{"text":[[{"start":8.15,"text":"Last week, on the same day the Artemis II mission blasted off for the first human flight around the Moon in more than 50 years, it emerged that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had filed for a record-breaking stock market listing to raise as much as $75bn. The coincidence brought the past and the future of US space exploration into sharp relief: one involves an expensive government programme seeking to rekindle the awe of Apollo-era human space flight, the other an entrepreneur gearing up to tighten his grip on the commercial space economy."}],[{"start":43.44,"text":"The very different economics involved make it inevitable that the US will increasingly rely on companies like SpaceX as it seeks to build on Artemis to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and venture further into deep space. Before that happens, it needs to fix what risks becoming an over-dependence on Musk’s company."}],[{"start":65.59,"text":"Artemis II, whose four-person crew is due to return to Earth late on Friday, is an impressive engineering feat founded on an old paradigm. It was built using the cost-plus method, so the main contractors faced no penalties for cost overruns or repeated delays. Its rocket boosters aren’t reusable, lifting the cost of each launch to $4.1bn."}],[{"start":91.03,"text":"Contrast that with SpaceX, whose Falcon rockets have become the workhorse for reaching orbit. Musk’s success was the product of a newer, commercial economic model: from the start, Nasa paid a fixed cost per launch, leaving all the financial risk with the company. SpaceX has also dragged down costs by reusing its rockets."}],[{"start":115.51,"text":"Musk’s critics like to claim that he built his company on the back of government largesse, but the benefits have flowed both ways. Nasa estimated the Falcon rocket would have cost 10 times as much to develop under a traditional government programme."}],[{"start":132.15,"text":"If SpaceX’s breathtaking IPO goes off as planned, Musk will have the resources to entrench his company deeper into markets it already dominates. That includes seeing its giant Starship rocket through to full commercial operations, further increasing its launch cost advantage over rivals, and overlaying the Starlink communications network with a third generation of more powerful satellites."}],[{"start":158.69,"text":"A heavy reliance on SpaceX already makes the US — and some other governments — queasy. Musk himself underlined the danger during his falling out with US President Donald Trump last year by threatening to decommission his company’s Dragon spacecraft, which the US relies on to get astronauts to the International Space Station. In a sign of Starlink’s national security clout, in 2022 he denied Ukrainian forces access to the network where they sought to push into Russian-controlled territory."}],[{"start":192.18,"text":"Competition in the launch market should soon be at hand, in the form of a new generation of powerful rockets from companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space. Nasa and the Pentagon need to actively support newer competitors, even if they cannot match SpaceX’s cost advantage in their early years."}],[{"start":216.97,"text":"To promote more competition, they will also need to hire multiple suppliers to other space programmes. SpaceX would have had an exclusive contract to build the lander that Nasa hopes to use to put its astronauts back on the Moon, had intensive lobbying by Bezos and his allies not led to the commissioning of a second, competing vehicle. Duplication will add to costs but will be needed to increase resiliency and spur more competition and innovation."}],[{"start":249.05,"text":"As it looks ahead to a new era of deep space exploration, the US is fortunate to be able to tap the risk appetite of its space entrepreneurs. But it needs to avoid an over-dependence on SpaceX."}],[{"start":272.38,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1775800962_4739.mp3"}