NASA has grown extremely dependent on its commercial partners in the past few years, outsourcing the development of almost all of its spacecraft and missions so that it can, so the theory goes, save some of that sweet federal money.
But it seems this bargain might not be paying off, after all. In a paper published recently in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, researchers revealed that NASA’s commercial partnerships are not necessarily more cost-effective than if the agency had built the spacecraft itself.
The findings come as NASA faces severe budget cuts and massive layoffs that threaten several of its most ambitious and successful missions—while the private space industry continues to grow.
NASA’s long history with industry
NASA has been outsourcing its spacecraft and scientific instruments for decades. And in the last decade, it has become particularly dependent on Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The agency uses SpaceX’s Falcon rockets to launch many of its missions, and it relies on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to transport both cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA is also hoping to use SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship to make its ambitious plans to return to the Moon and establish a permanent base there, the Artemis missions, a reality
Winding the clock back to the Apollo era and earlier, however, the agency built, owned, and operated almost all of its rockets and capsules. Project Mercury, NASA’s first human spaceflight program which ran from 1961 to 1963, used spacecraft built in-house, and the same was true for the Apollo program to send astronauts to the Moon—still the only successful human missions to reach our natural satellite. NASA was also hugely involved in the design and development of the Space Shuttle fleet, the first reusable spacecraft that could transport cargo to orbit and back.
It wasn’t until the shuttle program ended in 2011 that NASA really began looking to industry to build its spacecraft for a fixed price. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing all bid for a chance to build spacecraft that would transport NASA astronauts to the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Other companies like Lockheed Martin built NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, as well as its Mars Reconnoissance Orbiter, while Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and Firefly Aerospace have all designed lunar landers to transport the agency’s payloads to the Moon.
Is it worth it?
The new paper looked at 69 projects, including 22 spacecraft built by NASA, and 47 by industry. It revealed two major findings: First, commercial space companies do excel at building low-cost, mass-manufactured spacecraft that don’t require too much specialization. They are also slightly more efficient at building low-risk satellites than NASA.
Second, and perhaps more controversially, when it comes to larger, high-impact and flagship science missions like OSIRIS-REx, industry players tend to run into the same constraints as the agency. In other words, they are just as inefficient as NASA, if not more so. These missions, the report suggests, are likely better off built in-house, by NASA. If nothing else, they are no cheaper when outsourced to industry, the analysis finds.
The research is compelling. But as the Trump administration continues to slash NASA’s budget and staff, it seems unclear what, if any, learnings the agency might take from the findings—especially as its core, flagship science missions, including Artemis, remain under such clear threat of funding cuts.