From Cold Wars to an 11-Minute Voyage: Introducing the New Space Area

Make 'em go, "Oh, oh, oh"

As you shoot across the sky. 

Katy Perry really did manage to make the lyrics of her hit-song "Firework" become a reality as it set the internet ablaze when she literally shooted across the sky for eleven minutes. New Shepard Mission NS 31 was a commercial space flight by Jeff Bezos's company, Blue Origin, that flew for 11 minutes and traveled more than 60 miles above earth. By no means was this the first commercial space trip enacted by the company, but it surely did become the one that gained the most traction and shed light on how much the space industry had changed through the years. 

Let us trace back the past to 1957, where a historical moment happened in terms of space exploration--a dog that went from the slums and soared to space, Laika. She was a dog from Moscow with a mission that was thrusted upon her by the Soviets. The mission was a success and she became the first living creature to orbit the Earth aboard the Sputnik 2. At that time, the moment not only served as a milestone in space exploration, but was also considered as the Soviets leading the ongoing Cold War disguised as Space Wars at that time. This serves the notion of how staggering the evolution of the space industry has been in less than a century. 

Shift of An Era

There was an elephant in the room between the Soviet Union and America's geopolitical relationship for 44 years in the 20th century, this era was called the Cold War. This multifaceted war at that time would unknowingly launch the world to enter a new era: The Era of Space Exploration. The legendary space race will then lead to a series of milestones for mankind, Laika in Sputnik 2; Launch of the first US satellite, Explorer 1; Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1; and many more until the 1969 Neil Armstrong in Apollo 11, landing on the moon. 

When the Americans became the first of humanity that left their traces on the moon, the Space Race hit its climax. But even after defeating the Soviets in the Space Race, NASA's plans for space exploration did not stop at conquering the moon. NASA constructed "The Post-Apollo Space Program: Directions for the Future" for President Nixon in 1969. One of the options required more than a doubling of NASA's budget by the 1980s if they want to initiate manned missions to Mars (NASA, 2019). Ultimately, they did not pick that option because NASA's budget was significantly depleted after the landing of the moon--it went from its peak of $53.3 billion in 1965 (adjusted for inflation in 2025)  to $19.7 billion in 1974 (O'Neil, 2024). 

As taxpayers' interest in space exploration declined, future possibilities for government space expenditures went down with it. The government had to find a way to secure its budgets and reduce the financial burdens, without disrupting the continuity of its space mission. Not to mention, the contractors that helped the government with their projects were also facing a decline because they had all this new knowledge of space technologies, but the drop in space missions made it less likely to produce an output from it (Peeters, 2021). 

The crisis faced by the space industry led the government to no longer act as the sole agent responsible for all missions, budgets, and resources. It opened the possibility for market liberalization to happen. They released space technology from its monopoly hold and made it public, then continued seeking out private companies to do public-private partnerships. A win-win solution where the government would not be fully responsible for the financial burdens and the risks alone, while the private companies would lift the barrier to entry in the formerly monopolised market. These new entries to the market also gave opportunities to contractors that were previously on large-scale projects like Apollo to become able to evaluate market demand for space-based assets and act as a provider for hardware and services that corresponded to the demand (Peeters, 2021).  

Thus, the gate for space commercialization opened, with the first market explored being telecommunications. Private companies discovered that investing in satellites would lead to more innovations and cheaper solutions. When private telecom operators proved themselves to be profitable, commercialization of the space industry branched to other sectors, such as transportation and remote sensing (Peeters, 2021). We could see one of the examples of the space sector branching into commercial transportation being the now discontinued supersonic commercial airplane, the Concorde Jet. Though it announced its retirement in the 21st century, the airplane was the world's first and only successful commercial airplane that was able to travel at the speed of sound, half the time of today's average commercial flights.