Introduction

History will likely look back upon NASA’s space shuttle program with a mixture of amazement and disbelief—and not in a good way.

Though the shuttle program was sold to the public as a major technological achievement, it is increasingly likely to look to our descendants like a staggering example of an organizational paradigm that was becoming obsolete before it got off the ground.

The shuttle program was born during a period of declining public interest following the incredible success of the 10-year Apollo program that landed human beings on the moon, one of the greatest achievements in the history of humankind. When the shuttle program was originally sold to Congress, it was expected to cost $50 million per flight and fly as many as 50 times per year. In the end, it cost on average $1 billion per flight and flew only four times per year.

Indeed, and sadly, what we are most likely to remember about the space shuttle, beyond its astronomical costs, are its tragedies. Those, too, were a measure of our growing complacency towards the program: shuttle flights had grown so predictable that NASA had resorted to promotional activities like putting a schoolteacher on board. The world watched in horror and disbelief in January 1986 and again in February 2003, as first the Challenger and then the Columbia fell burning from the sky.

That the Challenger disaster was largely the product of bureaucratic blunders was a further reminder that America’s space program, specifically NASA itself, had lost its way. It no longer had an overarching vision—to put a human on the moon—to galvanize its employees and the public. Its operating systems were products of a previous and fading century. Its technology was antiquated. It used organizational structures and business models that dated from before World War II. The space shuttle program required a standing army of more than 20,000 employees—which itself cost NASA more than $4 billion a year. The result had been bureaucratic bloat. 

It seems hardly surprising that, in the years since the Challenger and Columbia crashes, the shuttle program has been slowly reduced to conducting deliveries of astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) (another compromised and overpriced initiative). The shuttle program was eventually shut down in 2011 when it was replaced by the much more affordable Russian Soyuz launch system for crew and cargo to the ISS. That shift left a massive void in America’s ability to access the space frontier.

But then, something extraordinary happened. A large, traditional US aerospace giant—like Boeing, Lockheed, or Northrup Grumman—did not step in to resolve this crucial missing US capability. Instead, a group of upstart technology entrepreneurs stepped into the fray. Raised in the years following the Apollo Space Race, and with entertainment like Star Trek and Star Wars, they believed space was within their reach. Armed with their wealth and track records of success, they set out to build their own private space capabilities.

Thus began the private commercialization of space. And, once again, the general public grew wildly excited about their own future prospects of going into orbit, to the moon, and perhaps even to Mars.

Peter Diamandis, one of this book’s co-authors, incentivized the new Space Race with the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE. Founded in 1994, XPRIZE is a non-profit organization created to design and host public competitions with the goal of benefiting humanity by encouraging radical breakthrough technological development. Since its inception, it has funded more than $300 million worth of incentive competitions, ranging from mapping the ocean floor and cleaning up oil spills to creating robotic avatars and replicating the Star Trek tricorder medical device.

But the XPRIZEs that have had the greatest impact to date have been those related to space: from the first—the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for sub-orbital flight (1996–2004)—to the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE (2007–2018) for successfully launching, landing, and operating a rover on the moon’s surface.

Some of these prizes were won by successful teams. Others—including the Google Lunar XPRIZE—have gone unclaimed, despite some impressive attempts. But all of them stimulated massive innovation and investment, harnessing the imaginations of millions of people to tackle big ideas with enormous potential. The potentially huge awards—rather than traditional government investment—further incentivized competitors. Even when prizes went unclaimed, the pursuit produced impressive advances in human knowledge.

The XPRIZEs set the stage for the next leap in space exploration: the arrival of entrepreneurs. Like financiers of the past, these individuals—most notably Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, and, most successfully, Elon Musk of SpaceX—saw a historic personal, scientific, and economic opportunity in space. Like all great entrepreneurs, they took off in pursuit of it.

Tellingly, each pursued an opportunity on the final frontier where they thought they could build a successful long-term business. Musk focused on building a new generation of rockets, capturing the market left vacant by the space shuttle. He set his longer-term sights toward Mars. Bezos built a thriving suborbital tourism business. He also pursued the development of larger commercial rockets but set his objectives on the moon. Branson, who purchased the rights to the winning technology demonstrated by the Ansari XPRIZE, focused exclusively on tourism.

The impact of these initiatives has already been stunning. SpaceX, in particular, has introduced two major innovations. First, it pioneered the reusability of rockets—long heralded as the key innovation for affordable space flight—by demonstrating the return and reflight of its Falcon-9 first-stage booster. (As we write this, SpaceX has reused a single, first-stage booster of nine engines more than 13 times.) It removed the massive human army of workers that, until now, has characterized space exploration. Today, SpaceX charges NASA approximately $100 million per launch of its astronauts to the ISS—at an estimated cost of half of that to SpaceX itself. In other words, SpaceX has not only achieved a tenfold improvement in the cost of launching astronauts to orbit, but it has also made a significant profit in the process. 

And that’s just the beginning. Several new entrants in the field are primed to compete with the likes of SpaceX with a newer generation of rockets. Tim Ellis is CEO of Relativity Space, which is 3D-printing as much as 95% of their rockets, enabling another tenfold cost drop. Ellis and his co-founder, Jordan Noone, were both 23 years old when they started the company. Both were interns, one at SpaceX and the other at Blue Origin. Meanwhile, an Indian startup, Agnikul Cosmos, has successfully test-fired a single-piece, 3D-printed rocket engine.**