Matt Ryall

Few thoughts in response: 1) NASA has not given up on LEO. Within weeks of being on the job, I publicly addressed the Starliner situation and the role NASA played in it, and we have since taken a very active role with Boeing in implementing the investigation recommendations and putting Starliner on a path to life beyond Atlas V. We intend for Starliner to safely transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and commercial LEO destinations, in the years ahead. I actually agree that we should have more crewed transport vehicles, but how many major endeavors do you want NASA to solve simultaneously? The more NASA takes on in parallel, the less will be accomplished. And if there is considerable demand in LEO and lots of economic potential, nothing stops the companies referenced from raising capital and building vehicles. We are trying to get back to the Moon, build a base, get underway on nuclear power, launch more science missions, replace the International Space Station with a commercial service, but now we also need to fund several new crewed vehicles too? To the author’s point, nothing stopped one company from building a suborbital vehicle and operating it dozens of times without NASA as an anchor tenant, but I think market realities have spoken and the service appears to have been paused. 2) America and NASA are not giving up our astronauts, and as a commercial astronaut, I state that as emphatically and patriotically as possible. Of course, if useful research and affordable data become available as a commercial service, similarly to how we purchase and make available Earth observation data, we would have to look at it. 3) I am about as pro-commercial space as it gets, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But to be clear, you cannot simply slap the word “commercial” on every problem or opportunity, pound the table about “deleting NASA’s burdensome requirements,” and assume it automatically produces a more affordable, better solution supported by a thriving market. When people talk about relying on private capital and commercial services, someone still has to pay, a service provider has to execute really well, and if NASA is the customer, it is likely a service that has rarely been done before. If it turns out NASA is ultimately the only meaningful customer, that has the potential to become a very expensive proposition, if it works at all. 4) Premature commercialization can set both the NASA program and the emerging industry up for failure. We have seen approaches ranging from spacewalking-as-a-service to lunar-nuclear-power-as-a-service, often premised on NASA eventually being just one customer of many. Sometimes that market materializes. Many times--it is speculative. NASA, the taxpayers and the interested public should care about whatever achieves the intended mission outcome as quickly, affordably and safely as possible, and the contracting method is secondary. We can screw up cost-plus, fixed-price and as-a-service contracts just as easily. The outcomes are what matter. If, along the way, we can create a credible demand signal, help industry mature the technology and buy time for a market to develop, that is outstanding. But we should be grounded in reality rather than pretending a market already exists when it does not. 5) There are absolutely areas where the commercial model works extraordinarily well. Launch, Earth observation and communications are real services supported by real markets, and have been for decades, where NASA truly can be one customer of many. There will be more examples in the years ahead. In those cases, NASA can execute missions at lower cost and free up more of the NASA budget for the low-TRL, cutting-edge missions that have no obvious business case or revenue model, but change the world in air and space. 6) People often point to commercial crew and cargo as proof that this model works everywhere. It does not. Those programs benefited from NASA providing substantial early demand across dozens of missions, creating an opportunity for private capital to generate a return, even though I believe most did not, while also allowing an iterative design process rather than jumping immediately to the dream state. There is a big difference between maturing capabilities over a dozen cargo missions before building a no-fail crew vehicle and jumping directly to the crew vehicle, and I think the real-world data has demonstrated that. Even then, the development record across all of the crew and cargo providers was far from perfect. And today, the category leader is increasingly focused on opportunities with much larger potential markets, which should tell us something about the near-term economics of the market NASA helped create. 7) I have been very open that, in the near term, I do not know whether there is a sufficiently large LEO market where NASA can truly be one customer of many, but we will do everything within reason and within our budget to set industry up for success and ensure there is a home beyond the International Space Station. I do know demand for commercial LEO destinations will be heavily influenced by transportation cost, and those costs are likely to go up in the near term rather than down. Now, you can argue that if NASA had funded more commercial crew vehicles in years past, that would have changed the dynamic, but how many did you want for two crewed NASA missions to the ISS per year? We picked two providers, the results are apparent (for better and for worse), and clearly there was not enough supplemental commercial demand to justify further industry investment. The same uncertainty exists on the Moon. I cannot promise today that the economic value extracted from the lunar surface will exceed all of the input costs. What we can do is create a demand signal for landers, rovers, power, communications and other infrastructure, do so in a logical way that affords iterative design, and give a lunar economy every opportunity to emerge. I believe it will, but there are no guarantees. The mission is to return to the Moon and build the base for scientific, technological, national security and even inspirational reasons, and along the way, we hope enormous economic potential is unleashed. 8) If the objective is to force an economy out of every NASA endeavor, then NASA should probably sit inside the Department of Commerce. But NASA is an independent agency with a broader mission: to extend humanity’s reach farther into space, pioneer breakthrough technologies, undertake the near-impossible and unlock the secrets of the universe. While at times that is sure to leverage commercial capabilities and stimulate economic activity, it is not a prerequisite to achieving every mission.