A white parachute billows above the camera as it hurtles to the ground, numbers in a corner of the screen flashing the landing velocity. Below spreads the arid iron oxide surface of Mars, orange dust for miles. In a video from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Perseverance Rover touches down on Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Like Apollo 11, Voyager and Curiosity before it, Perseverance was the result of a coordinated government effort to explore space and conduct scientific research.

The introduction of private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic into the space industry has successfully commercialized a field with extremely high barriers to entry, opening space to tourists with means to pay tens of millions of dollars for a ticket.

Due to the capital needed to venture past Earth, small companies and startups face much greater difficulty sustaining the high risks and high costs of the market. As a result, this oligopolistic market pushes its few competitors to lower costs for passenger space travel and personal interests. 

In the transition to a space industry driven by private ownership, the coordination of government and companies stands crucial. Not only do government launch sites conflict with commercial launch sites, but access to space also challenges NASA’s extremely selective astronaut corps. Pulling away government regulation in a field with high-risk factors raises questions as to how companies will recover from rocket failures and possible human casualties and how the market will promote competition from smaller corporations.

As commercial flight and the space-based economy sets in, we risk losing areas of public interest, such as data collection of space exploration, in favor of commercial goals. As of now, NASA’s sweeping science programs, including Perseverance, remain unrivaled by any private agency, yet the booming popularity of space over the past few years may indicate a future takeover.

As an amateur astronomer, the concept of space fascinated my childhood imagination and continues to lead me to ponder the creation of extraterrestrial worlds. In our junior year American poetry unit, we studied the Transcendentalist poets, in particular Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Whitman’s narrator criticizes the rigorous mathematical formulas of the scientist, claiming that they leave the beauty of the night sky void of life in favor of a quest of elaborate charts and diagrams.

However, astronomy stands as the missing link between stardust and our own lives, a field that asks us, as ephemeral beings insignificant against the ancient galaxies, to study the sublime. Despite the impossibility of the Anthropic Principle, we exist in a world that appreciates the romance of science, a high price to lose. In order to maintain its relevance while sustaining private growth, NASA must chase new frontiers, paving the way for industrial development to follow while collecting data that answer the question of how our existence came to be on the grandest arena of all.