For decades, NASA has increasingly leaned on corporate contractors to develop the spacecraft it uses to explore the solar system. Triumphs have included SpaceX’s Dragon vehicles, which can now reliably shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.
The widely parroted idea is that players in the free market will be able to operate more efficiently than NASA’s own stock of engineers, who masterminded the agency’s triumphs of decades past, like the Apollo Moon missions and the Space Shuttle.
But are corporations actually more efficient at realizing NASA’s goals? A recent paper in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets set out to settle the score through a close look at the finances of 69 space-faring projects of all sizes, including 22 spacecraft built by NASA, and 47 by the private sector.
For proponents of corporate partnerships with NASA, the results are embarrassing: the paper found that the contractors were just as inefficient as the government. And as the Financial Times flagged, in some cases NASA was even more efficient than industry.
The private sector weather-observation satellite, Suomi NPP, for example, was built by a constellation of firms like Raytheon and Ball Aerospace for $922 in 2012, adjusted for inflation. By comparison, the near-polar orbit observation satellite FAST , developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, had a budget of just $73 million, adjusted for inflation.
Though spacecraft defined as class C and class D — less publicized, low-risk projects — tended to be cheaper when built by the private sector, the difference quickly evaporates with more important class A and B projects like the $558 million OSIRIS-REx, developed by Lockheed. Essentially, the paper finds, corporations excel at building spacecraft where lower quality components can be mass-manufactured with “less oversight,” but face the same constraints as NASA when development becomes more complex.
“The results suggest that the cost of spacecraft does not depend on the developer type for Class A/B projects,” the paper’s authors write.
This flies in the face of some free-market utopian fantasies parroted by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who argue that the private market is naturally the more efficient option. Instead, the researchers find, spacecraft complexity — not the spacecraft’s developer — was the key metric influencing build cost.
Unfortunately, the paper may be falling on deaf ears. Since rising to office, the Trump administration, with a helping hand from Musk, has gutted some 20 percent of NASA’s staff, including over 2,000 senior staffers with “core mission” experience.
Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, has been handed the keys to the proverbial kingdom, to the frustration of even his fellow space tycoons. We can even see the paper’s results at work in the real world: in 2021, SpaceX accepted a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to return American astronauts to the Moon using its still-struggling Starship — which, no matter how you feel about the issue, will be an extremely public and high-stakes test of the role of corporate contractors at NASA.
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