We Need a Private-Sector Overhaul of U.S. Space Exploration

Originally planned for this month, NASA’s crewed flyby of the Moon on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket has been pushed back until March, following a lengthy string of delays and missed opportunities in the SLS rocket and the broader Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon. This is a major problem for the U.S., as China will conduct key tests this year as part of their own plan to return humanity to the lunar surface.

Time is of the essence in this new space race, and the SLS has a long history of its schedule slipping. America’s efforts to return to space could use a shot in the arm — one that only the private sector can provide.

NASA’s initiative to return humans to the Moon has faced persistent challenges and numerous delays. It has been three years since SLS’s first unmanned test flight, and after a hydrogen leak detected during Tuesday’s “wet dress rehearsal” — a final practice run before the actual launch — the return will have to wait a little longer. This is just one example of the program’s history of delays and slipping schedules. The rocket was originally intended to first fly in late 2017. It will not return astronauts to the Moon before 2028 at the earliest, due to what NASA calls persistent technical issues.

But Dr. Robert Zubrin, who helped design plans for NASA’s manned mission to Mars, believes that part of the reason for the delays is a lack of impetus. “The problem is not that Artemis 2 is being delayed,” he told National Review. “The problem is that it doesn’t matter that it is being delayed. NASA’s human space flight program needs a useful purpose.”

The program hasn’t just been inefficient in terms of time, but it’s been a money drain as well, a sign of the inherent inefficiency of even noble governmental endeavors. Even by the standards of government procurement, the rocket is massively over budget. The SLS was originally supposed to cost $7 billion. But before it has even flown a single crew of astronauts, taxpayers have already spent roughly $32 billion on the SLS rocket, according to the Planetary Society. The capsule necessary for astronauts to operate the rocket already comes to another $20 billion. In 2023, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General estimated SLS will cost $93 billion for the rocket to deliver astronauts to the Moon, and costs have only risen since then.

“Artemis is not even an effective program to explore the Moon, offering significantly lower capability than we demonstrated during the Apollo missions more than a half-century ago,” Zubrin continued, discussing his objections to the plan to return to the Moon previously published in National Review. “It’s now been eight years since Trump started the Artemis program, and stuck with a mission plan that makes absolutely no sense, we are still years away from a Moon landing. Eight years after JFK announced Apollo, we were walking on the Moon. And that was done by an America with half the population and one quarter the GDP of today, using slide rules instead of AI to do its design work.”

Each launch of the SLS will cost between $2 to $4 billion depending on the rocket’s configuration and how the accounting is conducted, making it the most expensive rocket in history. For context, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch goes for $74 million, while its heavier Starship rocket costs an estimated $100 million per launch. SLS is a heavier deep space lifter, but this cost differential is still remarkable.

SLS isn’t NASA’s first project to be massively over budget and behind schedule. The James Webb Space Telescope, a darling of the agency’s science program, was originally supposed to cost just $1 billion and fly in 2007. It ended up costing $10 billion and flew in late 2021, ten times its original budget and 14 years behind schedule. It’s not an exaggeration to say that NASA centers’ engineering and science capabilities were greatly reduced in order to fund these bloated programs.

The problems with the government-run space program are baked into the program’s very design. In order to achieve political buy-in, NASA built SLS in a manner which essentially bought-off every political group involved in space exploration. It was effectively designed by a committee to maximize political efficiency with contractors spread across all 50 states, essentially every major government Prime Contractor, and NASA Center. As I’ve previously written, achieving such buy-in increases the total costs of the program via de facto bribery, risking the program’s future from “sticker shock” as well as huge delays in mission design, as everyone’s pet technology gets deemed mission critical in order to buy their support. If any of these many pet technologies go wrong, the mission will be delayed, as occurred with Artemis in 2021 when NASA’s Inspector General released a report deeming Moon plans unfeasible because of significant delays in developing the mission’s spacesuits, which the agency had more than a decade to do.

This is an inherent feature of government contracting: prioritizing political payoffs to constituents over achieving the mission. SpaceX’s Elon Musk has rightly noted that NASA has “too many cooks in the kitchen.” This is why increased government funding seems to be, if anything, inversely linked to progress in science, because it takes money from more efficient private sector firms and gives the cash to political graft. Inflation-adjusted annual federal research funding exploded from $2 billion in 1953 to $60 billion today — a factor of 30. This is roughly equivalent to the cost of two inflation-adjusted Manhattan Projects going to federal research funding, but to be sure, we aren’t getting 30 times the scientific breakthroughs today as we were in 1953, when a series of revolutionary space technologies were literally rapidly taking off.

The Artemis delay is the latest reminder that the turning to the private sector offers us a better chance of maintaining our space superiority. Private ventures, such as Musk’s SpaceX, are exponentially more efficient since they have no incentive to inflate costs by including their own pet technologies as their own money is at stake. People spend their own money more carefully than they spend taxpayer dollars collected from others.

Multiple private American space firms are currently pursuing accomplishments beyond those of NASA, and they are more successful than the entire government space programs of China and the European Union combined.

SpaceX has led the charge, ramping up its Falcon 9 launches from 96 in 2023 to a staggering 165 in 2025, while achieving high reuse rates allowing rocket boosters to fly up to 24 times including boosters flying up to 24 times. 85 percent of American orbital launches last year were SpaceX missions. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin broke through in 2025 with the successful debut and second flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, reaching orbit, deploying payloads such as NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) Mars spacecraft. Blue Origin successfully landed its reusable first stage on an ocean platform, a feat matching SpaceX. Meanwhile, Rocket Lab set new records with 12 launches in 2024 and has continued expanding its capabilities toward the reusable Neutron rocket.

These private sector milestones, driven by reusable technology and commercial innovation, dramatically lowered costs, increased launch frequency, and enabled ambitious ventures like massive satellite constellations, private crewed missions, and even unmanned lunar landings by private American entities.

The best solution to NASA’s woes would be to greatly increase its reliance on commercial launch providers instead of big government-run rockets. The cause of space exploration is simply too important to leave to the public sector. If America wants to win the new space race with China, we need to unleash a free-market overhaul of our government-run space program.