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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
For decades, NASA has increasingly leaned on corporate contractors to develop the spacecraft it uses to explore the solar system. Triumphs have included SpaceX\u2019s Dragon vehicles, which can now reliably shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station<\/a> and beyond<\/a>.<\/p>\n The widely parroted <\/a>idea is that players in the free market will be able to operate more efficiently than NASA\u2019s own stock of engineers, who masterminded the agency\u2019s triumphs of decades past, like the Apollo Moon missions and the Space Shuttle.<\/p>\n But are corporations actually more efficient at realizing NASA\u2019s goals? A recent paper<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, in some cases NASA was even more efficient than industry.<\/p>\n The private sector weather-observation satellite, Suomi NPP<\/a>, 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<\/a> , developed by NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, had a budget of just $73 million, adjusted for inflation.<\/p>\n Though spacecraft defined as class C and class D \u2014 less publicized, low-risk projects \u2014 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<\/a>, developed by Lockheed. Essentially, the paper finds, corporations excel at building spacecraft where lower quality components can be mass-manufactured with \u201cless oversight,\u201d but face the same constraints as NASA when development becomes more complex.<\/p>\n \u201cThe results suggest that the cost of spacecraft does not depend on the developer type for Class A\/B projects,\u201d the paper\u2019s authors write.<\/p>\n This flies in the face of some free-market utopian fantasies parroted by billionaires like Elon Musk<\/a> and Jeff Bezos<\/a>, who argue that the private market is naturally the more efficient option. Instead, the researchers find, spacecraft complexity<\/a> \u2014 not the spacecraft\u2019s developer \u2014 was the key metric influencing build cost.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the paper may be falling on deaf ears. Since rising to office, the Trump administration, with a helping hand<\/a> from Musk, has gutted some 20 percent of NASA\u2019s staff, including over 2,000 senior staffers<\/a> with \u201ccore mission\u201d experience.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s SpaceX, meanwhile, has been handed the keys to the proverbial kingdom, to the frustration of even his fellow space tycoons<\/a>. We can even see the paper\u2019s results at work in the real world: in 2021, SpaceX accepted a multibillion-dollar contract<\/a> with NASA to return American astronauts to the Moon using its still-struggling Starship<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n