The International Space Station photographed on Nov. 25, 2009. NASA
It’s been a busy month in space. Between the return of Boeing’s problematic Starliner (sans the two astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station (ISS)), the first private commercial space walk by the tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, and the new contract that NASA recently awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the commercialization of space has accelerated and grabbed headlines. The transition from government programs to private and commercial space exploration has been happening for a long time. More companies are moving into the sector to help with everything from supporting the retirement of the ISS to furthering research done in both orbital and suborbital space.
Sierra Space, a commercial space and defense company based in Colorado, is one of those companies. It has partnered with NASA to build and fly an autonomous resupply vehicle to the ISS. The company is also working on an inflatable space habitat called LIFE (short for “Large Integrated Flexible Environment”), which will form the building blocks for a future space station.
This is all taking place as the ISS moves into its sunsetting stage: a time when NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Russia’s Roscosmos—all partners on the ISS—plan to decommission and deorbit it by 2030 and transition to lower-orbit commercial space stations built and maintained by private companies like Sierra Space.
“Space is bipartisan. NASA is always challenged to get enough funding for all of the science that they want to do, given all the other priorities out there,” Angie Wise, the Chief Safety Officer and SVP of Mission and Quality Assurance at Sierra Space, told Observer. “What we’re starting to see is that in the commercial industry, investors are really interested. We are seeing more and more people interested in investing in these private companies because they do see the long-term payoff there.”
The commercialization of space is inevitable because governments “wanted someone external [to carry some of the costs of space exploration], and a lot of aerospace companies and manufacturers had very good capabilities, and they saw potential there for partnerships,” Dafni Christodoulopoulou, a space analyst at Analysys Mason, told Observer.
The global space economy is estimated to reach nearly $1.7 trillion by 2033, according to Analysys Mason, and it has many facets. In the coming years, everything from science and medical research to mining, military work and tourism will take place outside our atmosphere, and this presents a huge financial opportunity for companies looking to make a handsomeprofit from the future of space.
To get there, though, these companies have to cross many hurdles, including a very high bar for human safety, as well as legal issues, including aging space law. Historic disasters like the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia still hold significant sway over public and investor perceptions of the safety of space exploration. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk last week raised some relatively significant alarm bells for international legal space scholars because, technically, it violated a 50-year-old space law outlined in the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by 111 different countries in the 1960s.
While these factors will continue to impact the future of space commercialization, the transition is clearly here, and it’s accelerating rapidly. Axiom Space, another commercial space company based in Houston, Texas, plans to launch the first commercial space station into orbit in late 2026. The company is taking a page from the collaboration and cooperation that has made the ISS so successful over the last 30 years and working across international borders to make it all happen safely, quickly and with a good profit margin. While none of these private commercial space companies publicly report earnings, they’re all hoping that their financial bets on the future of the commercialization of space pay off.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore (L) and Suni Williams back from the ISS on July 1. AFP via Getty Images
Last month, Boeing made history when it successfully launched its Starliner spacecraft into space after three delays, sending a crew of NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). July will kick off with the space crew returning to Earth. But that won’t be the only space event to watch that week. As the return vessel heads for Earth, Firefly Aerospace will be preparing to send a rocket, appropriately named “Noise of Summer,” in the other direction as part of a Nanosatellite mission.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has multiple launches scheduled. After successfully sending up its Starship megarocket for the 4th time in June, the space exploration company has earmarked July for its next launch. But it isn’t stopping there. SpaceX is also preparing for the launch of Polaris Dawn, which Space.com describes as the company’s “most ambitious crewed mission to date.” In other news, Rocket Lab is gearing up for its next mission, which centers around a new-generation satellite.
Here are six space missions to watch in July 2024:
July 1: Firefly’s “Noise of Summer” (FLTA005) satellite mission: Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will kick off July with the launch of the FLTA005, or “Noise of Summer” mission using a two-stage, expendable Firefly Alpha rocket designed for commercial small satellite launches. The mission, scheduled to blast off at 4 :03 a.m. UTC from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, Calif., will mark the small satellite launcher’s fourth test flight. It will carry eight cubesats as part of NASA’s ELaNa 43 (Educational Launch of a Nanosatellite) mission.
July 2: Boeing’s Starliner brings astronauts back to Earth. Last month, Boeing’s thrice-delayed Starliner Crewed Flight Test (CFT) launch finally sent astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williamsto the ISS.These NASA crew members are scheduled to return from the ISS on July 2, pending no further technical complications, after helium leakage and thruster problems pushed back the return from June 26.
July 2: SpaceX launches Starlink Group 8-9 satellites. SpaceX has a busy month planned with several missions scheduled. On the same day as Starliner’s return mission, SpaceX will launch a batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Florida. This omega-constellation collection is part of the company’s satellite-based internet service.
July 9: ESA’s Ariane 62 maiden flight. The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for the first test flight of its newest heavy-lift rocketafter multiple delays. Designed by the French firm ArianeGroup, the Ariane 62 has two solid boosters and is intended for both government and commercial missions. The mission is scheduled to launch from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. Although no specific time has been set, the mission has a three-hour launch window between 2 p.m and 5 p.m local time.
TBD: SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn launch. The start of SpaceX’s new series is scheduled for July, although the company hasn’t released a set date yet. The billionaire entrepreneur and pilot Jared Isaacman is funding the first of three missions that will comprise the Polaris Program. The first mission will include an attempt at history’s first “all-civilian spacewalk.” It follows the Inspiration4 launch of 2021, a SpaceX mission that took Isaacman and several other patrons into space.
TBD: Rocket Lab’s Capella Acadia 3 Electron mission. Leading small rocket maker Rocket Lab is preparing for the launch of Capella Acadia 3 Electron rocket. This expendable two-stage orbital launch vehicle has an optional third stage. Its payload includes a single Earth-imaging Acadia (SAR) satellite, designed and operated by Capella Space. Though no date has been set, the mission is expected to blast off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand into low earth orbit.
On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”
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Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.
On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.
Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.
When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.
Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.
The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.
Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.
It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.
Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”
Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.
The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”
Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.
Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.
For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.
Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.
Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.
Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.
Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.
Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.
In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”
In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.
The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.
Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.
The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.
State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.
The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”
Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.
I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.
Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.
Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.
I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.
Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”
The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.
Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.
Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”
Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.
Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”
This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?
Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.
This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”
