.3 percent in the space economy, faster than growth in the overall U.S. economy (1.9 percent). The statistics also show in 2022 the space economy accounted for $232.1 billion of gross output and $54.5 billion of private-sector compensation and supported 347,000 private-sector jobs.”

Defining “Commercial” Space Activities

What makes a space activity “commercial” can be difficult to define. Some consider a commercial activity to be one in which a private sector entity puts its own capital at risk and provides goods or services primarily to other private sector entities or consumers rather than to the government. Examples of these activities would be direct-to-home satellite television (e.g. DirecTV and DishTV), satellite radio (Sirius XM), and commercial communications satellites that transmit voice, data and Internet services (such as Intelsat Ltd., SES Global, and Eutelsat).

Other definitions are broader and include sales of consumer equipment by companies even though the satellite system is owned by the government. The chief example of this is the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation satellite system that is owned by the U.S. Department of Defense, but has a vast array of consumer users ranging from automobile navigation systems to cell phones to precision farming. The devices used by consumers around the world in their cars, on their boats, or carried on their persons are sold by commercial companies, but the satellite signal that makes them work is provided for free by DOD.

Still broader definitions of commercial space activities include those where a company provides services primarily to government customers, such as the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance (ULA). Others do not consider these commercial because they are reliant on the government for most of their revenue and the government shoulders a major portion of the risk because the government requires the services.

In his National Space Policy issued on June 28, 2010, President Obama defined “commercial space activities” in this manner:

The term “commercial,” for the purposes of this policy, refers to space goods, services, or activities provided by private sector enterprises that bear a reasonable portion of the investment risk and responsibility for the activity, operate in accordance with typical market-based incentives for controlling cost and optimizing return on investment, and have the legal capacity to offer these goods or services to existing or potential nongovernmental customers.

President Trump retained that definition is his December 9, 2020 National Space Policy with one exception. The word “space” is omitted prior to “goods, services, or activities…”

U.S. COMMERCIAL SPACE POLICY

The government plays a major role in commercial space activities in many ways, from establishing regulatory policy, to creating policies that direct government agencies to purchase services from companies, to engaging in public-private partnerships where the government and the private sector share the risks and rewards, to traditional fixed price or cost-plus contracts for services or products.

U.S. commercial space policy is set both by presidential directive and in law. Presidential directives remain in force until and unless a future President revises them. Thus, what is in force today is a mix of directives issued by President George W. Bush (2001-2009), President Barack Obama (2009-2017), and President Donald Trump (2017-2021). President Biden (2021-present) has not issued any space policies as of the date of this post, but a set of National Priorities was released in December 2021 and several policy guidance documents have come out so far as detailed below.

The following summary of presidential space policies covers all space sectors for completeness. The most recent complete presidential National Space Policy was issued by Trump on December 9, 2020, superseding the Obama policy issued on June 28, 2010. Trump changed two sentences of the Obama policy in 2017 (see below), but the rest remained the same until the last few weeks of his administration.

Biden-Harris Administration. On December, 1, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris, as chair of the White House National Space Council, released a United States Space Priorities Framework in conjunction with the first meeting of the Space Council under her leadership. It covers all aspects of space policy, including national security. Biden released an Executive Order the same day expanding the membership and duties of the Council, which supersedes the two issued by Trump in 2017 and 2020.

On April 18, 2022, Harris announced a policy that the United States will not conduct debris-generating direct-ascent antisatellite tests, sometimes called Kinetic Energy (KE) ASAT tests, and urged other countries to join the pledge. The action was in response to a Russian KE-ASAT in November 2021 that created thousands of pieces of debris that imperiled many space objects including the International Space Station.

On November 15, 2023, the National Space Council released its proposal for “mission authorization” — assigning an agency or agencies to authorize and continuously supervise new types (“novel”) of commercial space activities not already regulated by others to ensure U.S. compliance with its international obligations under Article VI of the 1967 Outer Spae Treaty. The FAA in the Department of Transportion regulates commercial launch and reentry), NOAA in the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing, and the FCC assigns licenses for use of the radio frequency spectrum and to some extent space debris, but many new commercial space activities are emerging such as commercial space stations and commercial activities on the Moon and beyond.

The long-awaited White House proposal is quite different from what was expected. Instead of choosing either the Department of Transportation or the Department of Commerce to regulate new types of activities, it split responsibilities between them. The proposal was released less than an hour before the Hoiuse Science, Space, and Technology Committee was about to mark up the Republican-sponsored Commercial Space Act, which has its own language assigning it all to the Department of Commerce. The committee delayed the final vote for two weeks and ultimately approved the bill on a party-line vote. On December 20 i conjunction with her third meeting of the Space Council, Harris released the “United States Novel Space Activities Authorization and Supervision Framework” to enable the Executive Branch to “prepare for and shape the future space regulatory environment.”

Also at the White House level, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s National Science and Technology Council has released:

At the agency level, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a set of Tenets of Responsible Behavior in Space on July 7, 2021. On August 30, 2022, DOD issued a new space policy directive, DOD Directive 3100.10, Space Policy, which was updated on October 14, 2024.  On April 2, 2024, DOD released its first Commercial Space Integration Strategy.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken released the first State Department Strategic Framework for Space Diplomacy on May 30, 2023.

Historically, during the four years of his Administration, Trump signed an updated National Space Policy, seven Space Policy Directives (SPDs), five space-related Executive Orders, two strategies, two reports and one National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM). Not all are directed at commercial space policy, but all are listed here in chronological order for completeness.

Trump used the National Space Council as the mechanism to formulate U.S. space policy, with Vice President Mike Pence as chair and Scott Pace as Executive Secretary. It met publicly five times:  October 5, 2017 (at the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport; February 21, 2018 (at Kennedy Space Center, FL); June 18, 2018 (at the White House); March 26, 2019 (at Marshall Space Flight Center, AL); and August 20, 2019 back at Udvar-Hazy.

President Obama, in addition to his 2010 National Space Policy, issued a National Space Transportation Policy and associated fact sheet on November 21, 2013 that updated a George W. Bush policy. Bush issued a policy for commercial remote sensing satellites in 2003.

For information on laws that affect commercial space policy, including the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, see our Space Law section.

NASA’S COMMERCIAL CARGO (COTS) AND COMMERCIAL CREW PROGRAMS

NASA is engaging in the most visible examples of public-private partnerships in the space arena although the national security space program is adopting this strategy as well. Although they are referred to as “commercial,” the government often provides the largest share of money for development and/or a guaranteed market.

It began with NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) or “commercial cargo” program to develop systems to take cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), followed by the companion “commercial crew” program to ferry astronauts back and forth. The impetus for both was a decision by President George W. Bush in 2004 to terminate the space shuttle program as soon as construction of the ISS was completed. That meant NASA needed to find another way to take crews and cargo to and from ISS for the duration of its operational life. The shuttle program ended in 2011. The first commercial cargo flights began in 2012. The first operational commercial crew launch was in November 2020.  In the interim, NASA paid Russia to take its crews to and from ISS.

Commercial Cargo

NASA initiated the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program in 2006 for the private sector to develop spacecraft and rockets to take cargo to the ISS in partnership with the government.  NASA wanted to ensure competition, so signed Space Act Agreements (SAAs) with two companies, SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler, to begin operational service to the ISS starting in 2011. Rocketplane Kistler did not meet its required milestones and NASA terminated that agreement in 2007.  NASA signed an SAA with Orbital Sciences Corp. (OSC) in 2008 to replace Rocketplane Kistler.

OSC merged with ATK in 2015 and became Orbital ATK (OA). OA was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018 and became Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems (NGIS). After a company reorganization in January 2020, it became Northrop Grumman Space Systems (hereafter NG).

The 2011 date slipped to 2012 (SpaceX) and 2013 (NG), but both systems are now operational and the COTS program, which covered development of the systems, has ended.  NASA held a press conference in November 2013 heralding its success and later released a report.

NASA now purchases cargo services from SpaceX and NG under Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contracts.  NASA initially signed contracts with each company to launch 20 tons of cargo to the ISS through the end of 2016.  Contracts with both companies were later extended adding more flights to cover through 2018 and a new round of CRS-2 contracts were awarded in 2016 for later years as discussed below.

SpaceX’s cargo spacecraft is called Dragon. It is currently referred to as Cargo Dragon to distinguish it from the version that takes astronauts to space — Crew Dragon. Cargo Dragon spacecraft are launched on Falcon 9 rockets from the Space Force’s Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, FL and NASA’s Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s adjacent Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX leases those facilities from the government.

Cargo Dragon spacecraft return to Earth and splash down in the ocean. It is the only cargo spacecraft that currently services ISS capable of returning cargo to Earth.  All the others — Russia’s Progress, Europe’s ATV (now discontinued), Japan’s HTV and NG’s Cygnus — are not designed to survive reentry. They burn up in the atmosphere and therefore are used for trash disposal — a less glamorous, but still critical task — and may also be used for experiments between the time they depart the ISS and reenter, which can be hours, days or weeks depending on the mission.

SpaceX conducted a test flight of Cargo Dragon to ISS in May 2012. The first operational Cargo Dragon flight took place in October 2012 and five more were successfully conducted through the spring of 2015.  The seventh flight, however, failed 139 seconds after launch. The Falcon 9/Cargo Dragon combination returned to flight in April 2016 with the SpaceX CRS-8 (SpX-8) mission.  The flights continue on a regular schedule, although the cadence was disrupted by an explosion at SLC-40 on September 1, 2016 that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and a commercial communications satellites (Amos-6) during a pre-launch test. No one was hurt, but SLC-40 was badly damaged. Launches moved over to LC-39A until SLC-40 was repaired. SpaceX introduced a new version of Cargo Dragon on the 21st launch in December 2020. Based on the Crew Dragon design, it can dock rather than berth with ISS, has greater payload capacity, and lands in the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico near its launch site instead of in the Pacific near its manufacturing facility in Hawthorne, CA.

NG typically uses its Antares rocket to launch its Cygnus cargo spacecraft to ISS from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, VA. MARS is located at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, but MARS itself is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and operated by the Virginia Commonwealth Space Flight Authority.

A test flight of Antares/Cygnus to the ISS took place in October 2013. The first operational flight (Orb-1) was launched in January 2014 and Orb-2 in July 2014. On October 28, 2014, the third mission, Orb-3, failed 15 seconds after liftoff, destroying the rocket and Cygnus, and damaging the MARS facility and surrounding area.  A recovery plan was quickly announced  under which it consolidated its remaining cargo requirements into four rather than five more launches using an upgraded version of Cygnus that can accommodate more cargo per flight. The failure was traced to the engine, a Russian NK-33 built four decades earlier, refurbished by Aerojet and redesignated AJ-26. The company decided to replace the NK-33/AJ26 engines entirely and use new Russian RD-181 engines for Antares instead. While waiting for the retrofit, it purchased launch services from the United Launch Alliance (ULA) for Atlas V launches of Cygnus to meet its contractual commitments to NASA.  he first launch of the new version, Antares 230, was in October 2016 from Wallops.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and the imposition of more sanctions on Russia by the United States and other countries, Russia announced it would no longer sell rocket engines to U.S. companies. Not only does Antares use Russian RD-181 engines, but the first stage is built in Ukraine. NG said it had sufficient engines and first stages to fulfill its current contract with NASA for two more flights, but needed to develop a new plan for the future. On August 18, 2022, it announced a deal with Firefly Aerospace to use Firefly Miranda engines for a new version of Antares, the Antares 330. The two companies also will jointly develop a new medium-class rocket. NG later said it bought three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches to get Cygnus to ISS while waiting for the Antares 330 to be available. The final Antares 230 launched in August 2023. The first Cygnus on a SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled for the end of January 2024.

NASA awarded a second round of commercial cargo launches (CRS-2) in January 2016.  SpaceX and NG each won a minimum of six launches each and a third company, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), was added also with six launches of its Dream Chaser spacecraft that resemvles a small space shuttle. In 2021, SNC spun off Sierra Space as a separate entity. The first launch of Dream Chaser is expected in the first half of 2024 on ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

Commercial Crew

President Obama proposed a dramatic change to the U.S. human spaceflight program in his FY2011 budget request to Congress, released on February 1, 2010.  He proposed relying on the commercial sector instead of NASA to build and operate systems to take people to and from low Earth orbit (LEO). That includes taking NASA astronauts to and from the ISS. He requested $6 billion over 5 years (FY2011-2015) in NASA’s budget to subsidize companies to develop “commercial crew” launch vehicles and spacecraft for LEO missions.

He also proposed cancelling the Constellation program, begun under President George W. Bush, for NASA to build new launch vehicles (Ares I and V) and a spacecraft (Orion) to take astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, as well as to and from ISS. He wanted NASA to spend several years investing in “game-changing” technologies before deciding on what systems to build and where to go.

The lack of a specific destination and timetable for these “beyond-LEO” human spaceflight missions made his proposal especially unpopular and on April 15, 2010, he elaborated on his plans in a speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At that time he made clear that he saw no need for U.S. astronauts to return to the Moon, but landing people on Mars remained the eventual goal, and he said he expected that to happen in his lifetime. Meanwhile, he wanted NASA to focus on sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 as his initial beyond-LEO destination, and send them to orbit (but not land on) Mars in the 2030s.

Congressional Reaction. The proposal was very controversial and vigorously debated in Congress. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act (P.L. 111-267), signed into law in October 2010, was a compromise wherein NASA is directed to develop its own crew space transportation system — the Space Launch System (SLS) and a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) — as well as fund commercial crew. The law required that the SLS/Orion system also be able to function as a backup for commercial crew in case those systems did not materialize or if they failed. NASA selected the Orion spacecraft that was being developed in the Constellation program as the MPCV, so the system now is usually referred to as SLS/Orion.

President Obama’s FY2012 budget request for NASA, released in February 2011, was similarly controversial because the congressional committees that oversee NASA believed it contravened the compromise reached in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.  NASA requested more money than was authorized in the 2010 Act for commercial crew and less than was authorized for SLS/Orion. The tense relationship between Congress and the Obama Administration lasted for several years, wherein Congress made clear that SLS/Orion was the priority, not commercial crew, adding money for SLS/Orion and not providing as much as requested for commercial crew.

For FY2011, FY2012, and FY2013, Congress provided sharply less funding than the Administration requested. The request for FY2013 was $830 million, for example, but Congress approved only $525 million. The request for FY2014 was $821 million and Congress approved $696 million. Though it was $125 million less than the request, it was more than the agency received in the past and the percentage cut was less, leaving many commercial crew advocates happy with the result. The request for FY2015 was $848 million and in a sign of continued thawing of relationships, Congress approved $805 million. The request for FY2016 was $1.244 billion and Congress appropriated that amount.  FY2016 was the peak funding year for commercial crew and for FY2017, the request of $1.185 billion began the downward trajectory. Congress approved the requested amounts.

With the termination of the space shuttle program in July 2011, NASA could not launch astronauts to the ISS until the commercial crew systems were operational.  Initially this “gap” between the end of the shuttle program and the availability of commercial crew services was expected to last four years, but the first commercial crew flight did not take place until 2020, almost exactly a nine-year gap.

The SpaceX crewed flight test, Demo-2, with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken was successfully accomplished from May 30-August 2, 2020.  (Demo-1 was an uncrewed test flight in March 2019.) The system then was certified by NASA as operational for its needs and the first operational flight, Crew-1, launched in November 2020.

While waiting for the commercial crew systems, NASA purchased crew transportation services from Russia at a cost that rose to a high of $90 million per seat. NASA intends to continue launching astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz, and Russia to launch cosmonauts on the U.S. systems, to ensure all are trained to fly on all the vehicles, but on a no-exchange-of-funds basis.  This “crew exchange” or “seat swap” agreement was signed in July 2022 despite the tense geopolitical situation stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NASA’s Frank Rubio launched on Soyuz MS-22 on September 21, 2022 and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina on Crew-5 on October 5, 2022. Kikina is the only woman in Russia’s cosmonaut corps. She returned with Crew-5, but Rubio ended up staying for just over a year with his Soyuz MS-22 crewmates because of a problem with the spacecraft that necessitated its replacement by Soyuz MS-23. Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev was on Crew-6, Konstantin Borisov is currently part of Crew-7, and Alexander Grebenkin will be on Crew-8. NASA’s Loral O’Hara flew to ISS on Soyuz MS-24 and is currenlty there. Tracy Caldwell-Dyson will be on Soyuz MS-25.

Evolution of the Commercial Crew Program.  NASA initially awarded contracts to five companies for Crew Transportation Concepts and Technology Demonstration, or CCDEV (commercial crew development) in February 2010: Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon Space Development Corp., Sierra Nevada Corp., and United Launch Alliance. Another round of winners of the CCDEV2 competition was announced in April 2011: Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX. Those contracts were awarded as Space Act Agreements (SAAs) where NASA can pay companies for meeting agreed-upon milestones, but has less oversight or insight into what the companies are doing compared with traditional contracts. NASA planned to adopt traditional procurement methods under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) for the next phase of commercial crew development — specifically, fixed price contracts — but changed course in December 2011 because of budget uncertainties in future years that it concluded made fixed price contracts unrealistic at that time.

The CCDEV program transitioned into the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCAP) program for the commercial companies to develop an integrated crew transportation system (spacecraft, launch vehicle, and ground systems).  In August 2012, NASA selected “2 1/2” proposals, meaning it fully funded two companies (SpaceX and Boeing) and partially funded a third (Sierra Nevada Corporation, or SNC).  SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is described above. Boeing is also developing a capsule, CST-100 Starliner. As noted above, SNC’s Dream Chaser, is a winged vehicle that resembles a small version of the space shuttle. In fact, it is based on a NASA design (HL-20) for an ISS crew rescue vehicle that the agency cancelled in the 1990s.

On September 16, 2014, NASA awarded FAR-based fixed price contracts for the final phase of the commercial crew development program, Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCAP).  It chose Boeing and SpaceX, with Boeing receiving $4.2 billion and SpaceX receiving $2.6 billion. Sierra Nevada filed a protest of the awards on September 26, 2014 with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying there were “serious questions and inconsistencies in the procurement process.” Consequently, NASA issued a stop-work order to Boeing and SpaceX for the CCtCAP contracts, but later rescinded it.  Sierra Nevada filed a lawsuit against the government for that decision, but a judge verbally indicated she would not overturn it. GAO denied Sierra Nevada’s protest. As described above, SNC currently is focusing on providing cargo services using Dream Chaser and won an award under the CRS-2 contract.

SpaceX and Boeing continued to develop their systems. Each was required to fly an uncrewed test flight followed by a crewed test flight before NASA certifies them for operational use.

SpaceX successfully conducted its uncrewed test flight, Demo-1, in March 2019, but the capsule was destroyed the next month during preparations for an In-Flight Abort (IFA) test.  SpaceX successfully conducted the IFA test in January 2020, paving the way for the 2020 crewed test flight, Demo-2, and subsequent operational flights for NASA as well as non-NASA private astronaut flights like those for Axiom Space described elsewhere in this article.

Boeing attempted its uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) of the CST-100 Starliner on December 20, 2019. The launch aboard an Atlas V rocket was successful, but the Atlas V leaves Starliner in a suborbital trajectory. Starliner’s own engines must take the spacecraft the rest of the way to orbit and to the ISS. A software problem set Starliner’s Mission Elapsed Timer (MET) to the wrong time and left the spacecraft with too little propellant to reach ISS.  It landed two days after launch. During those two days, Boeing engineers seeking to find the problem with the MET discovered a separate software failure that could have proved catastrophic during landing. They fixed it just in time and landing was successful. Because the launch and landing were successful, NASA and Boeing initially painted a positive picture of the test despite its inability to perform rendezvous and docking operations with ISS.  However, the post-flight investigation showed troubling failures at Boeing and the decision was made to refly the OFT before attempting the crewed flight test. Because this is a fixed price contract, Boeing must pay for the additional test. In January 2021, Boeing and NASA set March 25, 2021 as the launch date for OFT-2, but that slipped to July and then to August 3. Boeing had to scrub the launch about two hours before liftoff because 13 propulsion valves would not open. The launch was postponed to sometime in 2022. OFT-2 finally successfully flew in May 2022. The Crew Flight Test is next. On November 3, 2022, NASA announced another delay, from February to April 2023, and in June 2023, Boeing delayed it indefinitely due to newly discovered problems. By October 2022, Boeing had had to pay almost $900 million of its own money for Starliner because it is a fixed price contract and in July 2023 revealed it had another $257 million loss on the program. In August 2023, Boeing said the Crew Flight Test will take place no earlier than March 2024.

While the success of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is generating considerable excitement, it is important to remember that its first launch was four years later than planned. Advocates place the blame for the delay on Congress because it provided less-than-requested funding in the early years. That is correct for FY2011-FY2014, but since FY2015 the request was essentially fully funded, undercutting that argument. One of the goals of using a commercial approach was to save time and money over traditional government procurements, so it is difficult to say if that was a success.

Another goal was for the commercial crew companies to find non-NASA customers and SpaceX is demonstrating success on that score. In September 2021, an all-commercial crew of four flew the Inspiration4 mission, spending three days in Earth orbit. Jared Isaacman, the wealthy entrepreneur who paid an undisclosed price for the entire mission, subsequently announced he purchased another three SpaceX missions, two of which will be on Crew Dragon. The third will be the first human spacefight of SpaceX’s Starship, which is still in development. Isaacman calls them the “Polaris” missions. He said on October 3, 2022 that the first, Polaris Dawn, would launch no earlier than March 1, 2023 and include the first commercial spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA). That date was extremely optimistic and soon slipped to 2024.

As for Starship, as of January 20, 2024, it had flown two test flights, in April and November 2023, and both were failures. SpaceX quickly recoups from such failures and tries again and is hoping to get its FAA license for the third flight in February 2024, but when Starship will be ready to take Isaacman on that first crewed trip to space is unclear.

On September 29, 2022, Isaacman, SpaceX and NASA revealed they are conducting a study, at no cost to NASA, on the feasibility of sending the second Polaris Crew Dragon to dock with the Hubble Space Telescope and boost its orbit and perhaps do other life-extension activities. Hubble was launched in 1990, but astronauts on five space shuttle missions replaced much of the hardware and all the instruments so it is not as old as the calendar would suggest. Its orbit is slowly deteriorating due to atmospheric drag, however, and needs a boost to keep operating far into the future.

Separately, Axiom Space has purchased at least four Crew Dragon flights. Unlike the Isaacman flights, these visit the International Space Station for several days of joint operations. The first, Axiom-1, took place in April 2022. The four-person crew, all private astronauts but one a retired NASA astronaut, spent almost twice as long in space as planned because poor weather in the splashdown area prevented their return.The crew was commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegria. The other three were wealthy men from the United States, Canada, and Israel. The price per seat has not been disclosed, but is rumored to be $55 million apiece. Russia has taken a number of tourists to the ISS (see below), but this was a first for the United States. All the ISS partners (the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries) must agree to whoever will visit the ISS.

Axiom-2, in May 2023, was commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson who also now works for Axiom. Joining her was race car driver John Shoffer and two Saudi government astronauts, Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni, from what is now the Saudi Space Agency.  Barnawi became the first Arab woman in orbit. (She was not the first Arab woman in space, however, a distinction that belongs to Sara Sabry who was a passenger on a Blue Origin suborbital flight in August 2022). The first Saudi to fly in space was Sultan bin Salman Al Saud on the 1985 U.S. space shuttle mission STS 51-G.

Axiom-3 launched on January 18, 2024 with López-Alegria again in the commander’s seat. He is joined by three military pilots from Sweden, Turkey, and Italy: Marcus Wandt, Alper Gezeravci, and Walter Villadei. Gezeravci is the first Turkish astronaut. They will spend 14 days on ISS. López-Alegria is a dual citizen of Spain and the United States so they are calling Axiom-3 the first all-European spaceflight. Wandt was selected as a European Space Agency reserve astronaut, but the Swedish government decided to arrange for him to fly to ISS with Axiom rather than wait for an opportunity through NASA. Poland is doing the same thing.  ESA selected a new group of astronauts in 2023: five “career” astronauts who immediately went into ESA’s training program, 11 in the “reserve” corps, and one with a physical disability.

Separately, Axiom made a deal with NASA to fly an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates to the ISS for a routine 6-month crew rotation. Sultan Alneyadi was part of the Crew-6 mission. He, Barnawi and Alqarni were on ISS together, the first time three Arabs have been in space at the same time.

One additional note since Presidents sometimes like to take credit for successful ideas even though they predate their tenure, commercial cargo was a Bush Administration initiative and well underway by the time President Obama took office  Commercial crew was an Obama Administration initiative and well underway by the time President Trump took office.

Are Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo Really Commercial

The names “commercial cargo” and “commercial crew” imply that the systems are being built at the expense of the private sector, but the companies are supported by taxpayer dollars. NASA spent about $800 million on the COTS commercial cargo program for system development and continues to pay separately for services. The commercial crew CCtCAP awards to SpaceX and Boeing are for a total of $6.8 billion of taxpayer money.  How much the companies themselves are investing is proprietary information and neither NASA nor the companies will say how much they are spending.

At a September 2012 congressional hearing, NASA’s then-Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Bill Gerstenmaier conceded that the government was paying 80-90 percent of the costs for the development of the commercial crew systems, but a more current figure is not available.  On the other hand, both companies have had to pay themselves to fix problems like recovering from SpaceX’s 2019 explosion and Boeing’s OFT reflight and associated delays.

It is more accurate to refer to these as public-private partnerships (PPPs) than commercial activities, and the PPP terminology is, in fact, being used more often as NASA extends this acquisition model to other activities like the Human Landing Systems for the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024 (described below).

OTHER COMMERCIAL SUBORBITAL AND ORBITAL VEHICLES, ROCKET ENGINES

Suborbital flights that do not go into orbit around Earth, but fly to a high altitude and provide several minutes of microgravity when returning to Earth, are commonly used in the United States and elsewhere around the world for experiments that need minutes, but not hours or days, of microgravity. Historically, government agencies have been the providers of these services and also are users along with academic institutions and others.

Two U.S. companies, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, now are sending people and experiments into space on suborbital rides.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group created a company, Virgin Galactic, to take anyone with the requisite funds (the pricetag initially was $250,000, but has risen to $450,000) on suborbital flights using SpaceShipTwo (SS2), a derivative of SS1. The plan had been to build five SS2 vehicles. During a test flight on October 31, 2014, the only existing SS2 vehicle was destroyed in an accident that killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injured pilot Peter Siebold.  The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the accident, concluding it was co-pilot error, but criticizing the spacecraft’s design that made such an error possible. Scaled Composites, later part of Northrop Grumman, was in charge of building SS2 and the two pilots were Scaled employees.

Virgin Galactic took over construction of the vehicle from Scaled and a second SpaceShipTwo craft, Unity, is now flying. The company achieved a milestone in December 2018 when two pilots flew SpaceShipTwo above 80 kilometers (50 miles), which some consider the dividing line between air and space. On February 22, 2019, it achieved another milestone when two pilots were joined by another Virgin Galactic employee, Beth Moses, on a second flight above 80 kilometers. Moses is the company’s Chief Astronaut Instructor and the first woman to make a spaceflight on a commercially-developed space vehicle. On July 11, 2021, Branson himself flew over the 50-mile threshold with other Virgin Galactic employees (including Moses on her second flight).

The company said they would make their first commercial flight two months later, but instead paused all flights for almost two years — an “enhancement period” — to make modifications after tests indicated problems with the strength margins of certain materials. The next flight didn’t take place until May 2023 with only company employees onboard. The first revenue-producing commercial flight, Galactic-01, finally flew in June 2023, 19 years after Branson founded the company.

Four more revenue-producing flights flew in 2023, but the company announced in November 2023 that it will stop flying Unity after just two or three flights in 2024 and wait until the upgraded Delta version is ready. Delta can carry additional passengers and fly more frequently and thus will be more profitable. A test flight of Delta is planned for 2025 and revenue-producing flights in 2026. The company immediately began laying off employees.

There is no legal definition of where air ends and space begins. Virgin Galactic and the FAA use 80 kilometers (50 miles), but the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which certifies air records, uses 100 kilometers (62 miles) as that boundary. That was the altitude Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites had to achieve with SpaceShipOne in 2004 to win the Ansari X-Prize.

Blue Origin uses the FAI line of demarcation. Owned by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s reusable, suborbital rocket is New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space on a suborbital flight in 1961. Blue Origin flew 15 test flights, some carrying scientific payloads for NASA, before the first flight with passengers on July 20, 2021, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Bezos himself, along with his brother, Mark, famed aviatrix Wally Funk, and a German teenager, Oliver Daemen, make the approximately 10 minute flight up across the 100 kilometer mark and back down to the Texas desert. Daemen was the first paying passenger, but the price was not disclosed. Blue Origin had conducted an auction for the first seat on New Shepard and the high bid was $28 million. Oddly, the person who won the auction paid the money (which Bezos distributed to groups involved in STEM education) but decided not to fly at that time. He kept his identity secret until December 2021 when he revealed himself to be Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur.

Blue Origin began a regular cadence of passenger flights, one of which took Star Trek actor William Shatner to space for real instead of a Hollywood studio, but New Shepard flights were suspended for more than a year after a September 12, 2022 failure. No people were aboard that time, only scientific experiments, and Blue Origin has provided very little information about what happened. FAA closed its investigation into the failure in September 2023 and the return-to-flight mission took place successfully in December 2023. Once again only experiments, not people, were aboard.

In 2020, NASA announced it also is interested in flying people on suborbital vehicles like SpaceShipTwo or New Shepard either as part of astronaut training or scientists who want to conduct experiments. In October 2020, it selected Alan Stern as the first person to fly under this new “SubC” program. Stern is a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) perhaps best known as the Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission that flew past Pluto. NASA last flew people on suborbital flights in the 1960s with the Mercury and X-15 programs. Stern did not want to wait, however, and flew on a Virgin Galactic mission in November 2023. He and SwRI stressed he still will fly on a NASA-sponsored mission later.

Orbital launches are much more difficult than suborbital flight, but a number of entrepreneurial companies are developing such systems to launch satellites, far too many to track here.

The most successful so far is Rocket Lab, a U.S.-based company that originally launched only from New Zealand, but now has an additional launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Rocket Lab was one of three companies to get NASA contracts in October 2014 for “Venture Class” launch services to place very small satellites (cubesats, microsats, and nanosatellites) in orbit. Rocket Lab has had many successful launches of its Electron rocket and in July 2022 sent a spacecraft beyond Earth orbit for the first time, NASA’s CAPSTONE, which is orbiting the Moon. NASA is only one of Rocket Lab’s many government and private sector customers.

The other two to win Venture Class contracts were Firefly Space Systems and Virgin Galactic, which created Virgin Orbit as a separate part of Branson’s Virgin Group to develop the air-launched LauncherOne. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne failed during its first test flight May 2020, but had a few successful launches after that and was planning to offer services around the globe. However, a failure during its first international launch in January 2023 from the United Kingdom led to bankruptcy. It ceased operations in May 2023.

Firefly filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in April 2017, but is making a comeback with its Alpha rocket. Alpha finally made its first successful trip to orbit in October 2022, launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA. As noted above, it also signed an agreement with Northrop Grumman to provide engines for a new version of NG’s Antares rocket and the two companies will build a new medium-class rocket together.

Stratolaunch began as an air-launched rocket concept in December 2011 led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and Burt Rutan, who retired from Scaled Composites, but was a major contributor to the SpaceShipOne effort.  Stratolaunch rolled out its enormous aircraft–described as the largest in the world–for public viewing for the first time in 2017.  Like other air-launched space transportation systems (e.g. Pegasus, SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo, LauncherOne), the aircraft was intended to fly to a high altitude and  release the spacecraft, which would have its own propulsion system to continue its journey to space. The company’s plans changed following Allen’s death in 2018. Early reports were that the company would close, but it is remaking itself into a company to test hypersonic vehicles.

Blue Origin is planning rockets much larger than its suborbital New Shepard. New Glenn is being designed for Earth orbiting missions and New Armstrong to send payloads to the Moon. (Its rockets are named after the U.S. astronauts who first reached space, orbit, and the Moon, respectively.) Blue Origin also is building rocket engines using a different type of fuel (liquified natural gas, or methane) than traditionally used. Called BE-4, it was selected by the United Launch Alliance for its new rocket, Vulcan, which will replace the Atlas V.  The first launch of Vulcan successfully took place on January 8, 2024.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk is well known for his interest in creating a “multi-planet species” by sending a million people to inhabit Mars as a “backup plan” in case Earth is destroyed by natural or human-caused events. He now also is interested in missions to the Moon. In March 2017, he announced he would send two people around the Moon in 2018 in a Dragon capsule launched by his Falcon Heavy rocket. The Falcon Heavy made its first flight on February 6, 2018, but the day before Musk announced that he had decided against human-rating the Falcon Heavy and instead focus on using his next rocket, then called the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), for human spaceflight.

In September 2018, Musk announced that a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, had purchased the first BFR flight around the Moon, planned for 2023.  (Maezawa later decided to try out spaceflight closer to home and visited the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in December 2021.)

BFR is a two-stage vehicle and Musk renamed the first stage “Super Heavy” and the second stage, which will carry crew or cargo, “Starship.” Confusingly, the combination is also referred to as Starship. Musk is conducting tests of Starship at his Boca Chica, TX site near Brownsville. He named that test facility “Starbase.” Starship will be used for many types of missions, not only putting satellites and people in earth orbit, but sending cargo and crews to the Moon and beyond. As discussed below, NASA selected Starship as the lander for its first crew return to the Moon, Artemis III, planned for 2025.

The first launch of the combined Starship/Super Heavy took place on April 20, 2023 from Boca Chica, but was not successful. Nor was the second on November 18, 2023.

OTHER COMMERCIAL SPACE CONCEPTS FOR EARTH ORBIT AND THE MOON INCLUDING NASA’S ARTEMIS PROGRAM

Human Habitats and Modules. Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America hotels, worked for several years on a commercial space station using expandable modules (often referred to as “inflatable,” but the correct term is expandable). Two subscale prototypes —Genesis I and Genesis II — were launched on Russian rockets in 2006 and 2007 respectively.  In January 2013, NASA signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to add one of Bigelow’s modules to the International Space Station (ISS). The Bigelow Expandable Activities Module (BEAM) was launched to the ISS in 2016 on the SpaceX CRS-8 (SpX-8) flight and expanded in May 2016. Bigelow’s structures trace their roots to NASA’s cancelled Transhab project, which was intended to provide crew quarters on the ISS using such a module. BEAM is a small prototype. At one point, Bigelow wanted NASA to attach a full size B330 module to the ISS in 2020, a concept he called XBASE, but never pursued that. In fact, in December 2021, Bigelow transferred title and ownership of BEAM to NASA, so the company has apparently abandoned its space aspirations.

NASA opened a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the NEXT Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships-2 (NEXTStep-2) in 2016 to solicit ideas for space habitats. Six companies were selected in August 2016:  Bigelow, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman), Sierra Nevada, and Nanoracks.

Nanoracks is best known for arranging transportation for very small satellites (cubesats) to be delivered to the ISS for deployment into orbit. Its participation in NEXTStep-2 was a new venture for the company and it teamed with Space Systems Loral (now Maxar Technologies) and ULA to create the Ixiom concept. ULA’s Atlas V rocket uses an upper stage named Centaur. The Ixiom concept would have converted Centaur upper stages into habitats. America’s first space station, Skylab, was a converted upper stage for the Saturn V rocket, although it was never used as an upper stage.  It was modified into a space station before launch. The Ixiom concept appears to have been abandoned and should not be confused with Axiom Space that is building a commercial space station module and flying astronauts to the ISS. Nanoracks moved on to develop the commercial Bishop Airlock that is attached to ISS to make it easier to deploy cubesats. Now part of Voyager Space, Nanoracks also is one of the companies developing concepts for a Commercial LEO Destination for NASA (see next).

Recognizing that the ISS will not last forever, NASA is facilitating companies to build their own space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) so NASA can be just one of many customers buying whatever services it needs rather than owning the facility. The program is called “Commercial LEO Destinations” or CLDs. 

NASA contracted with 13 companies in 2018 to conduct studies of a potential LEO commercial space economy, but results released in May 2019 painted a questionable outlook. In June 2019, NASA announced new policies intended to entice companies to get into the commercial LEO business, including opening more commercial opportunities on ISS such as allowing space tourists to visit, with a price list of what they must pay for services like life support. The prices do not include transportation to get to and from ISS, which a customer would have to arrange with one of the commercial crew providers. NASA updated the pricing policy in May 2021.

NASA requested $150 million in FY2020 to facilitate the commercial LEO effort, but Congress allocated only $15 million. It repeated its $150 million request in FY2021, but received only $17 million.

Nonetheless, in January 2020 NASA awarded a contract to Axiom Space to attach the first of four modules to ISS that eventually will separate and operate as a free-flying commercial space station, Axiom Station.

NASA chose three more companies in December 2021 as part of its Commercial LEO Destination (CLD) procurement to design commercial space stations to succeed the ISS: Blue Origin partnered with Sierra Space and others, Nanoracks partnered with Lockheed Martin and others, and Northrop Grumman partnered with Dynetics and others. These modules would not initially attach to ISS, but exist as free-flying space stations from the outset. Northrop Grumman withdrew in October 2023 and joined the Nanoracks/Voyager Space effort instead, called Starlab. Europe’s Airbus is also a partner in Starlab.  The Blue Origin/Sierra Space space station is called Orbital Reef.

Congress warmed up to the commercial LEO concept, providing NASA $101 million in FY2022 and $224 million in FY2023. The FY2024 request is pending. NASA is eager to get at least one commercial space station in operation before the International Space Station comes to an end. NASA hopes to operate ISS through 2030.

Commercial Space and the Artemis Program to Return Astronauts to the Moon.  In March 2019, NASA was directed by the Trump Administration to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024, four years earlier than NASA was planning. The program is named Artemis after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology.  (See our Civil topic for more information.)

The Biden Administration supports Artemis, but acknowledged in November 2021 that the first Artemis human landing will not take place until 2025, and in January 2024 pushed the landing another year to September 2026.

The short deadline imposed by the Trump Administration did shape NASA’s approach to accomplishing the goal, however, with a strong focus on commercial as well as international partnerships.

NASA’s overall concept (“architecture”) initially was to launch astronauts in Orion crew capsules aboard Space Launch System (SLS) rockets to a small space station, Gateway, in a “Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit” or NRHO around the Moon. There the astronauts would transfer to a Human Landing System (HLS) to get down to and back from the surface. Once back at Gateway, they would return to Earth in Orion.

The architecture was challenged by some experts as too complicated. NASA later decided the Gateway was not “mandatory” to get astronauts on the Moon by 2024, but insisted it will be needed after that to support “sustainable” operations on the lunar surface. Gateway remains part of the plan.

NASA owns SLS and Orion (Boeing and Lockheed Martin, respectively, are the prime contractors), but is planning to acquire the Gateway and HLS through commercial and international partnerships.

NASA does not want to own the HLS systems, but to purchase services from companies just as it now buys commercial cargo and commercial crew services to ISS. That concept is controversial and legislation introduced in 2019 in the House would have required the government to own the HLS systems. The bill never proceeded beyond subcommittee markup, however, and the 2022 NASA Authorization Act does not include that requirement. But it does direct NASA to develop criteria “for determining whether NASA should make, manage, or buy key capabilities within the Program or engage with international partners to access such capabilities.” It further directs that only government astronauts may carry out Artemis human lunar landing missions including surface and in-space activities.

Gateway.  The initial version of Gateway will consist of only two components:  a Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and a Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO).

NASA signed a firm fixed-price contract with Maxar Technologies, which builds communications satellites (formerly the Space Systems Loral unit), for the PPE wherein it would build and launch the PPE and own it for one year after launch for an in-space flight demonstration. NASA then would have the option to buy it. The PPE is intended to be outfitted with much larger than usual solar panels that could provide 50 kilowatts (kw) of power for a solar-electric propulsion (SEP) system enabling Gateway to change its orbit around the Moon to meet various scientific objectives.

NASA signed a sole-source contract with Northrop Grumman for HALO, which is based on the design of the company’s Cygnus commercial cargo spacecraft.

PPE and HALO were to be launched separately and dock once in lunar orbit. However, NASA changed its mind in the spring of 2020 and now plans to integrate PPE and HALO together on Earth and launch them on a single rocket, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

In July 2023, Northrop Grumman reported a $36 million loss on the HALO fixed price contract.

NASA intends to evolve the Gateway beyond the PPE and HALO, adding modules and other hardware provided by international partners. Supplies would be delivered by international and/or commercial partners. The agency has agreements with Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency (ESA), all existing partners in the International Space Station (ISS) program, to contribute hardware. Canada will supply a robotic arm, Canadarm3, similar to those it built for the space shuttle and ISS. ESA will build the European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (ESPRIT) refueling module and, with Japan, an iHAB international habitation module. At one time NASA hoped Russia, another ISS partner, would provide an airlock, but Russia showed little interest and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, NASA began looking at alternatives. In January 2024, NASA announced that the United Arab Emirates will build the airlock.

As for commercial partners beyond the public-private partnerships, SpaceX won the first Gateway logistics contract in 2020.

Human Landing Systems (HLS). NASA originally planned to build the HLS systems using traditional contracts where it would be the owner. Its notional design comprised three stages:  a Transfer Vehicle to reach a lower orbit around the Moon than is possible with Orion or the Gateway; a Descent Vehicle to reach the surface; and an Ascent Vehicle to return to Gateway.

After the directive to get people back on the Moon by 2024, however, NASA decided to procure the HLS systems through public-private partnerships, leaving the design to the companies proposing to build them. On April 30, 2020, NASA awarded 10-month study contracts to three bidders: a Blue Origin-led “national team” with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper; SpaceX; and Dynetics, which had a number of partners including SNC.

Blue Origin’s bid was the only one resembling NASA’s three-stage concept: transfer vehicle, lander, and ascent vehicle.  Blue Origin’s Blue Moon concept was the lander. Lockheed Martin would have provided the ascent vehicle based on Orion. Northrop Grumman would have provided the transfer vehicle based on Cygnus.

Dynetics proposed a two-stage concept, and SpaceX proposed one-stage, Starship (although many Starship launches are required to accomplish the entire mission, not just one). Quick descriptions of the three designs are available in an April 30, 2020 SpacePolicyOnline.com article.

The companies spent their own money in addition to the NASA awards ($579 million to Blue Origin, $253 million to Dynetics, and $135 million to SpaceX) on the concept studies. In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to proceed, prompting protests from Blue Origin and Dynetics to the Government Accountability Office, which denied the protests in July 2021. Blue Orign then sued NASA in federal court, but also lost.

At the time, NASA was committed to returning astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024, though many were skeptical that could be achieved. As noted earlier, some in Congress object to the entire concept of allowing the private sector to own the landers. More importantly, congressional appropriators provided only 25 percent of the funding NASA requested for FY2021 to proceed with HLS development. The Biden Administration supported the 2024 goal, but as noted earlier the date now has slipped to 2026.

NASA thinks it imperative to have two HLS contractors to ensure competition and redundancy, but the cut in funding in FY2021 meant NASA could choose only one, SpaceX. As noted above, Blue Origin protested the award, but lost.

NASA still insisted that having at least two companies was crucial.  In 2021 it opened a Lunar Exploration and Transportation Services (LETS) solicitation for landings after Artemis III, but changed its mind and awarded a second HLS service contract to SpaceX for Artemis IV (which originally was not going to involve a landing). For Artemis III, Starship will dock directly with the Orion spacecraft, but beginning with Artemis IV, Starship HLS will dock with the Gateway and the astronauts will transfer from Orion into Starship through the Gateway.

For landings after that, NASA opened a new Sustaining Lunar Development solicitation in March 2022. In its quest for a second supplier, it was open to any company except SpaceX. Blue Origin won so there now are two HLS suppliers.

Although NASA promotes a vision of sustainable, long-term lunar exploration and utilization, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has said NASA itself plans only one landing per year over about 10 years. It is using the lunar missions only as a “proving ground” before sending people to Mars. Whether a sufficient commercial and international market will develop to support multiple HLS providers remains to be seen, one of the risks for companies in public-private partnerships.

Robotic Lunar Landers. Even before the 2019 Trump directive to accelerate the human return to the Moon by four years, NASA established a PPP program for companies to build and launch small robotic lunar landers that will precede astronauts as well as work in tandem with them for lunar exploration.

Through this Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, NASA is simply buying services from companies that develop and launch the landers on their own. NASA provides only science and technology experiments to be placed on the landers and money, with the expectation that the companies will find other customers to put other payloads on the vehicles to make it profitable.

The failures in 2019 of small lunar landers built by Israel’s SpaceIL (Beresheet) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (Vikram) underscored how difficult it is to successfully land on the Moon.  NASA officials said they realize the difficulty and will be satisfied if only 50 percent of the CLPS missions succeed, calling it “taking shots on goal.”

Its plan is for two CLPS launches per year, but the schedule is constantly changing. The first two were supposed to launch in 2021, one from Astrobotic and another from Intuitive Machines.  Astrobotic’s first flight, of the Peregrine lander, finally launched on January 8, 2024 on the first launch of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket. The launch was perfect, but Peregrine experienced a fuel leak and could not accomplish its mission.  As of January 20, 2024, the first Intuitive Machines launch, on a SpaceX Falcon 9, is expected in mid-February.

They are just the first of the CLPS missions. NASA awarded Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts to nine companies in 2018 and five more in 2019 to deliver NASA payloads to the lunar surface. They are eligible for task order assignments. The first three task orders in June 2019 were awarded to Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines as noted above. The third went to a company called Orbit Beyond, but it withdrew shortly thereafter.

In 2020, three more task orders were awarded: Masten Space Systems to deliver nine NASA instruments to the lunar South Pole in December 2022, Intuitive Machines to deliver the PRIME-1 drill by December 2022, and Astrobotic to deliver NASA’s VIPER lunar rover to the lunar South Pole in late 2023. Masten filed for bankruptcy in August 2022 and although some of its assets were acquired by Astrobotic, the CLPS task order was not part of that and its fate was decided by the bankruptcy court. NASA says the payloads it had on that mission will be reassigned to others.  As of January 20, 2024, Intuitive Machines’ PRIME-1 drill still shows on NASA’s schedule as 2023. In July 2022, NASA delayed the VIPER mission to 2024 to provide more time for testing Astrobotic’s new Griffin lander.

Whether that next Astrobotic launch will be affected by Peregrine’s failure remains to be seen. NASA paid Astrobotic $108 million for the Peregrine delivery services and the 5 NASA payloads onboard cost another $9 million. By contrast, VIPER’s cost estimate is $433.5 million plus the $235.6 million NASA is paying Astrobotic for delivery services. A failure on that mission likely would be viewed quite differently than the loss of Peregrine.

Firefly and Draper have won task orders as well. The number of task orders and associated launch dates continuously changes. NASA keeps track of which companies have won task orders and current projected launch dates on its CLPS website, but does not show the original dates, obscuring the delays. That site also is not updated very often. NASA said it is up to the companies, not NASA, to announce launch dates.

The April 2023 failure of a commercial Japanese lunar lander, Hakuto-R M1, built by the Japanese company ispace, and the August 2023 failure of Russia’s Luna-25 continued to underscore the risks involved in these missions, all of which are headed to the region of the Moon’s South Pole. India’s success with Chandrayaan-3 on August 23, 2023 may be a sign the tide is turning, however, and Japan successfully landed SLIM in January 2024 although the solar cells did not supply power to the spacecraft and it lasted for only several hours before the battery was depleted. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) holds out hope that when the sun angle changes, it may be possible to rejuvenate the spacecraft.

Non-NASA Commercial Lunar Excursions

SpaceX plans Starship flights to Earth orbit and beyond separate and apart from its contracts with NASA. As noted earlier, in 2018 Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought the first Starship flight around the Moon, whenever it occurs.

Maezawa bought the entire flight of that Starship and has chosen companions to join him. In October 2022, Dennis Tito and his wife bought just two seats on the second Starship trip around the Moon, opening what SpaceX calls airline-like passenger travel where people can buy only the number of seats they want instead of the whole capacity.

Asteroid Mining and Other Unsuccessful Ventures.  Not all commercial space ventures are successful, but some can lead to policy changes nonetheless.

Two U.S. companies were pursuing asteroid mining, but neither is active in that business now.  Planetary Resources Inc. announced plans in April 2012 to mine asteroids with the backing of billionaires including movie producer and explorer James Cameron, Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi who flew into space twice as a space tourist on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and space entrepreneurs Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson. Later, however, the company emphasized that it wanted to prospect, not mine, asteroids, and later said it would focus on plans for earth orbiting satellites to study Earth. Ultimately, the company folded and was acquired by blockchain company ConsenSys in October 2018.

Deep Space Industries (DSI) announced its plans in January 2013.  In June 2016, DSI announced that it would stake an initial 200 million Euros to become the “Silicon Valley” of space resource utilization.  However, in May 2018, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation announced that DSI was a new associate member and described it as a space transportation company offering access to deep space, not asteroid mining.  On January 2, 2019, it was acquired by Bradford Space Systems, a European company, to produce a water-based electrothermal propulsion system called Comet.

Although the companies failed in their asteroid mining pursuits, they did stimulate a policy debate about ownership of space resources. In November 2015, President Obama signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), P.L. 114-90, which allows U.S. companies to claim property rights to resources mined from asteroids.  The U.S. law has not been universally embraced by other countries. Russia, for example, claims that it violates Article II of the Outer Space Treaty.

Those objections have had little impact on U.S. policy, however. On April 6, 2020, President Trump signed an Executive Order spelling out the U.S. position in favor of commercial companies mining space resources and retaining rights to them. In May 2020, NASA announced plans to sign bilateral agreements, the Artemis Accords, with countries that want to participate in the Artemis program that further detail principles on commercial rights to lunar resources. Thirty-three countries had signed the Accords by January 2024.

The list of unsuccessful entrepreneurial space ventures is quite long. Among those that received substantial media coverage is XCOR, which was planning to send tourists into space, but went bankrupt. A December 30, 2018 story in the Los Angeles Times reports that individuals paid as much as $100,000 for tickets and were struggling to get their money back. Another failure was Golden Spike. In December 2012, Alan Stern, a space scientist and human spaceflight advocate, announced the company would sell human trips to the Moon. Stern is a former NASA Associate Administrator for Science. He and a number of other former NASA officials, including Gerry Griffin, an Apollo flight director who later was the Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, along with former House speaker Newt Gingrich, entrepreneur Esther Dyson, and former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson were backers of the project. The group provided few details of the project at a press conference at the National Press Club on December 6, 2012, such as what rockets or spacecraft would be used. The cost was to be $1.4 billion per mission, which would take two people to the lunar surface and back. By May 2016, the company’s website was no longer active.

Dennis Tito, another billionaire, who was the first “tourist” to fly to the International Space Station on a Russian spacecraft in 2001, formed another venture called Inspiration Mars. His initial proposal was to send two people, preferably a married couple, to Mars in 2018. They would not land on the planet, but fly on a free-return trajectory where, once launched from Earth, few maneuvers (and therefore fuel) are needed to get them to and around Mars and return to Earth.  Their closest approach to the Martian surface would be 100 miles. The year 2018 was important because Mars and Earth are correctly aligned only every 26 months to permit spacecraft to make the journey. Some opportunities are better than others in terms of the amount of propellant needed; 2018 was one of the best. In November 2013, however, Tito testified to Congress and revealed that he now wanted this to be primarily a NASA mission. NASA replied that it was “unable to commit to sharing expenses” with him.  The idea nevertheless evolved into a “Mars Flyby 2021” concept championed for several years by House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) that would be a NASA mission. Launching in 2021, it would have first flown towards Venus to get a gravity assist from that planet to reach Mars since the Earth and Mars are not aligned properly for a direct flight that year. Rep. Smith retired at the end of the 115th Congress.

The number of entrepreneurial companies planning suborbital or orbital missions near Earth or further out in space is continually changing and some companies that go bankrupt come back to life. It is not feasible to keep this summary up to date, but hopefully provides useful information.

U.S. AEROSPACE COMPANIES

Hundreds of companies are involved in the aerospace sector, even when looking only at the “space” part of the business and not aircraft. The following list is not meant to be exhaustive, but to provide links to some of the companies that are most often referenced in discussions about space policy.  The list of entrepreneurial companies is especially subject to change as new companies enter the business or existing ones merge with other companies or fail.

The “big three” U.S. aerospace companies are:

In addition, Boeing and Lockheed Martin co-own

Other major aerospace companies that manufacture spacecraft, instruments and/or launch vehicles and/or provide launch services including for personal spaceflight include:

  • Astra (small launch vehicles, on-orbit electric propulsion systems)
  • Astrobotic (robotic lunar landers, acquired parts of Masten in 2022)
  • Axiom Space (commercial space station, personal spaceflight)
  • Ball Aerospace (spacecraft and instruments)
  • Blue Origin (suborbital and orbital rockets, rocket engines, personal spaceflight)
  • Dynetics, a Leidos Company (space systems)
  • Firefly Aerospace (launch vehicles, engines, robotic lunar landers)
  • GeoOptics (radio occultation weather data)
  • International Launch Services (launch services)
  • Intuitive Machines (robotic lunar landers)
  • L3Harris  [in 2019, L3 merged with Harris (which had previously acquired Excelis); in 2023, L3Harris acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne]  spacecraft instruments, rocket engines
  • Maxar Technologies (incorporating Space Systems Loral, DigitalGlobe, and Radiant Solutions — earth observation and communications satellites and services)
  • Paragon Space Development Corp. (environmental control and life support systems)
  • Planet (formerly PlanetLabs) (earth remote sensing, which bought Terra Bella, which was previously Skybox)
  • Raytheon (spacecraft instruments, acquired Blue Canyon in 2020)
  • RedWire Space (acquired Made in Space June 2020)
  • Relativity Space (launch vehicles)
  • Rocket Lab USA (launch vehicles)
  • Sierra Space (a carve out from Sierra Nevada Corporation) (reusable cargo/crew spacecraft, commercial space stations)
  • SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) (reusable launch vehicles, crew and cargo spacecraft, satellite communications)
  • Spire (radio-occultation weather data)
  • Terran Orbital (spacecraft)
  • Voyager Space Holdings (acquired Nanoracks) (commercial space stations)

Major companies that sell space-related products or services include:

Entrepreneurial companies:

MAJOR NON-U.S. AEROSPACE COMPANIES

There also are hundreds of non-U.S. companies in the aerospace sector. The following list is not meant to be exhaustive, but to provide links to companies that are most often referenced in discussions about space policy.

Updated January 20, 2024.  Didn’t find what you were looking for? Let us know by emailing us at info@spacepolicyonline.com

Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 5:26 pm ET

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