There's no doubt these are exciting times to be building new rockets and propulsion systems for space travel - "Unprecedented," says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society.
But so far most of that excitement has been felt in the US - not in Europe.
There was a brief burst of commercial entrepreneurship in the early 1980s when the shuttle began to fly, Dreier says. Then, after the Challenger disaster, NASA pulled back from investing in commercial projects. Now, those projects are coming back.
"We're in this period of heady excitement, and you get real innovation when people don't know what's impossible yet," says Dreier. "SpaceX and Blue Origin have been pioneering, Planetary Resources [an asteroid mining company] have raised a significant amount of private money. And you have to ask, 'What's the government's role?'"
The Americans are also known to celebrate competition and an entrepreneurial spirit. Those very same things make Europeans nervous. But America has a long history of entrepreneurship.
"I go back to Burt Rutan, the famous airplane designer, who had this secret spaceship program in the Mojave Desert," says Julian Guthrie, author of "How to make a Spaceship," which tells the story of Peter Diamandis' XPrize for private space travel. "Had they had the government breathing down on them and imposing regulations, they would not have been able to achieve what they did. Having said that, most paying passengers would not want to fly in SpaceshipOne [which won the prize]. You want oversight."
So you want governments working with private companies. That's the public-private partnership model that the European Space Agency sees as a cornerstone of its Space 4.0 vision.
No exclusive access
But with or without oversight, whether in the desert or in Silicon Valley, US companies have achieved big things where Europe has not. They have been part of the US space program since the start. The Apollo program's Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), which landed on the moon, was made by the Grumman Corporation in New York. Now, Elon Musk's SpaceX flies supplies to the International Space Station. And Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is as close as anyone has got to building a heavy-lift vehicle since Saturn V.
As the years have progressed, the ways in which NASA and its contractors have collaborated have evolved. In the early days, NASA would pay for everything and expect to own the technology. These days, Dreier says, NASA is more of an "angel investor," injecting funds into startups, with the companies having a tighter grip on their intellectual property (IP).
"What's exciting is the government doesn't maintain total control over the IP, that's a real big shift," says Dreier. "SpaceX owns the design for the Falcon 9. They have an independent launch capability into space. That is a new and novel thing. Governments no longer have exclusive access to space."
Shifting space
It's not something you would have heard in Europe up to now. Government institutions here are slow to act, and "private investors have been conservative on space," says Amnon Ginati, a senior advisor at the European Space Agency (ESA).
