Low-Energy Fridays: Is space exploration good for energy innovation?

For the first time in decades, the United States has sent humans to the moon. Even though no astronaut set foot on the moon this time, the Artemis program shows us how the latest technologies can support future travel into deep space. While the primary purpose of these missions is to advance science, there’s also an economic rationale: innovation. However, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s own history contains cautionary lessons about overreliance on government to cultivate innovation.

Many people imagine the Apollo program when they think of government innovation, but one of my favorite NASA innovations happened because of a manufacturing mistake with the Hubble Space Telescope: NASA engineers devised a technology that could digitally correct the blurry images transmitted back to Earth. That same technology is now used for other scientific purposes, including earlier detection of breast cancer via mammography. When it comes to energy, the space program’s reliance on solar power was a major reason behind rapid improvements in photovoltaic (PV) solar power. When NASA formed in 1958, its need for solar-powered spacecraft was a boon to the advancement of solar panels, invented by Bell Labs just four years earlier.

These stories are great, but it’s important to note that the government does have an innovation policy aimed at discovering economically useful technologies that are either uninvested or underinvested in by the private sector. NASA is part of this innovation agenda, as is the Department of Energy (DOE) and its 17 National Laboratories, as well as several other government agencies. While it can be hard to track the value of one invention relative to another, a common metric for gauging the innovation “output” of these efforts is to look at the number of patents produced and how frequently they are licensed. While NASA is consistently one of the least efficient government innovators when examining expenditures relative to output, the DOE is one of the most efficient.

The reason for this gap in innovation output is simple. The DOE is tasked with advancing energy security, which relies on promoting innovation that improves energy availability for Americans in an economically viable way. Consequently, much of their work focuses on transferring technologies to the private sector. NASA, on the other hand, is tasked with exploring space—an activity that generally lacks a practical economic application in the near term.

All of this should help policymakers appreciate that publicly funded innovation programs warrant some demand for efficiency. The non-economic value of advancement in areas like space exploration (i.e., the warm and fuzzy feelings we get) can’t be discounted, and the public is largely willing to pay for it. But we shouldn’t let symbolism blunt our perception of reality.

One example of this dynamic is the effort to retire the International Space Station (ISS). Originally slated to run from 2000 to 2015, the ISS mission is still in service and could potentially stay in orbit until 2032. This isn’t because the ISS delivers any practical value; in fact, it costs $3 billion per year to maintain and should be retired to make way for other space exploration missions. It’s because allowing a long-lived symbol of international harmony in space exploration to crash down in a fiery ball just doesn’t sit well with people.

Don’t misunderstand; I am pro space exploration. Sure, the all-in cost of the first three Artemis missions is estimated at about $93 billion, but most taxpayers probably view it as money well spent—particularly after the successful return of Artemis II this past week.

The practical lesson here is that purely government-run programs tend to be inefficient at yielding results. This is why NASA itself turned to the private sector and competitive grants to reduce costs. SpaceX has succeeded in taking over some of NASA’s missions because profit motivation yielded more innovation from the private sector than the conventional government-centric approach of gathering eggheads and showering them with money. Also worth noting is that retrospective examination of NASA’s greatest success story—Apollo 11 and the moon landing—has shown the milestone was achieved in spite of government bureaucracy rather than aided by it.

In the energy innovation space, policymakers desiring more are tempted to spend more. However, just because an innovation program can do more if funded better doesn’t mean it will be done efficiently—and the history of U.S. space exploration provides great examples. Everyone loves “moonshot”-style efforts, but innovation policies tend to operate best in the long term when focused on leveraging the advantages of competition and the private sector.