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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

🚀 Struggling launcher Astra nearly considered bankruptcy during its rapid devaluation and delisting from the New York Stock Exchange

🛰️ After months of gibberish, Voyager 1 has finally returned to normal communications with NASA

☄️ Space companies offer options to study a massive asteroid on its way to Earth

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Today’s Subject of Space: The Great Lunar Race

Entire countries and international companies alike look to the Moon, and don’t just see an inspiring object, but an investment in their own national security and a voice at the table.

Moon is an untapped world, and just like the New World of the Americas, where the cultural, financial, and social impact of its original colonial settlers still shows its influence, whoever controls the Moon first gets to write the rules.

America and its allies have drafted the Artemis Accords, promising to the safe exploration of the Moon. 36 countries across the world, from developing countries interested in sending their first payloads to space, to geopolitical powerhouses like India and Japan, have all thrown their lot behind NASA and its Artemis program.

Meanwhile, countries like China have rejected these accords as the neo-colonialism of space and drafted its own competing pact with Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Belarus. None of which are very Western-friendly countries.

And looking at this from the outside in, it almost looks like a new space race, except instead of being spearheaded by the two bipolar superpowers of the world, this global spanning competition seems reflective of our increasingly multipolar world.

Where different, concentrated regions compete for the benefit of themselves and their ideological partners. But that might not necessarily be a bad thing, and if you’re interested in learning more about this new space race, I also made a video on that linked below.

The competition is ambitious. Both parties aim to create their own separate lunar bases, and while space relations tend to be professional, with America and Russia’s multi-decade partnership on the ISS being a prime example, there’s no telling how these competing parties might treat each other on something as important as carving out a chunk of the Moon for control over its resources, exploration, and access.

After all, we humans still have relatively trivial border disputes today, even over land designated for international research, like Antarctica, which seems to be big enough for everyone, right? Tell that to world governments. 

Why would the Moon, with its uncountable untapped resources, be any different? Companies want in on this action too, which is why in America alone, six separate companies are trying to privately land payload on the Moon over the remainder of the decade.

Everything from the massive SpaceX Starship and Blue Origin landers, to the smaller, robotic Odysseus lander from Intuitive Machines. All of them looking to ferry payload, harvest ice into liquid water for rocket fuel, or survey the ground for future mining spots. And that’s to say nothing of the companies from other countries too.

More countries and companies will follow over the coming years, in an exponential flood, breaking new records each year. It wasn’t that long ago, when the number of rocket launches in the world numbered in the dozens, and now, SpaceX alone fell just short of 100 launches in 2023. Space exploration is beginning to become routine, but certainly not boring, and the Moon will follow the same fate. First with robots, and soon with people.

State of the New Space Economy

• NASA invests $93.5 million into America’s most promising space technology startups and think tanks through its coveted SBIR program

• China’s national annual launch rate grows apace in 2024, with a projected total of 100+ by EOY, following a steady trend of 22 in 2016, 55 in 2022, and 67 in 2024

• Congress levies a 2% budget cut to NASA, bringing the space agency’s funding down to $24.875 billion, subsequently forcing layoffs at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory and shrinking program ambitions.

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