American Space Achievements: Lessons from the Past Year

History will likely record the past year as a turning point in space exploration. A few examples of recent achievements include:

• NASA’s Perseverance rover mission executed a flawless landing on Mars, complete with a hidden Easter egg. The mission included a tiny drone named Ingenuity that became the first powered aircraft to operate on another planet. The rotorcraft has outperformed its original five planned test flights with more than 28 sorties covering 4.2 miles.

• SpaceX achieved 31 launches in 2021 and is on a record pace for 2022. The company launched and landed the same Falcon 9 booster twice in three weeks, setting a new turnaround record. There are now 2,193 Starlink satellites in orbit. In April 2022, the first crew composed entirely of private citizens returned from the International Space Station after more than two weeks in orbit, marking another milestone for commercial spaceflight.

• SpinLaunch just completed its eighth test flight using a novel alternative method for launching a spacecraft that uses kinetic energy with a centrifuge spinning the spacecraft at hypersonic speeds before releasing it. The company believes its system will remove 70 percent of the fuel and launch infrastructure requirements.

• The James Webb Space Telescope, 10 times more powerful than Hubble and the most complex observatory ever built, was successfully deployed. Engineers had to squeeze into the spacecraft an enormous mirror and a kite-shaped sunshield made of five membranes the thickness of a human hair. All this needed to be slowly unfolded before the 18 hexagonal segments could be aligned so they would work together as a single 21-foot-wide mirror. Focusing is achieved by adjusting each segment in increments as small as 10 nanometers, roughly one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. Recent alignment milestones have revealed just how sharp a view we will have of distant space.

• A team of astronomers released an image of the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The breakthrough was the result of a remarkable collaboration of 80 institutions in various countries and eight radio telescopes in six sites.

• Ordinary citizens have started visiting space on a regular basis. Blue Origin, whose passengers have included William Shatner, and Virgin Galactic began shuttling passengers for brief trips. Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched an all-civilian spaceflight last September, with no trained astronauts on board. A charity auction for Robin Hood will result in two New York City teachers having seats on an upcoming Blue Origin flight. Orbital Assembly Corporation is building the first space hotel and office park, called Pioneer Station and Voyager Station. And NASA, SpaceX, and Axiom announced plans to produce the first movie in space featuring Tom Cruise.

There are a few takeaways from these developments. First, all these innovations are the result of two pipelines. One is the patient funding that supported research and development (R&D) over many years—decades in most cases. The other is a talent pipeline that cultivated the human capital producing the ingenuity and entrepreneurship we are witnessing today.

Strengthening both of these pipelines today is crucial for the breakthrough innovations of tomorrow. There are some immediate opportunities as Congress begins deliberations on the Bipartisan Innovation Act, which will include important funding for R&D and other reforms that lay the groundwork for innovation in the future.

Second, many of these accomplishments owe themselves to NASA intentionally creating public-private partnerships to achieve national space ambitions. This produced a regulatory framework by which multiple new technologies and road maps can be piloted, tested, and eventually scaled. The benefit for NASA is the opportunity to save on costs while entrepreneurs compete among themselves with different approaches to win various contracts. It is the same principle and type of public-private partnership that helped produce the miracle of multiple COVID-19 vaccines.

Federal policymakers and regulators should double down on using public-private partnerships and creating more regulatory room to test and scale innovations. One important element of this work should involve reviewing existing regulatory processes that may need modernization. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration delayed for a fourth time its environmental review of SpaceX’s Starship program in Texas, creating challenges not only for SpaceX but also for NASA’s Project Artemis, which will rely on the same launch site. Unlocking future technologies may require updating these review processes to ensure they can match the speed of the innovation they are assessing.

The past year was filled with incredible technological breakthroughs and moments of inspiration. We should celebrate these achievements, but also use them as a call for continued action to strengthen the pipelines that enable innovation.