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The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace’s second failed lunar landing attempt (making them 0 for 2) to SpaceX’s ongoing Starship test flight setbacks — amid a backdrop of exploding prototypes and shifting goalposts — the evidence is mounting that the commercialization of space is not progressing in the triumphant arc that press releases might suggest. This isn’t just a series of flukes. It points to a structural, strategic and cultural problem in how we talk about innovation, cost and success in space today.
Let’s be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today’s failures, even when dressed up as “learning opportunities,” raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?
Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded — until last March when Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings — from Space IL’s Beresheet to iSpace’s Hakuto-R and Astrobotic’s Peregrine — before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access.
The prevailing industry answer — “we need to innovate for lower cost”— rings hollow. What’s happening now isn’t innovation; it’s aspiration masquerading as disruption. Take iSpace as an example. The company claims to be a “low-cost” provider, but that doesn’t hold up under financial scrutiny. It seems that their pricing doesn’t reflect the real cost of delivery. The financial reports on iSpace’s website show that their gross margin isn’t nearly enough to cover the costs of running the company. They may look like a bargain compared to NASA, that’s because they seem to be charging far less than the true cost of their missions, masking risk with financial optimism, and inviting failure under the guise of competitive advantage.
Is it criminal? No. The customer still gets a service, and markets still function. But it is disingenuous to promote it as sustainable, scalable innovation. If you sell space service for less than its total costs, and it doesn’t work, it isn’t viable — no matter how shiny the rocket looks.
SpaceX’s Starship saga is another emblem of this phenomenon. Yes, progress requires trial and error. But we must stop measuring success by launch views and splashy animation reels. When the same core systems fail in similar ways, time after time, we must ask whether this is aggressive iteration or just poorly managed ambition. Failure alone isn’t innovation. Only failure followed by measurable, demonstrable improvement is. For contrast, look at the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V — still the most powerful rocket engine ever flown. Its early prototypes suffered from catastrophic combustion instability. The engines literally tore themselves apart in violent explosions. But instead of rushing to launch, NASA and Rocketdyne engineers dedicated engineering talent analyzing high-speed film, instrumenting combustion chambers and systematically redesigning injector patterns. They solved it — not through luck, not through iteration by crashes — but through engineering discipline. The result? A rocket that flew 13 times without a single engine failure. That’s how space is done. Not with bravado and broken boosters, but with precision, patience and a refusal to accept “good enough.”
Which brings us to the most baffling contradiction in today’s space narrative: how can companies that struggle to land a basic lunar probe or launch a single fully successful test flight simultaneously promise hotels on the moon and interplanetary travel to Mars? When a company can’t reliably land a small uncrewed vehicle on the moon — or re-enter Earth’s atmosphere without catastrophic failure — there is no rational basis for discussing lunar resorts or Martian colonies. It would be like designing a luxury yacht without first knowing how to build a canoe. These grand visions make for great headlines and investment decks, but they hollow out credibility in the long run. The public and investors deserve goals tethered to progress, not just imagination.
Worse still is how these companies now frame their failures. In iSpace’s most recent attempt, during the final and most critical 15 minutes of the landing sequence — when the spacecraft was making its descent and the online audience was transfixed — they cut away from the landing reporting and brought on their CFO to talk to the viewers. Instead of explaining what was happening with the vehicle, they spoke about investor confidence and the resilience of their business model. It was a baffling shift, almost as if the financial narrative mattered more than the flight outcome. The same disconnect can be seen in SpaceX’s messaging. While the company routinely frames each Starship explosion as a necessary step in rapid iteration, two consecutive full-stack flights, Flight 7 and Flight 8, failed during stage separation. That’s not fast learning. That’s failing to fix a known issue but the saying they will spend their investor’s money on a more ambitious attempt. At some point, calling repeated, preventable failures “progress” ceases to be engineering — and starts to look like marketing.
This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets. It’s a call for seriousness. If we’re truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership — not PR strategy. Let’s stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model.
The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won’t happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft — it’s in accountability. The engineers of Apollo didn’t tweet success before they had it. They spent years in wind tunnels, test stands and control rooms solving problems atom by atom. When the F-1 engine exploded, they didn’t call it a “learning opportunity” and move on — they fixed it until it worked every time. That is the standard. That is the legacy. And if this new generation of space companies truly wants to lead humanity forward, they must learn to respect it, not just reference it.
Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University’s Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.
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