In The Hill, Mark Whittington says Trump is mulling over a shake-up of NASA and its programmes:
"The most politically difficult would be closing down NASA Goddard and NASA Ames and folding in their functions at NASA Marshall. From an organizational standpoint, the idea makes sense. NASA has too many centers spread out over the country doing too many redundant functions. Consolation would save money and increase efficiency,
However, the reason NASA has several centers spread out across the country is that it increases congressional support for its programs. If a House member or senator is not moved by a love of science or beating the Chinese back to the moon, he or she might be motivated by the jobs and contracts created by a NASA center in their district or state. They will fight tooth and nail against closing such a source of votes.
Perhaps the best that can be done is to reduce redundancies across the field centers as much as possible. Also, NASA could make its centers more attractive to commercial space investment, such as what already is taking place at NASA Stennis, the Johnson Spaceflight Center and the Kennedy Space Center.”
In Space News, Jeff Foust reports that the European Space Agency will use a launch competition to try out reforms to georeturn:
“ESA plans to use fair contribution this year for the European Launcher Challenge, a competition to support the development of new launch vehicles by European countries. At the December ESA Council meeting, member states approved an “enabling resolution” that allows the agency to formally proceed with the competition.
Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA director of space transportation, said at the briefing that ESA plans to issue an invitation to tender (ITT), the agency’s version of a request for proposals, in February. The competition will operate under fair contribution rather than a traditional georeturn policy.
“There will be no constraints on georeturn in this ITT,” he said. “Industry is completely free to form consortia and they will propose to us based on that.” ESA will then prepare formal proposals to member states for funding based on those plans from industry.”
In The Guardian, Robin McKie argues that Elon Musk’s Starship rocket will slash the cost of missions, leaving Nasa in the dust:
“The prestigious research journal Science was equally enthusiastic: “The feat heralds a new era of affordable heavy-lift rockets that could slash the cost of doing science in space,” it announced last month when it gave an award to Starship’s October flight as one of its Breakthroughs of the Year.
Musk’s company has already reduced the cost of putting cargo into orbit round the Earth by a factor of 10, the journal revealed. Once Starship – the most powerful launcher ever built, and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable – is in full operation later this year, further reductions of a similar magnitude can be expected, it added.
This view is shared by many space engineers who believe that Starship is poised to make a major leap with a schedule that could see it carry out launches every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have learned how to reclaim and reuse its main booster stage and will do the same for its upper stage this year, they say.”
In The Economist, the authors ask if Jeff Bezos can compete in the private space race:
“One reason for the subsequent slow progress might have been that Mr Bezos was too busy with his day job at Amazon to pay close attention to his rocket company. Many of the managers he hired to run Blue Origin were from the sleepy “Old Space” establishment. “Blue Origin’s approach was to say ‘We’ll hire the best in the business’,” says Simon Potter at BryceTech, a firm of analysts. SpaceX, he says, “started from the assumption that the whole [aerospace] business was broken anyway”, and so did things its own way.
Caleb Henry of Quilty Space, another firm of analysts, thinks Blue Origin might have been too well-funded for its own good. Mr Bezos was already a billionaire when he founded the firm, and has made regular donations over the years. By contrast Mr Musk had to run SpaceX on a comparative shoestring, at least at first, with the firm almost going bust in 2008. Even now, says Mr Henry, SpaceX retains a scrappy, high-pressure start-up culture. “I think the work-life balance at Blue Origin is attractive to many people,” he says. But it has perhaps meant less progress than the boss would have liked.
Mr Bezos himself has admitted that Blue Origin has been too slow, and has said he quit as Amazon’s chief executive partly to speed things up. In 2023 Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s CEO, was replaced by Dave Limp, an Amazon executive.”
In Inc, Kit Eaton says the promise of startups and small private space companies may be a hallmark of 2025:
“Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman has already indicated that using new, agile space companies to reach the space agency’s goals will be a big part of his playbook. Beyond NASA contracts and defense industry contacts 2025 is going to see a lot of commercial space activity. Government is increasingly on board, with the Pentagon recently embracing commercial space tech to boost the U.S. military’s edge, and we can expect missions to launch private satellites, more commercial moon landers, and plenty of other exciting space stuff.
There’s an entrepreneurial spirit in the atmosphere. Consider the just announced, somewhat unlikely, but innovative-sounding partnership between SpaceX, Palantir and OpenAI which hopes to bid for lucrative government space contracts, changing the pace of the typically slow-moving space industry thanks to each company’s ‘startup mentality.'“