SpaceX launched its IPO on the same day that the United States sent astronauts to the moon for the first time in 54 years. And the timing is fitting: This is likely the last time NASA will attempt to send people into deep space without major assistance from a company that emerged from the venture-backed technology scene.
The origins of NASA’s current lunar campaign trace a complicated path back to the second Bush administration, which began developing a huge rocket and a spacecraft called Orion to return to the moon. By 2010, the project had grown over budget and was scaled back — and paired with a new program to support private companies building new orbital rockets.
That decision led to a company-saving contract for SpaceX and a rush of venture capital into extraterrestrial technology and into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that now carries three Americans and one Canadian around the moon and back.
SLS is the most powerful operational rocket in the world today. It has flown only once before, when it launched an empty Orion spacecraft on a test flight around the moon in preparation for this week’s historic mission, which will set a record for the furthest humans have gone into the solar system.
Next time, however, the pressure will be on SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The two companies are competing over who will put boots on the lunar regolith.
SLS and Orion were built by NASA’s legacy contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with a boost from Europe’s Airbus Defense and Space. They were also expensive, delayed and over budget, while SpaceX flew a fleet of cheap reusable rockets and set off a massive cycle of investment in private space.
When NASA decided to head for the moon again in 2019, the agency felt it had to stick with SLS and Orion.
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But a piece of the puzzle was missing: a vehicle to transport astronauts from space down to the surface of the moon. That, NASA decided, would come from the new generation of venture-backed space companies. The agency also approached a handful of private space companies to deploy robotic landers for reconnaissance and testing, including Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines.
SpaceX bid to use its Starship rocket as a lander and in 2021 won the job. It was a controversial decision. Getting the huge vehicle to the moon will require a dozen or more launches to fill it with sufficient propellant for the journey. After several years of waiting for the spacecraft, NASA decided to push back an attempt to land on the moon and renew its program.
“This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I’m aware of would have chosen if they had the choice,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told Congress last year, noting that the decision had been made without a Senate-confirmed leader at the agency.
Blue Origin was added to the list in 2023 to build its own human landing system.
Now, the agency is apparently planning a bake-off: In 2027, NASA will test Orion’s ability to rendezvous with one or both landers in orbit, ahead of two potential landings in 2028. That will put additional studies on SpaceX’s next Starship test, which could take place this month, and Blue Moon will print its landing plans sometime this year.
This year has seen a major overhaul of the program under the new NASA administrator, billionaire toll contractor Jared Isaacman, who paid SpaceX to fly two space missions and was promoted by Musk as the right candidate for administrator. After being nominated for the job by President Donald Trump, having his nomination withdrawn and being renominated, he took office in late 2025, facing a series of difficult choices about how to return to the moon.
In March, Isaacman scrapped plans, long seen as wasteful or politically motivated by outside observers, to build a lunar space station called Gateway and invest in expensive upgrades to SLS. Now he is fully involved in the new generation of private space companies.
But with China on its own disciplined path to put one of its citizens on the moon by 2030, any delay or misstep will be seen in a geopolitical light. Silicon Valley has so far failed to beat Chinese companies in the physical areas of electric cars or robots. SpaceX has become the company entrepreneurs across the Pacific seek to emulate, but heading to the moon, Silicon Valley will have a chance to show it can still own the technology frontier.