The world witnessed the preamble to a changing of the guard in space as four astronauts climbed aboard the Orion spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin and awaited the countdown. They launched into space Wednesday on a 10-day journey around the moon by the Space Launch System rocket, a NASA initiative led by Boeing with help from subcontractors Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

As any space junky will tell you, those companies are legendary players in the history of U.S. space exploration. They were key contractors on the Apollo missions that landed astronauts on the moon beginning in 1969, allowing America to win the space race against Russia and cementing the country’s status as the dominant superpower. After some 50 years, their time driving NASA's space explorations appears to be ending.

But although the legacy space companies are all back to play key roles in this mission, they won’t be spearheading NASA’s ambitious seven-year, $20 billion plan to build a permanent moon base. For that to happen, Boeing, Lockheed and the others will have to figure out how to remain relevant in a new space market increasingly dominated by commercial interests instead of NASA’s budget. The drive to turn a profit means that the delays, the billions of dollars of budget overruns and the structurally high per-launch costs that have plagued space programs in the past will no longer be tolerated.

The reconfigured Artemis program will require a steady cadence of launches from rockets and spacecraft that have much lower operational costs and can carry more payload. That future belongs to the producers of reusable rockets, led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin........

© The Japan Times