Can privatisation save the space race?

There is a very American conviction that the private sector is far better placed to develop the next generation of piloted spacecraft than Nasa, writes Steven Cutts. But don’t give up on the shuttles of the 1960s just yet

SpaceX’s Starship: Elon Musk envisions 1,000-strong fleets of the model departing for Mars every 26 months (Getty)

It’s the third decade of the 21st century and some of the icons of modern science are starting to feel very dated. Take the space shuttle, for example. On-screen, it’s the epitome of American exceptionalism but in practice, it’s a museum piece. The last piloted flight was almost nine years ago and the quest to find its successor continues to this day.

With the space shuttle retired, Nasa has been forced to pay good money to the Russians to send their astronauts into orbit. Needless to say, this kind of dependency hasn’t gone down very well with your average American patriot. Worse still, the Russian space agency has gradually increased its asking price for a flight into space from an initial figure of $20m to the more recent sum of $80m per seat.

The shuttle had been developed with the expressed purpose of driving down the cost of piloted space flight. It failed. Conceived in the early 1970s, it benefited from the heady optimism that followed the first moon landings and few in the space flight community expected anything but success.