Space capitalism needs more than a bull market
By most measures, commercial space is thriving. Washington produced a flurry of activity over the past year: two major executive orders, a raft of directives, and "space superiority" elevated to official doctrine. More recently, Wall Street answered in kind. On June 12, SpaceX went public in the largest initial offering in history, closing its first day worth more than $2 trillion. The public and private sectors agree that the commercial space age has arrived.
But there are still major barriers to space capitalism. Despite capital owners' confidence and the government's directives, the rules of the game are not settled. Policy changes mean little until and unless they result in durable institutional change. And market optimism is no substitute for long-term strategic thinking.
Consider the policy record. Last August's executive order streamlines licensing for launch and reentry. That's genuinely good. It clears regulatory underbrush, lowering costs at the margin. However, we need legislation, not executive discretion, to secure lasting gains. December's order did well to emphasize space as a strategic imperative. But that was already obvious to anyone paying attention. The binding constraints - especially security of celestial property rights and ambitions to develop the space industrial base - haven't moved much.
Now consider the SpaceX IPO. What is that $2 trillion actually a bet on? Starlink satellite internet, which was roughly 61% of last year's revenue; launch services; and, since the xAI merger, artificial intelligence. Broadband spectrum, launch licensing and even data centers rest on legal institutions that already exist and function tolerably well. The market priced the settled layer of space. The unsettled layers, such as asteroid mining and long-term human habitation, may be a ways off, but the legal frameworks they require demand attention today.
Space commerce has two distinct tracks that are governed very differently. The contractual track (launches, satellites, resource trades between consenting firms) is in decent shape. The second track is the wild card. Orbital debris, space resource appropriation, liability for damage to third parties and brewing great-power competition in space, especially with China, all require new governance frameworks. They involve parties who never signed a contract and have a strong incentive to tilt the playing field in their favor. This is where institutions must be deliberately built. It is also where almost nothing has been built over the past year.
One might object that the arrangements we have, informal as they are, seem to work. But "it works for now" is the most dangerous sentence in policymaking. Arrangements built on executive discretion and one dominant firm's rapport with the government might be good enough for tranquil times. The whole point of building institutions is that times cannot permanently be tranquil. Markets price risk, but statesmanship contemplates that which is incalculable and genuinely uncertain. And when it comes to space policy, we need much more statesmanship.
Public choice economics, which applies economic logic to political decision-making, predicts the holdup. Directives and licenses are fast, visible and easy to claim credit for. In contrast, statutes, liability regimes and property frameworks are slow, diffuse and thankless. Politicians and bureaucrats reliably produce the first while neglecting the second. We've confused the appearance of activity for substantive progress. Meanwhile, the final frontier remains inadequately governed.
So what must be done? America must seize the celestial high ground. We need legislation codifying novel-activity authorization, giving space operators the certainty they need to make long-term plans and ensuring that new rules survive a change in presidential administration. We also need a framework for pricing space debris so that Earth's orbit does not become a permanently cluttered junkyard. We need an integrated national defense strategy for countering Russia's and China's space ambitions. And most of all, we need space commerce rules that play to America's vast entrepreneurial advantage while also securing buy-in among friendly nations. Government paper-pushing and stock market jumps only matter if they help us achieve our commercial and strategic goals in space. There's only one question that matters: Did the constraints limiting our space ambitions loosen?
The Trump administration has made progress in space, and SpaceX's investors are right that the future is bright. But a well-capitalized IPO and a busy rule-making season in Washington are small steps on a much larger journey. Both literally and figuratively, America is the moonshot nation. It's time we started acting like it.
Alexander William Salter is an economics professor in the business school at Texas Tech University and a researcher at TTU's Free Market Institute.
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