Ottawa, ON – Today it is commonplace to see NASA astronauts flying to the International Space Station on SpaceX vehicles. But there was a time when such a public-private partnership would have been unthinkable, and the accomplishments of such a private space company would have never come to pass. What made all this possible was a fundamental attitude change on the part of NASA.
This transformation was examined by NASA Chief Economist Alex MacDonald at Space Bound 2024, the annual conference hosted by the industry association Space Canada. It was held at Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of Nature on September 24-25, 2024.
MacDonald was taking part in the first day panel discussion, ‘Empowering the Private Sector: Partnerships Driving the Future of Space’, when he made his observations. Back in the days of the Space Shuttle, “NASA really saw itself as a space exploration agency responsible for delivering space exploration missions,” he told a standing room only audience, “If it wasn’t a NASA mission, it wasn’t our responsibility.”
NASA’s change of heart began when it invested half a billion dollars in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which led to successful private sector spacecraft launches by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. “That was really the start of a big shift in strategy,” said MacDonald. It not only led to NASA forging public-private partnerships with SpaceX and Boeing worth many billions of dollars, but also fundamentally changed attitudes within the space agency itself. (After all, no other country has ever turned to the private sector first for cargo space missions, and then for crewed spaceflights, he noted.)
Making this change wasn’t just a matter of accepting that the private sector has a role to play in spaceflight. It was much bigger than that: Suddenly, NASA realized that opening its tent to the outside world meant access to more talent, resources, and drive than the agency could muster on its own. The people in the agency grasped that “there was no way we were going to achieve our ambitions …. without harnessing the enthusiasm of the entire population of the private sector,” Macdonald concluded. Today, “we are relying on the commercial sector for getting us back to the Moon. It’s been going pretty well so far.”
The importance of NASA’s mindset shift was acknowledged by Wade Larson, Earth Daily Analytics’ EVP of Business Development and Co-founder. “The reason the Americans are so far ahead of Canada is that they have gone through the painful process of difficult policy decisions,” he said. To reinforce the importance of this point, and why private-public partnerships matter, Larson cited the accelerated development and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines during the recent pandemic. It was the public sector that put up the money for the project, he said, but it was the private sector that had the resources and supply chains needed to deliver the desired results. The proof can be found in the millions of people who avoided serious COVID infections, thanks to mass vaccinations.
- Read more coverage from the Space Bound 2024 conference.