Dear readers,
Welcome to Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extraterrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: Unhinged transition speculation, the first Black ISS crew member, and Relativity Space’s big fundraising round.
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President-elect Joe Biden is beginning to stock his new administration. Some Democrats worry that his White House staff will be too friendly to business, but his space appointments could face the opposite criticism.
Under the previous three presidents, many successes for the US space program emerged from public-private partnerships, while many traditional contracts suffered massive cost overages. Donald Trump’s National Space Council pushed regulatory reforms to enable more commercial activity in space, and its primary goal—rushing astronauts back the moon by 2024 depends on the engineering efforts of private firms.
The only problem is that this plan is not getting off the ground in time. NASA’s Inspector General released a report this month that summed it up: “[W]e believe the Agency will be hard-pressed to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024.”
That means the next administration will need an alternate vision for space exploration—either a re-working of the lunar timeline, or something more drastic. Given everything else happening in the world, it’s unlikely we see Biden’s team turn on a dime. The Trump administration didn’t make new decisions on space until about six months in, and recent presidents have tended to announce big space plans a year or two into their tenure. Still, the official transition teams for space-focused agencies don’t seem to include figures seen as bullish about private-sector space activity.
The current NASA chief, Jim Bridenstine, was an advocate for the public-private partnerships that gave NASA cheaper and more reliable access to low-earth orbit. Now the former Oklahoma lawmaker is stepping down, and his replacement will be key. Rep. Kendra Horn, an Oklahoma Democrat who was a critic of public-private partnerships and lost her seat in Congress, has floated herself as a potential space appointee. But another often mentioned potential nominee is former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, who championed such partnerships during the Obama administration.
Below the top dog, many NASA civil servants are enmeshed in public-private partnerships and understand them as enablers of space activity. For lunar exploration, NASA’s work hiring private companies to send robotic explorers to the moon will continue, and in low-earth orbit, private companies will gain expanded opportunities at the International Space Station thanks to commercial transportation systems.
And at the Pentagon, the Space Force is here to stay, as is an interest in leveraging private space innovation.
But it is less apparent how efforts to enable the US space industry will continue at the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other agencies that had been coordinated by the National Space Council under vice president Mike Pence. It’s not yet clear if the next vice president, Kamala Harris, will even take on the job of leading the body.
Advocates of space commerce, meanwhile, need to do the work to convince Biden’s science-focused team that their model is as effective for gathering climate data as it is for finding water on the moon or hurling people in orbit.
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IMAGERY INTERLUDE
Victor Glover became the first Black crew member on the International Space Station this week, which is great news and also pretty embarrassing.
The former Navy test pilot has called the milestone “bittersweet” in an interview prior to his mission. Just fourteen Black Americans have become astronauts, including a few who helped assemble the station but did not serve as long-term crew. I wrote about some of the challenges faced by Black people in aerospace after the first crewed Dragon launch earlier this year and we will revisit the topic again soon, so please share your thoughts.
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What’s cool? Jazz musician Lester Young coined the slangy usage of the word in the late 1930s. “When Young said, ‘I’m cool’ or ‘that’s cool,’ he meant ‘I’m calm,’ ‘I’m OK with that,’ or just ‘I’m keeping it together,'” Joel Dinerstein writes in his book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. The modern equivalent might be “chill.” For jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s, this attitude would translate into a sound marked by relaxed intensity and expression of one’s personal style.
To understand this early concept of cool, there’s no better method than listening to it. We asked Dinerstein to create a playlist for Quartz. He obliged, putting together this list of tracks representing the original sound of cool as it first evolved in jazz. Listen along in our field guide to the new meaning of cool.
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SPACE DEBRIS
Veganomaly. Tough sledding this week for European space giant Arianespace, which failed to launch a small Vega rocket successfully for the second time in as many years. The cause is thought to be human error during the assembly of the vehicle. Two European satellites were lost, and now the company will have to go through another investigation to bring the Vega back online, even as it works to meet the slipping deadline for its new large rocket, Ariane 6.
Relative to what? CNBC’s Michael Sheetz reports that Relativity, the 3D printing-focused small rocket builder, raised $500 million in new capital, led by the investment firm Tiger Global. Relativity didn’t comment, but after a 2019 fundraising round, CEO Tim Ellis told me the company had enough money to get through the planned launch of its first rocket in early 2021. Smart companies tend to raise money whenever they can, but alongside the departure of co-founder and CTO Jordan Noone in September, it seems safe to speculate that something has changed in Relativity’s path to orbit.
A mystery in Star City. A terrific piece of investigative reporting by Polina Ivanova tells the tragic story of Natalya Lebedeva, a physician at Star City, Russia’s most important human spaceflight center. Lebedeva was at the center of attempts to control the coronavirus there as American and Russian astronauts launched to the ISS, but found herself blamed for the outbreak, with ugly consequences.
Bad call. More details are emerging about the phone call to Boeing that led a NASA executive to resign and launched a grand jury investigation into how the agency awarded contracts for human landers. The Washington Post’s Chris Davenport reports that Doug Loverro, then NASA’s top human spaceflight executive, called a Boeing vice president during an official blackout period to learn if the aerospace giant would object when NASA declined its proposal. Instead, Boeing submitted an unexpected new bid, spooking officials and prompting the inquiry.
More Airmail Fiasco. Inspired by the crew Dragon, I wrote a little more about what the US can learn about building a space economy from Bill Boeing and the early days of aviation.
Your pal,
Tim
This was issue 74 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your choicest space investment tips, favorite historical aerospace fiascos, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.