For most of its history, NASA hired companies to build hardware like the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft. NASA then took full ownership of those vehicles.
Today, the agency is increasingly shifting toward purchasing services, not hardware, from its contractors. Since 2014, for instance, NASA has awarded SpaceX nearly $5 billion in contracts to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
These changing roles raise many questions, particularly around the ownership of and responsibility for space hardware. Can NASA ensure the reliability of spacecraft developed for services contracts in the same way it does for spacecraft it owns? Will private companies preserve history-making spacecraft in the same way NASA did with much of the Apollo hardware, transferring ownership to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum?
I reached out to five experts and asked them: In light of the rapidly growing role of commercial space companies, who should own the hardware, both during missions and after?
With few exceptions, I’m a firm believer that contractors should own and operate hardware, not NASA. Our vendors, like Rockwell and Boeing, built our rockets and vehicles, and then we purchased, owned and operated them. And that’s where the problem came in. On top of spending a lot of money getting it built and delivered, owning and operating costs a lot of money.
During the Obama administration, many of us at NASA decided there was no longer a need for NASA to spend the money to own rockets and airplanes. With capable commercial operators, we could transition to public-private partnerships and purchase services from them, not hardware. That’s the model NASA uses today for human spaceflight and cargo to the ISS through the Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, and I think that’s the model we should be following for almost everything, including things like Earth-observing satellites.
There are some exceptions. Certain exquisite science or intelligence satellites may be more appropriate for the government to own and operate. I doubt there’s a company that wants to own something like the James Webb or Hubble space telescopes, though I could be wrong.
By transitioning to purchasing services instead of hardware, NASA not only saves money on overhead and maintenance, but we also reapportion risk. Let me give you the Boeing CST-100 Starliner as an example.
Today, with NASA procuring services, we exercise a safety model that we call “insight,” wherein we embed personnel into the contractor’s facilities at their request to offer advice and our insights into safety requirements, instead of the traditional oversight in which NASA dictated everything from design to manufacturing to the contractor. We tell the company what we want and offer our services as consultants and advisers on the project, but we’re not constantly looking over their shoulder. We probably should have been exercising the same amount of insight at Boeing that we were at SpaceX, and it’s my belief as the NASA administrator at the time that we didn’t do that. And so we experienced the delays and in-flight failures on Boeing’s first Orbital Flight Test (OFT-1) in the Starliner program.
But I would vehemently disagree with somebody who says it didn’t work out. It worked out exactly the way NASA should want it to, where the contractor, who owns and operates the vehicle, has taken responsibility for analyzing and repairing and resolving any problems. It’s a firm fixed-price contract.
The one area where NASA’s move to purchasing services introduces uncertainty is the historical preservation of spacecraft and artifacts. NASA and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum signed an agreement in 1967 that made the museum into the equivalent of the National Archives for historic NASA hardware. But it’s not clear how that process works when NASA doesn’t own the artifact. To my knowledge, the Smithsonian does not yet have a Falcon 9 or a SpaceX Dragon because the vehicles belong to SpaceX, not NASA. [SpaceX in 2022 donated a Merlin engine and Falcon grid fin to the Smithsonian, but NASA was not involved in that transfer. — JK]
One possible solution would be to stipulate in the service contract that ownership of the first vehicle flown on an operational mission for NASA will transfer to NASA. Then, NASA can transfer the vehicle to the Smithsonian as we always have. Commercial operators can decide if that contract works for them, just as they do with fixed-price contracts.
The answer is yes — both. When it comes to achieving national priorities in space, it should never be a question of the private sector or the government, but both the public and private sectors. Public-private partnerships are absolutely vital to maintaining American leadership in space.
We have to be very cautious of one-size-fits-all statements, and so I fundamentally disagree with the nature of the question. A better question is, what are the best roles of government and the private sector in accomplishing specific missions?
When you’re dealing with a mission that has new, untested technology or one that lacks a clear return on investment, then you’ve got a strong case for government ownership and operation. For example, in the early days of space development, there were only a half dozen or so satellites, and they were all constructed, owned, and operated by the government. But, as private sector capabilities increased and an orbital economy emerged, the government’s role shrank proportionately.
That to me is the ideal cadence of public and private sector coordination in space. As the private sector matures to reliably deliver a capability, the government should turn those capabilities over to the private sector and move on to more ambitious programs that don’t yet have a return on investment. The government’s role should always be to push the envelope of what is possible. NASA should focus on returning to the moon with Artemis, and then move onward to Mars, rather than on owning and operating spacecraft for taking astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.
This goes beyond freeing NASA’s budget and attention for more ambitious exploration and science missions. If you look at the international field of play, we are in an existential competition with China over the moon: Whoever reaches the moon first to establish a permanent foothold will establish the rules of the road in space. They will, in turn, wield influence over everything from trade to national security alliances terrestrially. Whoever controls the moon will eventually control the Earth.
The American private sector is our greatest tool in that competition, the best arrow in the quiver to defeat the Chinese. Inevitably, China will eventually spend more than we do on space, so we must out-entrepreneur the Chinese. And that means leveraging our entrepreneurial spirit that created the second golden age of space, harnessing the capabilities of private sector companies.
But there is also a strong role for government, in that the SLS and Orion may represent our best chance of beating China to the moon quickly.
So, beware of false dichotomies. It’s not LEO or lunar; it’s LEO and lunar. It’s not public or private; it’s public-private partnerships attuned to the requirements of specific missions. That’s how we create the business cases, the capabilities and the international partnerships that will support missions in LEO, on the moon and beyond. It has to be an all-of-the-above approach for America to win the future.
From the perspective of international space law, it doesn’t matter who owns the hardware. Because at least one government, possibly multiple governments, will always be responsible for that hardware and the actions of the people operating it.
From NASA’s perspective, the move toward purchasing services rather than spacecraft could be a shrewd one. In my interactions with folks at NASA, I’ve always found that what they want most is to do science and exploration. If SpaceX owning and operating a spacecraft is more economically efficient and gets NASA astronauts back on the moon doing science, then so be it. And if the U.S. government owning the spacecraft gets them to the moon, then so be it.
It may come down to the specific mission and purpose: The U.S. government owns military aircraft used for missions, but military personnel often fly commercial airlines to their posts because it is economically efficient.
Under international law, the foundation of which is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it doesn’t matter who owns the spacecraft. NASA owning and operating a spacecraft, SpaceX owning and operating a spacecraft for NASA, and Blue Origin owning and operating a spacecraft for its own purposes are all allowed under international law. But the U.S. government is equally answerable for all of the activities of each of those missions. Meaning, if they do something wrong, we are responsible for it, just like a parent may be responsible for the activities of their child. If any of those spacecraft or operators cause harmful damage to the space domain or fail to show due regard to other actors in space or fail to treat astronauts as envoys of mankind, which are obligations under the Outer Space Treaty, then the U.S. government is responsible for the legal and political consequences and repercussions of those wrongful acts.
This new space age of private actors doing really bold, ambitious, novel, unique and pioneering things in space doesn’t in any way threaten the international rules, but it will test the extent and the understanding of those rules. The next 10 to 20 years are really going to flesh out all the particularities and nuances of international space law. But I don’t think there is an overriding reason of national prestige that demands the spacecraft that next delivers American astronauts to the moon be a U.S. government spacecraft. However they get there, and whoever owns the spacecraft, the headline is going to be “America lands on the moon.”
I can see the pros and cons of either the traditional structure of NASA owning and operating spacecraft or the newer commercial structure.
As a historian, I can say the commercial structure presents new challenges for the preservation of historic space artifacts. But the question of who should own and preserve hardware produced by the space program is not a new one. There were discussions within the U.S. government during the Apollo program, for instance, because at first there were no provisions for the historic preservation of the spacecraft after they completed their missions.
NASA hung onto its early spacecraft at first, recognizing their historic significance, and hired its first chief historian, Eugene Emme, shortly after the agency formed. They quickly realized NASA needed to focus on making, rather than preserving, history and worked with the Smithsonian, which was then amending the title of the National Air Museum to become the National Air and Space Museum. They entered into what was called the NASA-NASM Agreement, which says any historic hardware from NASA gets transferred to the Smithsonian following its useful life or its mission.
A lot of historians across the country are wrestling with the question of what historic preservation looks like at this moment. We are making space history right now, and not only is private ownership of the hardware challenging, but the number of actors making that history is also challenging. It’s much more difficult to come up with a singular agreement like that between NASA and NASM to solve for everything.
Some of the private companies recognize the history that they’re making and have taken some independent initiative to preserve it. Blue Origin donated to the National Air and Space Museum its first New Shepard capsule that carried people. And SpaceX has donated some of its Cargo Dragon capsules to institutions like the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (though we don’t yet have a Dragon at the Museum of Flight). I would also hope that the first Starship to land on the moon and return would be preserved.
But that brings another emerging challenge for space history preservation: Starship is gigantic. What museum could have room to display it? There are only three Saturn V rockets still in existence: one at Kennedy Space Center, one outside Johnson Space Center and one at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. They basically require a building the size of a shopping mall to fit them. If Starship is the shape of historic space missions to come, we’re going to have major logistics challenges on top of sorting transfers of ownership.
Since 2018, I’ve been part of a project called To Boldly Preserve. We’re a collection of historians and museum curators who are trying to answer some of these questions. How do we ensure we don’t lose any of the important history being made today without overwhelming everyone involved? The discussions are ongoing, but one thing we all recognize more and more is that, absent a process, history does not preserve itself.
I look at this from the perspective of the reclamation and preservation of space artifacts. The question of ownership is always the first question, and it is a complex one that requires analysis.
Ownership of an artifact can change over its lifetime and is squishy to begin with since a spacecraft may have hardware contributed by multiple entities. If you want to ensure space history is preserved, you have to think deeply about this because there are no clear “safe” universal solutions — we have to evaluate everything on a case-by-case basis.
Private space companies may preserve their own artifacts, but will they make them publicly accessible? Museums like the Smithsonian make artifacts available to everyone because they are free, but many museums are not easily accessible due to entry fees. Further, most museums and archives also throw away or sell 30-70% of everything donated to them. They call it deaccession.
My father [James Tillman] and I took legal ownership of the only flight-qualified spare Viking Lander and associated hardware in the 1970s after NASA deaccessioned them. I also ensured my father’s work was preserved throughout his life and after, as I understood its value to education, history and humanity. Those items are privately owned by me, precisely so they will not be thrown away or sold, even after I pass.
Because I knew many people associated with the Viking missions were throwing away their old materials, I founded my nonprofit to preserve the oral histories, archives and artifacts. I believe it’s important to protect the aggregate of mission materials, which includes my privately owned materials and everything donated to the nonprofit. I preserve and maintain the Viking Archive in its entirety, which includes both, because together they are better protected than separately.
At the same time, I’m very much against historic artifacts being in private hands unless the owners have an appropriate trust similar to what I created to ensure those items are preserved upon their death. In July, Congress passed a bill ordering the Smithsonian to transfer ownership of the space shuttle Discovery back to NASA for relocation to Texas. [President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending law allocated $85 million for the transfer. — JK] But the Smithsonian owns Discovery just as I own the Viking Lander flight spare, although my interest is protected even more because it’s privately owned.
And those are just the kinds of issues around artifacts on the ground. What about preserving historic satellites in orbit, like Vanguard 1? Or the descent stage of the Apollo 11 lunar lander on the moon?
To help facilitate responsible discussion around these questions, I’ve created a framework for analyzing any proposed item for reclamation or preservation, whether it’s on Earth, in orbit or on another celestial body. I’ve invited other historians, curators and academics to weigh in and help develop this framework as a way to identify artifact ownership, the responsibilities of owners, liability and a chain of custody to change ownership for artifacts. It begins with assessing who the stakeholders are: the manufacturers that made it, the space agencies that used it and the people of the nation who created and used it.
Then we ask who owns the artifact now, and how ownership and liability can be transferred. We also have to assess the risks of transferring ownership or moving an artifact — for instance, attempting to capture Vanguard could cause it to deorbit or strike something else — against the value of preserving that artifact in specific ways and places. Some items, such as Mars samples, might be best preserved on private space stations for planetary protection purposes, for example.
This framework is just the beginning of a discussion about what a process for responsible preservation of space history would look like. Whatever shape it takes, it must be a global process, not one led by me or a handful of historians or the U.S. government, or even a singular special interest group like archaeologists or consortia. Because at the end of the day, these things truly belong to all of us. And we need to protect our history as if it belongs to everyone.
