When NASA ended its space shuttle program in 2011, analysts questioned whether the space agency — and space exploration as a whole — was in decline. Five years later, those critics have been all but silenced with the entry of new commercial space companies, which have proven novel rockets and engines and sent them into space on government missions.
Perhaps more importantly, these venture capitalist-founded businesses have rejuvenated public interest and started a second space race. Only this time, instead of a race to the moon between the US and the Soviet Union, private firms like billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are battling to see which company can first make it to Mars.
Compared to many of the other innovators, technologies and initiatives spotlighted for Defense News' 30th anniversary project, the ascent of commercial space is recent, but experts said the impact will be no less influential.
"I think the rise of the billionaire space startups — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic — really lit a fire in the space industry, which has forced DoD and the traditional defense primes to reconsider how they acquire, launch, and operate military space systems," said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center of Strategic and International Studies. "The story is still being written, but I think we will look back years from now and see that this second space age took off not with investments by the military or NASA but with commercial companies that were playing by different rules on a different timeline."
The US military has long been reliant on private industry to launch its payloads into space, namely Boeing-Lockheed Martin's joint venture United Launch Alliance (ULA). But after SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was certified in 2015 to launch national-security payloads, the Defense Department became able to compete its contracts among multiple vendors for the first time in a decade.
"Ultimately, leveraging of the commercial space market drives down cost to the American taxpayer and improves our military's resiliency," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said then. About a year later, SpaceX landed its first Defense Department contract: launching one of the Air Force’s GPS III satellites.
SpaceX’s entry is only the beginning. Other commercial space startups are also aggressively trying to crack into the defense sector. For instance, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are vying for a contract to make a reusable space plane for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Blue Origin is also developing a replacement to the Russian RD-180 engine currently used by ULA in its Atlas V rocket, and is getting funds from ULA to aid the process.
And as their billionaire founders develop and test groundbreaking new technologies for NASA, some of those capabilities could work their way into national security launches as well.
This article is part of a larger Defense News 30-year anniversary project, showcasing the people, programs and innovations from the last three decades that most shaped the global security arena. Go to
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Valerie Insinna is Defense News' air warfare reporter. She previously worked the Navy/congressional beats for Defense Daily, which followed almost three years as a staff writer for National Defense Magazine. Prior to that, she worked as an editorial assistant for the Tokyo Shimbun’s Washington bureau.
