Last week, on the same day the Artemis II mission blasted off for the first human flight around the Moon in more than 50 years, it emerged that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had filed for a record-breaking stock market listing to raise as much as $75bn. The coincidence brought the past and the future of US space exploration into sharp relief: one involves an expensive government programme seeking to rekindle the awe of Apollo-era human space flight, the other an entrepreneur gearing up to tighten his grip on the commercial space economy.
The very different economics involved make it inevitable that the US will increasingly rely on companies like SpaceX as it seeks to build on Artemis to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and venture further into deep space. Before that happens, it needs to fix what risks becoming an over-dependence on Musk’s company.
Artemis II, whose four-person crew is due to return to Earth late on Friday, is an impressive engineering feat founded on an old paradigm. It was built using the cost-plus method, so the main contractors faced no penalties for cost overruns or repeated delays. Its rocket boosters aren’t reusable, lifting the cost of each launch to $4.1bn.