In part one yesterday of this two-part essay, I described the likelihood that Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointment to be NASA’s next administrator, will push to cancel NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule, deeming them too expensive, too unsafe, and too cumbersome to use for any viable effort to colonize the solar system.

I then described how the Artemis lunar landings could still be done, more or less as planned, by replacing SLS with Starship/Superheavy, and Orion with Starship. Such a change would entail some delay, but it could be done.

This plan however I think is short-sighted. The Artemis lunar landings as proposed are really nothing more than another Apollo-like plant-the-flag-on-the-Moon stunt. As designed they do little to establish a permanent sustainable human presence on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.

Isaacman however has another option that can create a permanent sustainable American presence in space, and that option is staring us all in the face.

And now for something entire different

Capitalism in space: I think Isaacman should shift the gears of Artemis entirely, and put a manned Moon landing on the back burner. Let China do its one or two lunar landing stunts, comparable to Apollo but incapable of doing much else.

The primary goal of Artemis should therefore not be to land humans on the Moon, but to first create a multi-faceted American space industry focused on competition and free enterprise, doing many different things. Such a goal would result in the kind of robust capabilities that would allow Americans and American industry to dominate the solar system for centuries.

Isaacman should therefore focus on the using all the remaining assets of Artemis — as well as the fleet of space stations that private American companies are presently building to replace the ISS — to build a sustainable real space-faring industry in Earth orbit that will quickly expand outward naturally to the Moon and beyond.

This reshaped program should begin with those four space stations already under construction. All together they involve practically every major or minor aerospace company.

• Vast hopes to launch its Haven-1 single module station in 2025 and have it quickly occupied for 30 days by a four person crew. It will then follow with a full size multi-module station, Haven-2, having nine modules total. It is so far the only station being built with no NASA funding, financed entirely with private capital. It will use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules for transportation.
• Axiom’s station will first be attached to ISS, but once enough modules are in place it will then be undocked and fly free. The company has already flown three commercial tourist trips to ISS, with a fourth planned in the spring of 2025.
• Starlab, being built by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, will be a two module station that the European Space Agency hopes to use as its main orbital platform.
• Orbital Reef is a project being led by Blue Origin, using its New Glenn rocket. Most of the work however so far has been done by its partner, Sierra Space, which is building expandable habitable modules for the station but which it is also making available for sale to others.

It seems to me that the best thing Isaacman can do in the near term is to use the money saved on SLS and Orion to promote the development of these and other stations. This would not only foster many different aerospace companies, both new and old, it would spread the wealth to many states and congressional districts, making politicians happy, but do so in a logical manner that would not raise the cost of these projects.

Like NASA’s on-going commercial deals to ferry crew and cargo to ISS, these additional space station contracts should all be fixed-price, with NASA also demanding that the companies commit some of their own capital. After all, in the end they will own the orbiting facility. They should take on some of the risk.

Isaacman’s own thinking aligns with this approach, as he noted in a tweet he posted on October 18, 2024:

The bottom line is, [the older big space] companies have faced little competition for decades — and without that competitive pressure, they have become so bloated that they can’t take on a fixed-price project without hemorrhaging cash. Meanwhile, cost-plus contracts are designed to drag on for years at great expense to taxpayers.

The government has been conditioned to think this is the only way, though I give NASA a lot of credit for having the foresight to create the Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew programs. … NASA does seem to truly recognize the value of fixed-price contracts and getting the best service for the lowest price.

At first glance I know this space station policy suggestion sounds like a boring continuation of NASA’s overall unproductive ISS program. It is most definitively not. ISS was NASA owned and operated. Thus efficiency was never a high priority, and profit was in fact discouraged by NASA aggressively. For this reason ISS never produced any viable or salable products during its entire lifespan. Researchers could do research, but they were not allowed to produce products they could actually sell for profit.

The new stations are all private owned. The companies running them will be glad to take NASA’s business, but they — not NASA — will decide what else happens on their stations. If other customers wish to use a module for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals for sale back on Earth, the companies will surely sell them rental space. On ISS NASA blocked such commercial enterprises. On these private stations commercial enterprise will be their main function.

Furthermore, these space station companies will be in competition with each other for this business, the best thing possible for driving costs down and promoting innovation.

Even more important, these stations will not be built by NASA, which will give Isaacman the justification to significantly reduce the staffing and bureaucracy at NASA. If private companies are doing all the work, there is no reason to have many of NASA centers scattered across the country. Many can easily be eliminated and the entire space industry would not notice. With a renewed private space industry scattered in many of the same states and locations, politicians in Congress who only care about jobs won’t mind either, In fact, it is likely that many of the laid off NASA employees will quickly get jobs at these new companies.

Artist rendition of the proposed Nyx cargo capsule
being built by the French startup The Exploration
Company

These multiple space stations will also create more business opportunities for the many old and new rocket and cargo capsule companies in both the U.S. and Europe. All four stations will need ferrying services, and the competition to provide this service will not only spur growth but require efficiency.

As I have already noted, all this new business will please politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, because it will generate jobs and prosperity in areas they represent. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the politicians from both parties in southern Texas what they think of SpaceX. You won’t find anyone complaining. Instead, you will hear enthusiastic support.

Nor should Isaacman limit NASA’s program to just these four stations. For example, other companies are already flying or plan to fly independent returnable capsules and spacecraft on which zero gravity manufacturing for profit is planned. One company, Varda, has already proved the concept with its first capsule. Encourage these Earth orbit businesses, and soon NASA will be irrelevant, because the profits from the products produced in space will overwhelm NASA’s entire budget.

In this context, if NASA should decide to end its Lunar Gateway project, the agency could still hand everything that has been built to the companies involved. Maxar and Northrop Grumman and the other Gateway partners could then quickly develop and launch their own station, thus enhancing the competition in Earth orbit. The agency could also hold onto this project, but if so it should aggressively rethink its purpose and location, and do so with these private companies as well as the international partners involved.

As for SpaceX’s Starship, Musk has always been designing it for Mars settlement. To do that however he has to learn how to engineer the spaceship’s interior properly for interplanetary travel. Thus, flying some Starships as space stations — for profit — is a perfect way to mix development with operations, something that SpaceX has always made a standard operating procedure.

Along these same lines, getting the lunar variant of Starship to the Moon will require it to be refueled once in orbit, and that refueling will require many additional Starship launches. In other words, SpaceX needs to create a Starship refueling operation in Earth orbit for landing Starship on the Moon. Why not expand that operation to provide refueling service to other stations and spacecraft in Earth orbit — not just Starship? SpaceX thus will not only be developing this technology for its own uses as well as Artemis, but it do so while making money at the same time.

This shift of focus to Earth orbit would also likely find great favor with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin. Unlike Musk, Bezos’s reason for developing his space company is not to settle the solar system but to protect the Earth by shifting heavy manufacturing into space where it can do less environmental harm. His New Glenn rocket and Orbital Reef station both have this goal in mind, and a policy shift for the next few years towards developing such capabilities would be exactly in line with his own goals. How better to enlist his support.

The Eventual Future

My policy suggestion above does not preclude the present Artemis program to land on the Moon. It simply shifts the emphasis from trying to get there fast and in a manner that accomplishes nothing but repeat the Apollo landings. Instead, it proposes surrounding that Artemis lunar program with a far more capable aerospace industry able to quickly improvise the new technologies needed to build a base on the Moon successfully.

The Oklahoma land rush, about to be
re-enacted in space

You want to colonize the solar system? You will need real interplanetary spaceships to do it, and building and operating functioning and reliable space stations is exactly what you need to do first. Support these stations and NASA will fuel the innovation and new designs that will make the colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids quickly practical.

You want to generate profits to pay for this exploration? Every one of those space stations is focused on making money from space. Not only are they gathering customers who want to fly on those stations, they are gathering businesses that want to use the weightless environment to create products to sell on Earth for profit. These profits will quickly be pumped back to create new space-related services, such as orbiting astronomy telescopes far superior to Hubble or Webb, or asteroid mining missions using the stations as manufacturing and processing hubs.

And in the end, these near Earth capabilities will make getting back to the Moon not only easier, they will make building bases there far more likely. Without much difficulty this tortoise-like space station effort will soon swamp China’s Apollo-like lunar program. And the knowledge gained from this will further fuel the knowledge required to build the more difficult bases on Mars.

Isaacman need only lay out a more relaxed Artemis program of lunar missions, tied not to China’s schedule, but to the development in Earth orbit of the technologies needed to make those landings and the establishment of a viable lunar base practical. The lunar program could still be the centerpiece of the program, inspiring it forward, but not on the present schedule that makes no sense.

Nullifying the Outer Space Treaty

Homesteaders heading west after the
Homestead Act of 1862

There is one more advantage to focusing initially on encouraging commercial operations in Earth orbit. The limits on private property in the Outer Space Treaty will not apply. The treaty forbids nations from claiming any territory on planets or asteroids, which prevents any nation like the U.S. from establishing its legal framework and property rights on any base it establishes.

The treaty’s limitations on private property do not apply however on any orbiting space object, from satellites to space stations. Instead, American law would automatically continue so that the ownership and investment rights of the station owners would be protected. So would the investments of the station’s customers from America, Europe, India, Japan, or any one of the other members of the Artemis Alliance. The Outer Space Treaty would thus be nullified, without any political or diplomatic struggle in the United Nations.

This nullification more than anything else could have profound positive consequences for the future of the solar system. It would establish property rights in space widely, among many commercial and international players. Such players will not want to give up those rights when they finally begin establishing operations on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids. And there will now be a lot of them, wielding a lot of political clout. Such clout would make changing the Outer Space Treaty far easier at that time.

Imagine: America would actually be doing something to extend its values of freedom, private property, competition, and the rule of law throughout the solar system. What a concept!

Of course, there is some risk involved in shifting away from the Moon initially, as I propose. It risks ceding that lunar territory to China, which will likely get there first, and then try to lay claim to it.

I don’t think this is a serious problem. If NASA works to encourage the growth of the largest possible profitable American space industry in Earth orbit, it will also create the foundation for a wave of settlement moving outward to the planets that will easily overwhelm the government-controlled programs of authoritarian nations like China.

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

In the end, give freedom the reins, and it will outrun everything. Let China have a few short moments of glory. It won’t last long as the freedom-loving capitalist west pours outward to dominate the future.

One Final thought

My proposal above is intended not so much as a specific plan, but a detailed suggestion for rethinking America’s space goals along better lines. There are innumerable variations possible.

My main point however is to let freedom and the American people do the work, not NASA or the government. The last thing Americans need is another “space program.” What we need is a chaotic, free space industry of many companies and individuals following their own individual dreams in space (while making money), and with NASA and the government simply on the sidelines providing support and aid.

Let freedom ring, and all things will quickly become possible.