 Behind me on the launchpad is Artemis One. It's the first step in NASA's ambitious program to bring American astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in half a century, and then on to Mars. Assuming NASA can pull it off, which is a big question mark, is the project worth hundreds of billions of government money? Is NASA just trying to relive the glory of the Apollo mission? Will private companies take us back to the Moon and Mars faster and cheaper? Artemis is the latest in a long series of setbacks and reversals in America's space program. In 2010, President Obama announced the shelving of the constellation program, which was NASA's last attempt to bring astronauts back to the Moon. The following year, the agency shut down its space shuttle program altogether because of costs and safety concerns. Obama also announced that NASA would begin relying more on private contractors. I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way. I disagree. But six years later, the Trump administration greenlit the Artemis program, which was heralded as the beginning of a new space exploration renaissance at NASA. It marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. This directive will ensure America's space program once again leads and inspires all of humanity. The pioneer spirit has always defined America. Artemis-1, the unmanned test route that traveled 1.4 million miles through space, splashed down on December 12th. And that's just the first of four planned launches. Artemis-2 will bring humans into space, and Artemis-3, scheduled to launch in 2025, is supposed to bring humans to the Moon with help from SpaceX's Starship vehicle. After that, NASA is planning yearly Artemis launches. And liftoff of Artemis-1, we rise together back to the Moon and beyond. That's the plan. Artemis-1's first three attempts at liftoff were canceled because of leaking issues connected to the rocket's ground system. The Artemis-1 mission postponed for the second time this week due to technical issues. The rocket finally went airborne on November 16, 2022. The price tag was $4.1 billion, and the next three launches are expected to each cost about the same. NASA's auditor estimates that the Artemis program will spend $93 billion by 2025. Because of delays, it's unlikely that a human will make it back to the Moon by the end of 2024, as originally planned. From 1960 to 1973, NASA spent $280 billion in today's dollars on moon landings. But the agency remains one of America's most popular, according to opinion polls, alongside the National Park Service and, surprisingly, the U.S. Postal Service. Beating the Soviets to the Moon bolstered America's claim to technological and ideological superiority in the 20th century. It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. But ever since Neil Armstrong's one small step, there have been giant leaps in space transportation made in large part by the private sector. Oh, wow. Lift off of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, go NASA, go SpaceX, Godspeed, bottom dog. In 2009, the private sector saw one of its biggest champions ascend to become the number two person at NASA. Lori Garver pushed to scrap the constellation program as a way to entice the private sector to fill in the gaps. She also spearheaded the commercial crew program, which continues to employ commercial contractors to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Today, companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX are launching rockets at a faster pace and for a fraction of what NASA spends. What we're seeing in short is the beginning of a historic transfer of space operations from the public to the private sector, wrote then-reason editor Bob Pool. That was in the magazine's April 1979 issue. Pool, who has always been ahead of the curve on issues related to space and privatization, is now Reason Foundation's director of transportation policy. In the magazine's December 2022 issue, he wrote about how science fiction writer Robert Heinlein's dream of private space travel is coming true. Commercial space transport is the obvious future, and I think we're getting well on the way to it after Artemis program. Former politician and current NASA chief Bill Nelson argues that space travel is a function that must be carried out by the government. Space is a very unforgiving kind of environment and NASA has always run the programs being built by contractors, not contractors running the programs with oversight of NASA. Now, that's a new way of doing business. Back when Nelson made those remarks, commercial space transport was still nascent. More than a decade later, private space companies have proven themselves to be more competent and cost-effective than NASA. Does NASA still need to be in the space travel business at all? The moon is really a stepping stone. We really need to learn how to live and work on the moon before we ever go to Mars, and that's the whole reason of the Artemis program. Lily Villarreal is a NASA engineer who works on the Artemis team. She says that exploring the cosmos is critical to the long-term preservation of the human race, making it a valid use of public funds. I really think it's important to go to deep space and learn how to live in deep space because we have limited resources here on Earth. We eventually are going to become a society where we have to move beyond Earth to be able to live. She says that Artemis' price tag is justified by the need for NASA to be safe and thorough. This is the first time we are actually putting this rocket together, and so we always expect the challenges. One of the things about NASA is we test like you fly. We want to make sure that we get it right because we want this launch to be successful. It's a test flight, so we're doing everything possible that we can to make sure that we are ready to go, and really we won't go until we are ready to go. The biggest criticism of the project is the cost. How do you respond to that type of criticism? It's an investment into our civilization about our ability to learn how to go to deep space and live in deep space, which is something right now we don't have the capability to do. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. The space race was also a way of demonstrating America's military dominance over the Soviet Union, which had embarrassed the U.S. with the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite. NASA and its political backers seem determined to recapture the glory of the Apollo missions with Artemis. Poole says that the agency tends to stick to old ways of doing things, isn't particularly interested in cost savings, and its decision-making is overly driven by politics. Basically, he's designed to repeat the Apollo program. The hardware that powered Artemis-1 is known as the SLS, the Space Launch System, and was developed in partnership with Boeing. Critics have another name for it. The SLS, because it was concocted by the Senate as a way to rescue Constellation, give it a new name. Poole says NASA would have been better off replacing the costly and dated Space Launch System used in the Artemis program, but it didn't, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was largely constructed and engineered in Alabama, the home state of Senate appropriations chair Richard Shelby, who has a history of strong-arming NASA to preserve jobs for his constituents. In 2019, the Senate earmarked $2.58 billion as a starting point to cover the Space Launch System's ballooning price tag. The Senate funding also required NASA to make use of old warehouse materials from Constellation, ostensibly a cost-saving measure. Well, it turns out, after sitting in the warehouse, each one has to be refurbished at about $150 million per engine. There's four of them in SLS, and so it's $600 million just to refurbish the used old-tech engines for every single launch. For four years in a row, under two different administrations, NASA got more money from Congress than the President requested. The human spaceflight program of this country can only be led by the elected leader of this country because he sets the priorities. He's going to have to pony up in his office of the management and budget more money. The biggest boondoggle in the industry right now is the Space Launch System. The Constellation program and the Space Shuttle were both canceled around 2011, and senators in Alabama, Texas, and Florida wanted to keep the jobs associated with those programs even after the cancellations. And so they created a derivative rocket program and told NASA to do it. Eli Dorado is an economist at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, who studies regulation of the commercial space industry. He says the SLS is largely a jobs program that utilizes wasteful cost-plus contracts that require NASA to fully cover a project's expenses plus an extra fee as profit, eliminating any risk taken on by the contractor. There's no incentive to find cost savings. NASA head Bill Nelson has called cost-plus contracting a plague. Dorado says NASA's entire rocket program should be outsourced to private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, who bid to complete the work at a fixed cost. The commercial approach is to create a market for the service that you want to buy and let hungry competitors work to get the cost down and the performance up. NASA has some smart scientists and some smart engineers, but it's a huge bureaucracy and it's very, very risk averse. Pool refers to NASA's cumbersome rocket design process as the one best way approach, in contrast to private firms, which are always on the lookout for more innovative and cost-effective ways of doing things. SpaceX has engineered a way to land its boosters after use instead of disposing of them into the ocean, as NASA does. Pool remembers the first time he saw SpaceX's method in action. There came the boosters coming down, beautifully settling down right on target of the pads. And I thought, my God, this is incredible. And the thought that immediately came to mind was, my God, Robert Heinlein should be alive today to see this. He wrote the first science fiction story ever that I know of about private enterprise creating a rocket vehicle to launch the moon. It crystallized how important the business approach to space launch has become. SpaceX has recovered 32 boosters that have all been reused at least one time for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. One booster has even flown 14 times. The company is pushing to get that number up to 30. While Artemis 1's launch costs $4 billion, the average launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy runs between $100 and $150 million, with enough capacity to carry about 80% of Artemis's load. It seems that SpaceX is still on their way to perfecting that reusability element for rocket boosters. But the SLS system, like you said, is not reusable. Why did NASA go that route of less reusability? The trade was the decision was, we want to get to the moon as fast as possible and for that you need a really big rocket. For you to get the thrust that you need, you just can't put the reusable components into the vehicle to be able to recover it afterwards. NASA has contracted with SpaceX for the Artemis program, with plans to use its Starship launch vehicle still in development to take humans from a lunar outpost to the moon's surface and eventually onto Mars. Do you think NASA's role is always going to be to build and launch rockets, or is that going to be outsourced, so to speak, to other companies that seem to be doing it quicker and more often? I think we would definitely be very much a part of launching rockets and building rockets. For sure, the Artemis campaign for the future has us continuing to launch SLS vehicles. So you got to think about the whole Artemis campaign is not just the SLS. It's also all of the other components that come with it. Commercial companies supplying us logistics or commercial companies supplying us human landers, supplying us deep space habitats. And I think it's a good thing to have a good combination of our ability to go into space and not make it all be one specific way of doing it. NASA already relies heavily on the private sector, with private companies designing and leasing the agency much of its hardware. But Poole says there's no reason NASA can't take it a step further and just use the SpaceX Starship to cover the entire journey from Earth to the moon and eventually Mars. If the current NASA plan goes ahead to have the SpaceX Starship actually deliver the astronauts from the lunar outposted orbit to the surface of the moon and bring them back up, that would be an even more dramatic refutation of the idea that only NASA should be doing space transportation. Poole says that instead of flying its own missions, NASA should play a more limited and supportive role. The future NASA role that makes the best sense is research and development and advancing science, helping with development of new orbiting telescopes and things, doing research that will assist the private companies. Visiting the Kennedy Space Center, it's easy to be nostalgic for the glory days of the space program, but the effort to relive them with Artemis has been a costly mistake. Commercial space travel is the next frontier, and it may be coming sooner than we think. There are more private launch startups of all sizes going on raising venture capital today between the Defense Department, having successes with launches from SpaceX and presumably other companies. Space transportation should be within a decade or so. It's possible to be the main model for how we get people and things into space, and that would be an incredible sea change. I'm telling you, we've never seen such a tale of flame, and I have to say, for what we saw tonight, it's an A-plus. Artemis 1 successfully launched. How did you feel watching the launch? Mixed feelings. The fact that it is a success, I mean, assuming it completes the mission and makes a success, then they plan eight missions of this, which means the $93 billion only covers through 2024. So the cost of this is going to be several hundred billion if this all goes through. And so if there was a big failure on the very first launch, there would have been a chance to say, well, look, all right, we did this, we built it, it worked, but we really don't want to do eight of these. But to commit to eight, all eight launches now strikes me as a very foolish decision. If there's one thing to be learned from the history of technology, it's that government support entails hidden perils. Poole wrote in Reason back in 1979 when heralding the dawn of private ventures in space. Like with industries such as railroads, cars, telecommunications, TV, and the power grid, space exploration saw new dynamism once the government backed off. In the 50 years since NASA astronauts last walked on the moon, remarkable progress made by the private sector shows that Poole was right back in 1979. We can and should develop space without government help.