Private companies reached several milestones in space this year, including the first private lunar lander touchdown and the first civilian spacewalk, and Elon Musk鈥檚 SpaceX played a key role in many of these missions.
The first big event for the sector this year came on 22 February, when Texas-based Intuitive Machines landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the moon, making it the first private company to achieve a feat previously only accomplished by national space agencies. Despite the lander tilting unexpectedly, the mission was a success and another is planned to blast off early in 2025.
Odysseus was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, making it just one of the many successes for the company this year. The biggest was in September with the Polaris Dawn mission, which featured the first ever civilian spacewalk. Every spacewalk completed before this was performed by government-trained astronauts.
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Billionaire Jared Isaacman, who co-funded the mission and served as commander, was the first to partially exit the spacecraft, followed by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis. The pair made their 鈥渟tand-up鈥� spacewalks one at a time as the craft orbited Earth at more than 25,000 kilometres per hour and an altitude of around 740 kilometres. The mission also broke the record, set by Gemini 11 in 1966, for highest orbit (excluding the Apollo missions to the moon), reaching over 1400 km at one point.
Not content with these missions, SpaceX made its third, fourth, fifth and sixth Starship test flights, including the first 鈥�catch鈥� of its Super Heavy booster, as the company continues to develop the largest rocket ever built. And it was business as usual, with more than 100 Falcon rocket launches and the deployment of hundreds more Starlink satellites.
In another sign that the private space industry is on the ascendant, the incoming US president, Donald Trump, announced on 4 December that Isaacman would be his nominee for administrator of NASA. , Isaacman said: 鈥淭here will inevitably be a thriving space economy鈥攐ne that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space.鈥�
at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California says the commercialisation of space ramped up in 2024 and we should expect to see the trend continue.
鈥淚 think it鈥檚 just the natural way of things,鈥� he says. 鈥淐osts will go down, risks will go down, reliability will go up. That鈥檚 just the way of the market. There鈥檚 been so much investment pushed into space in the last few decades. The commercialisation of space, I think, is going to be a great thing for all humanity.鈥�
at Imperial College London says that with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos鈥檚 Blue Origin we have seen a Silicon Valley-isation of space. They have a build-fast, test-fast approach to rocket design that is unprecedented in the relatively conservative world of state space agencies.
Amato says that while they are pushing innovation faster than ever before, it is ultimately often still governments footing the bill. For instance, Intuitive Machines and others are contracted by NASA to put payloads on the moon. SpaceX generates revenue by carrying military satellites into orbit and ferrying US astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And both Blue Origin and SpaceX are designing landing systems for NASA to carry Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface.
