![]() ![]() He hopes instead that his HBS course will prompt students to ask the right questions. Weinzierl does not pretend to have all the answers, given the rapid evolution of commercial ventures in space. He adds, however, that in both cases, “I personally don’t feel like those risks are as high as some people are afraid of.” “As soon as you decentralize, you get lots of people involved with private capital doing their own thing, and you might worry that risk is going to find its way into the system in new ways.” Another active worry is that private companies might draw capital and talented personnel away from legacy, public space players. “When you have run through public sector agencies, whether civilian or military, because of their centralized control, there is a tremendous amount of risk management,” Weinzierl says. “We’re just scratching the surface, really just starting to discover what’s in the realm of the possible.”ĭespite its many benefits, increased privatization comes with drawbacks. “This is one kind of niche use case with a real impact,” Rosseau says. Within 48 hours, Starlink, SpaceX’s internet satellite company, had sent some of its 1,500 active satellites to restore internet in parts of the country. In late February, Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov sent a tweet to SpaceX’s Elon Musk requesting that he route internet satellites to spots in Ukraine experiencing broadband outages. Private actors in the space-for-earth economy are currently playing an important role on the world stage, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Unfortunately, the part that you often see is the fun rides into space where it looks like they’re partying.” Weinzierl acknowledges that private actors are of course motivated by profits, but adds that companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin “view themselves as providing public goods at some level,” like increasing the capacity for climate-change observation above the atmosphere. This includes the launch of scientific observation hardware to better monitor climate change and predict catastrophic weather events, as well as internet satellites that provide low-cost connections to remote users. As of 2019, 95 percent of the $366 billion sector was in what’s called the “space-for-earth” economy: goods or services produced in space for use on earth. Well-resourced private actors have propelled the space sector toward the economies of scale it needs to put more people and more infrastructure, such as national security and internet satellites, into space. “Commercialization doesn’t have to be a dirty word,” adds teaching fellow and course research associate Brendan Rosseau. "It's been a fundamentally interesting shift for anyone who cares about space or," he adds, "the future of humanity.” He says, “That was when really took off." Public-private partnerships, although long-standing in the space industry, are tighter now than ever before. “Coincidentally, or perhaps fortuitously,” Weinzierl says, this coincided with tech entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk launching their own space-exploration ventures. NASA hoped that, by pooling their resources with private capital, they could spur sustainable space exploration. The new approach involved seeking out private partners. “If we were not going to be able to put our own astronauts up in space, we needed a new approach.” “That really woke everybody up to the fact that, in this centralized model, something was broken,” he says. The Space Shuttle program was then scheduled for full cancellation by 2011. Then, in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, “there was a push to move the sector toward a more commercial basis.” However, the “real inflection point” came in 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated midflight and killed seven crew members. “As soon as Sputnik went up in 1957, started making sure that there were private sector companies building things that would help” their efforts. “On one level, there was a space industry as long as we’ve been going to space,” he said in an interview. Weinzierlįor Weinzierl, recent headlines about the privatized, “billionaire space race” tell only a fraction of a much longer story.
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