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: New NASA chief, the new business of space garbage, and a Martian ‘copter with the Wright stuff.
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The next NASA administrator will be 78-year-old former Florida senator Bill Nelson, a shoo-in to be confirmed by his old colleagues.
As a lawmaker, Nelson consistently brought home the bacon for Florida’s space coast. In 1986, he flew on a space shuttle mission, as the agency wooed the politicians responsible for NASA funding.
There’s a lot to like about Nelson’s nomination. Washington watchers value the relationship between an agency leader and the president: Nelson’s service alongside Biden in the Senate means the future NASA chief will get his phone calls to the Oval Office returned. And there’s no arguing with Nelson’s decades of engagement with space policy.
But Nelson’s critics warn that he was wrong about the most important space development in the last quarter century: The rise of public-private partnerships that have returned the US to global dominance in satellite launch and human spaceflight.
In 2009, Nelson fought a rearguard battle against the Obama administration’s push to expand commercial partnerships begun under president George W. Bush, blocking Obama’s initial appointees to the space agency. Following Obama’s decision to cancel the Constellation program, Nelson fought to grandfather in the long-delayed SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft.
NASA’s inspector general found that Congress provided just 38% of expected funding to the commercial crew program between 2011 and 2013. This added two years of delay to the SpaceX crew Dragon and Boeing’s still forthcoming Starliner.
By the middle of the last decade, Nelson changed his tune: The future of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center was now dependent on the private companies leasing what had formerly been government launch pads. SpaceX, Blue Origin, OneWeb, and other private firms poured investment into the space coast.
What does all that augur for Nelson’s tenure now? The previous administrator, Jim Bridenstine, argues that the job must be understood as political. NASA’s top executive needs to sell the agency’s agenda to lawmakers, academia, industry, and the public writ large. And like his predecessor, whose nomination was dogged by criticisms of his views on global warming, Nelson will have an opportunity to take a different approach as the leader of a national space program rather than a local constituency.
Bridenstine memorably abandoned his past views during his confirmation hearing. “It is very different representing the first district of Oklahoma than…being NASA administrator,” he explained, acknowledging the evidence for climate change and promising to protect NASA’s research into the topic.
Will Nelson deliver similar introspection? Put it this way: It’s hard to imagine Nelson attempting to stand up to a powerful senator, as Bridenstine did, in an effort to keep NASA’s exploration programs from being delayed.
This week, NASA announced its latest plans to encourage the creation of privately operated space stations that, in the future, could replace the International Space Station as destinations for government and commercial activities in low-earth orbit.
One of Nelson’s last NASA hearings as a senator in 2018 focused on exactly this topic. He and Texas senator Ted Cruz made clear that they had no confidence in the private sector’s ability to replace the ISS as a destination after 2025, and insisted that the station would last past its scheduled end date of 2028. Told that surveyed venture capitalists weren’t willing to invest in a space station, Nelson crowed “if I were trying a jury trial, I would say ‘your Honor, the plaintiff or the defense rests.'”
The point isn’t that the private sector is ready to replace the ISS, although today investors are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these plans. But in 2018, Nelson cast himself as a prosecutor of NASA’s economic development agenda. Is he ready now to lead it?
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IMAGERY INTERLUDE
Is there anything more on-brand for a Florida politician than eating citrus fruit while orbiting in a spacecraft that launched from Cape Canaveral?
👀 Read this 👀
For all the hype, the market for electric vehicles remains small. In the US, only 1.8% of new sales are electric. Even in an optimistic scenario, only a quarter of the new cars in the US will run on electricity by 2030.
One reason is price: Tesla’s cheapest model starts at $38,190, just under the average price of a new car in the US. To make them even cheaper, the company is betting on innovative manufacturing which costs less and produces new vehicles quickly; cheaper, longer-lasting batteries; and ever-more-efficient software. This week’s Quartz field guide goes behind the scenes to examine Tesla’s secret sauce.
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SPACE DEBRIS
Garbage grapplers. Two satellites broke apart in just the last week, a timely highlight of the importance of Astroscale’s ELSA-d mission, on orbit this week to demonstrate the company’s ability to seize dead satellites and put them on course to burn up before adding to the space junk problem. One key issue will be getting satellite operators to design their spacecraft for servicing—and that may in turn require the government to set new standards.
Bluestaq stacks. Speaking of space junk, a three-year-old start-up has won a $280 million contract from the US Space Force to continue developing a master database of objects being tracked in orbit.
The Wright Stuff. Ingenuity, the small helicopter that NASA sent to Mars on the Perseverance rover, is now expected to make its maiden flight on April 8. The nearly 4 lb. (on earth) drone will show its abilities in a specially designated “air field,” and sports a tiny swatch of fabric from the Wright brothers’ first plane as a nod to its aviation predecessors. Imagine telling old Orville that humans are flying heavier-than-air vehicles on Mars!
Shameless Moran. Kansas Republican Senator Jerry Moran published an op-ed arguing that if the Biden White House fails to endorse the Trump goal of returning US astronauts to the moon by 2024, “there is no doubt we will lose this space race to Russia and China.” It’s a baffling take from Moran, because last year he led the senate appropriations committee that delivered $2.4 billion less than NASA requested to build moon landers, virtually guaranteeing that deadline will be missed. It’s not a great sign for Artemis that Moran is turning the question of going back to the moon into a partisan debate.
Starlink, still growing. Following a mission this week, SpaceX has launched 420 new Starlink satellites in 2021. It is now operating more than 1,300 spacecraft, the largest satellite network orbiting the planet. Put another way, roughly one in three active satellites is owned by Elon Musk’s space company. Filling out the top five among private companies: Planet, OneWeb, Spire, and Iridium.
Your pal,
Tim
This was issue 89 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your expectations for NASA under Nelson, predictions for the LEO economy, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.