Don’t expect SpaceX-NASA space race
LOS ANGELES — SpaceX, the upstart company, and NASA, the government agency, both have plans to venture to Mars and orbit the moon. But that doesn’t mean they’ve launched a new space race.
In fact, NASA has long been SpaceX’s most important customer, providing contracts to deliver cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station.
And the Los Angeles-area company will need NASA’s technical support to achieve the first of its grand ambitions in deep space.
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk acknowledged as much last week, shortly after announcing that SpaceX would launch two private, paying individuals on a weeklong lunar flyby in 2018.
“SpaceX could not do this without NASA,” Musk tweeted. “Can’t express enough appreciation.”
NASA, on the other hand, has come to rely on SpaceX and other companies for transport to the space station as its funding has tightened. In today’s dollars, the agency’s budget is about half what it was at the peak of the 1960s, and down from the 1990s.
In the wake of the SpaceX news, NASA issued a statement that said it is “changing the way it does business through its commercial partnerships,” in part to “free” the agency to focus on rockets and spacecraft to go beyond the moon into deep space.
“The whole idea is that NASA is at the point of a spear,” said Howard McCurdy, professor in the school of public affairs at American University. “It’s like exploration of any terrestrial realm. This is the way the model is supposed to work.”
Indeed, the rapid ascent of Musk and other space industry pioneers is validation of the publicprivate partnership envisioned when Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984.
By the mid-2000s, NASA was signing contracts with the private sector to fill in for its own funding constraints and the impending retirement of the space shuttle program.
In 2006, SpaceX won its first NASA award for $278 million to help develop the company’s nowworkhorse Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule.
It later received an additional $118 million, and SpaceX contributed a total of about $454 million of its own funds to finish development, according to a NASA report.
Two years later, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA contract to transport cargo to the space station. The deal came as the fledgling company of about 400 employees was starting to successfully launch the Falcon 1 from an atoll in the Marshall Islands.
It was not just NASA’s financial resources and technical support that helped SpaceX, said company President Gwynne Shotwell, but also the agency’s trust.
“We would not be the company that we are today without that early support from NASA,” Shotwell said.
“We would have made it, but it would have been more of a struggle, it would have taken us longer.”
A major milestone for the partnership came in 2012 when SpaceX launched its first NASA cargo load, making it the first private company to send a spacecraft to the space station.
Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at the Teal Group, said the NASA supply missions gave SpaceX “almost instant credibility.”
“Having NASA as an anchor client allowed them to have enough revenue flow so that they could establish themselves and eventually diversify and get some commercial contracts and eventually to be able to get into the military establishment,” he said.
Today, SpaceX and Boeing Co. are developing separate crew capsules as part of NASA contracts to transport astronauts to the space station.
SpaceX noted that this NASA program provided most of the funding to develop the Dragon 2 spacecraft, which will make the moon trip.
It is planning to conduct the first test flight of the Dragon crew capsule in November, followed by a flight test with humans in May 2018.
Once operational crewed flights to the space station are underway, the company said it would launch its Dragon capsule atop the Falcon Heavy rocket, which was developed with SpaceX funds, for the lunar mission in late 2018.
Other well-known, newer space companies have also recently been awarded NASA contracts, including Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
Both of those companies intend to target the suborbital space tourism markets, though Blue Origin has also unveiled plans for a launch vehicle called the New Glenn, which the company has said could lift astronauts to lowEarth orbit or even beyond.