Enabling America on the Space Frontier: The Evolution of NASA’s Commercial Space Development Toolkit

Throughout NASA’s history, the Agency has supported the development and growth of the U.S. commercial space sector via various mechanisms that have nurtured the technology, companies, people, and ideas driving an industry that today is a significant contributor to the American and global economies. This report identifies 17 such mechanisms and qualitatively examines how they have been applied across four distinct periods in NASA’s history: 1915–1960, which covers NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA’s pre-Apollo years; 1961–1980, the Apollo era; 1981–2010, the Space Shuttle era; and 2011–present, the post-Shuttle commercial era. These eras are defined by dominant technologies, programs, or economic trends. Not all 17 mechanisms were applied during each era; some are relatively recent conceptions, while others have been used throughout the history of NASA and NACA. Additionally, there is inevitably some overlap between the mechanisms; this overlap adds an element of subjectivity to the categorizations in this report. In most eras, and for most mechanisms, there are far more examples than can reasonably be summarized in a single document. Therefore, this report should not be considered an exhaustive review of every iteration of any given mechanism’s implementation. Finally, with many of these mechanisms, such as contracts, commercial space capabilities sometimes resulted as a serendipitous by-product rather than a planned outcome.