Fifty years ago, astronauts traveled to space in rockets designed, built, and maintained by NASA and paid for by government funding. Today, the astronauts are often billionaires enjoying a journey into low orbit on a rocket they paid for from their billion-dollar bank accounts.
The change feels like a giant leap, but it makes sense, says Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of Astralytical a space consulting company. "More and more of modem civilization relies on space," she says.
Huge numbers of satellites orbit tiie planet connecting us to everything from cell phones to GPS to Netflix and there is big money in maintaining those systems. "This doesn't get a lot of headlines typically, bur there are profit reasons why private companies want to go into space," says Forczyk.
And 85 private companies learn more about putting rockets and satellites into space, they're able to help the likes of NASA on their missions. That's important because NASA itself has become financially constrained From its 1966 peak, where spending on the space race took up 4.4 percent of the federal budget, that spending is now less than 0.5 percent of the country's total budget.
"NASA using commercial companies to build a lot of the hardware to do a lot of those services of taking scientific payloads to the surface of the moon," says Forczyk. The hope is that people will follow — possibly by 2025, but more realistically, says Forczyk, by 2030. If you're wondering why we're going back to the moon since mankind has already walked its surface, the answer is that we explored only part of it.
"We know a lot more, but we also know so very little," says Forczyk. "So we want to go back with people to learn more, but more importantly, we want to go back to live and work there."
Some even see the moon as an eventual staging area for human exploration of deep space Mars is seen as the next stepping-off point toward the final frontier 一 though whether we'll get there in our lifetimes is another question.
