Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:23:04 +0000
A feud with Musk, a flirtation with Bezos, and talk of folding the agency into the DOT leave America's space ambitions adrift ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- _This is a free edition of_ _**Faster, Please!**_ ,_my regular newsletter about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.) If you enjoy it and find it helpful in any way, please consider buying a subscription to the twice-weekly regular issues that include in-depth essays, Q &As with smart people, and summaries of relevant news stories. _ Upgrade to paid * * * # 🚀 NASA (and moonshot 2.0) is in meltdown mode ### A feud with Musk, a flirtation with Bezos, and talk of folding the agency into the DOT leave America's space ambitions adrift | | James Pethokoukis --- | Oct 22 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- **My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:** NASA, probably still the most respected part of Washington by the American public -- plenty of coolness cache remains in that brand -- is now engulfed in a Beltway farce more _Veep_ or _Space Force_ than _Apollo 13_. Here we go: Acting administrator Sean Duffy has a) publicly sparred with Elon Musk, b) floated folding the space agency into the Department of Transportation, and c) courted Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin as a last-minute alternative to SpaceX to provide the Artemis III mission lunar lander. Beneath the sorry spectacle lies a serious reality: America looks poised to lose the race back to the Moon -- and the dysfunction now gripping NASA is a microcosm of the national Down Wing shift¹ that I describe in _The Conservative Futurist_. Hardly "new Golden Age" material happening here, to be painfully honest. For the first time in six decades, the United States may cede lunar primacy to a rival power. China's well-funded, methodical program² is preparing to land taikonauts before 2030. And NASA? Ace space journalist and author Eric Berger of Ars Technica³ reports that the agency has lost a fifth of its staff, that morale is low, and that its only viable lunar lander -- SpaceX's Starship -- is way behind schedule. Even if Starship pulls off its next milestones, insiders admit a human landing by the public 2028 goal is optimistic, to be charitable. Prediction markets are equally pessimistic: | | ---|---|--- Duffy's recent actions make sense only against that anxious backdrop. His attacks on SpaceX and outreach to Blue Origin seem less an executive strategy than PR optics -- an attempt to show his Oval Office boss that he's "standing up" to Musk while conjuring a Plan B that doesn't yet exist. (Also rumors of WH ambitions.) Floating the idea of merging NASA into the transportation department looks like bureaucratic self-preservation, not accelerationist reform. The state of play is grim. Artemis depends entirely on a single contractor's unproven technology. Blue Origin's human-rated lander remains theoretical. The Space Launch System and Orion capsule, decades and $30 billion in the making, have finally flown -- once -- but are relics of Space Shuttle-era design. (Congress kept them alive through cost-plus contracts that guaranteed profit regardless of progress.) As Berger writes: > Privately, many people within the space industry, and even at NASA, acknowledge that the US space agency appears to be holding a losing hand. Recently, some influential voices, such as former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have spoken out. "Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China's projected timeline to the Moon's surface," Bridenstine said in early September. #### From Apollo daring to Artemis drift How did the world's innovation engine get so bogged down? The answer is the same one that explains America's wider slowdown. Over the past half-century, we replaced our frontier ethos with a culture of caution. In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, and the environmental backlash of the 1970s, Americans began equating progress with peril. Regulation metastasized, litigation flourished, and risk-taking became a vice. As I argue in _The Conservative Futurist_, this "Down Wing" shift was self-inflicted -- not the natural exhaustion of invention, but a political and cultural choice to prefer safety over speed. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- * * * NASA's trajectory captures that stagnationist arc perfectly. The Apollo program leapt forward on daring engineering and a national willingness to fail in public. Artemis trudges forward on PowerPoint charts and oversight committees. A system once designed for rapid iteration has been re-engineered for risk avoidance. Every new administration redefines the mission. Every Congress rewrites the budget. Every contractor builds another derivative vehicle to preserve jobs. The result is a space program optimized for politically advantageous continuity, not discovery and exploration. #### While China builds, America dithers China, meanwhile, looks distinctly Up Wing, especially by comparison. Its program advances through clear milestones, stable funding, and a national consensus that exploration signals strength. Beijing has absorbed the lesson Washington once taught: Confidence and competence are the ultimate soft power. | | ---|---|--- If America does lose the second Moon race, the symbolism will sting more than the science, but sting it will. The US still dominates the space economy, private launch, and orbital operations -- but a Chinese flag on the lunar surface would mark something deeper: The triumph of decisiveness over dithering. We're a society that talks endlessly about the future but cannot build it. What are the stakes? A 2022 RAND report, "Future Uses of Space Out to 2050," sketches a world on the edge of transformation -- an America-led Western civilization stretching from Earth to the Moon in a single, breathing economy. Lunar foundries forge alloys for orbital shipyards. Satellites beam solar power home through the dark. Mining rigs chew asteroids for fuel and metals. Space has become the next industrial basin -- crowded, contested, and impossibly human. All that, just a quarter century hence. Sure, it's not the squeaky clean optimism of 1960s NASA, what we now call retro-futurism. It's grit and pragmatism, opportunity in an off-planet vacuum. The question isn't so much whether we can reach the stars, really. We should feel good about our technical progress, especially in the SpaceX era The real quandary is whether we still remember how to get to work and build something worthy of our capabilities -- and our history. 1 After the go-go 1960s, rising regulation cultural risk aversion made the country less willing to build, experiment, or invest boldly. Environmental and safety concerns hardened into permanent barriers to innovation, and policymakers prioritized stability over progress. This "Down Wing" shift was not caused primarily by a shortage of new ideas but by a loss of confidence in growth itself -- a national choice to manage decline rather than finance discovery. 2 According to The Space Review, China launches over 100 spacecraft annually and now has about 1,000 satellites in orbit. Private and state-backed firms are building reusable rockets, mega-constellations rivaling Starlink, and a vast network of satellite-based communications, navigation, and Earth-observation systems. Crewed lunar missions are targeted for 2030 using the new Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou-Lanyue spacecraft. Meanwhile, Beijing is marketing its Tiangong station and lunar missions as platforms for global cooperation. In short: a tightly integrated civil-military-commercial push. 3 Please check out my 2023 podcast chat, including transcript, with Berger. It give even more great context for the issues facing the US space program. Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid You're currently a free subscriber to Faster, Please!. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2025 James Pethokoukis 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe