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Is the Artemis Program Unsustainable?
Launchpad Newsletter
May 21, 2024
Your Comprehensive Guide to the New Space Economy
G. Pettit here,
Welcome to the Launchpad Newsletter, your top source for political, economic, and social developments in the New Space Economy, built by real entrepreneurs shaping it.
Ready-for-launch into the insights of the most impactful industry of the 21st Century.
This Week’s Next-Gen Newsflash
🚀 From $100 million dollar raise to sudden layoffs, space startup True Anomaly navigates the highs and lows of the New Space Economy
🛰️ Russia vetoes a United Nations resolution to forfeit nuclear weapons in space
🪶 Blue Origin readies its ultra-heavy New Glenn for its maiden launch with a valuable NASA craft bound for Mars
Today’s Subject of Space: Is the Artemis Program Unsustainable?
Just how much risk surrounds NASA's budget and the future of the Artemis program?
The Biden Administration recently offered NASA $27.2 billion for FY 2024. A 7.1% increase over 2023, if approved.
Those extra funds are far from pocket change, but even still they are accompanied by trimmings and forced hiatuses to certain programs and reallocations to higher-value projects like the historic Mars Sample Return and SpaceX Starship Human Lander System for future Artemis missions. In one pocket, out the other.
Prioritizing high-value projects is a good thing and certainly nothing new, but as cuts begin to creep in it's easy to see how even these could be threatened.
Even now, the US Space Force has a 2024 budget beating out NASA by nearly $3 billion.
New Space is trending toward militarization, with more companies competing for Space Force and Department of Defense Contracts in addition to NASA contracts.
This may just be a natural evolution as the space economy grows, but what happens if confrontations and control disputes between the US and rising powers like China worsen? With some US House Republican leadership pushing near-term budget cuts, it's not difficult to imagine a tenser future justifying budget reallocations in the name of pure national security. Even at the cost of American aerospace dominance and the dreams of spacefaring success.
It happened with the Vietnam War, gradually siphoning vital resources and support away from the Apollo program, perhaps the greatest technological and nationalistic achievement of all time, and whittling NASA's budget into a husk of its 1960s height. It could happen again.
Hopefully, cooler heads can prevail, and countries can compete on the fronts of technological advancement and national pride rather than war and waste.
Would America scale back or even give up its lunar and commercial space aspirations in the event of heightened geopolitical hazards? Only time will tell.
State of the New Space Economy
Looking to raise venture capital in the New Space Economy? These 33 firms lead the pack, and could one day place their wager on you!
In 2021, the space economy accounted for a mere 0.6% of US GDP. By this time next year (2025), it could nearly double in size.
By 2035, over 60% of economic demand for space goods and services will be driven by supply chain and transportation, leaving the remaining 40% for a thriving in-space economy of manufacturing, research, and tourism.
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