Private Venture to Moon Shows Results
March 4, 2025
In a first, a private company named Firefly has successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon, and two other firms are poised to deploy their own lunar landers. In Issues, the space analyst Bhavya Lal argues that this push makes sense, for both businesses and the nation. Companies, for example, have an incentive to engineer systems that are cheaper to produce and operate in order to generate greater profits. Companies are also financially motivated, she writes, to “push the boundary of the art-of-the-possible in space beyond what government managers can envision, and the footprint of space activities will grow apace.”