Funding the Final Frontier

On Friday, April 10, 2026, the Orion spacecraft Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the Artemis II mission to a successful close. A lunar flyby mission, Artemis II was the first crewed spaceflight to leave low Earth orbit and journey to the moon since 1972’s Apollo 17 brought that legendary chapter of American space exploration to a close.

Its fascinating benefits aside, space exploration is neither simple nor inexpensive. The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion—over $257 billion today—and seven years of development and testing before sending humans into space. Similarly, Artemis has already cost about $93 billion since it was first established in 2017. Such astronomical price tags have long drawn sharp criticism. In the 1960s and 70s, this led to the early cancellation of the Apollo program, and ever since NASA has faced a constant cycle of grand, new Apollo-like starts and sudden cutbacks.

Unlike most in the field, Renny Hahamovitch did not set out to study space. As a master’s student in comparative history at Central European University in Hungary, Hahamovitch was primarily interested in the history of radical politics and socialism, such as the history of Jewish anarchism around the turn of the 20th century. Moving into a Ph.D. program at U-M, he began thinking about his research in more expansive terms.

“I started thinking, what’s a key distinction between a socialist and a capitalist society? Their vision of the future,” he says. “A big way people think about the future is through science and technology, and since the early 20th century, that has increasingly meant space exploration.”

While he initially hoped to develop a comparative history of the early American and Soviet space programs framed around this question, world events—the COVID-19 pandemic and Ukraine War, which prevented him from traveling to Russia for essential in-person research—conspired to shift his focus to the rise, decline, and evolution of the American investment in space alone.

One of the most common critiques of space development, Hahamovitch notes, is that it is wasteful. Incredible resources—financial, technological, and human—have to be marshalled for the purpose of launching equipment into space. But when the American space program began in earnest with the founding of NASA in 1958, he points out, not only was the idea that space exploration was wasteful not especially controversial, it was, in fact, used to defend the existence of the program.

“Early NASA leaders sold the space program as primarily a spiritual endeavor, not a materially beneficial one,” Hahamovitch notes. While there would no doubt be some benefits in the form of satellite applications, such as G.P.S., the primary selling point of the space program was that it offered a peaceful and spiritually uplifting way to compete with the Soviet Union after the Cold War had started to get too hot.

“But wasteful didn’t mean that it wasn’t positive, only that it wasn’t considered economically productive,” Hahamovitch says. “A classic example of an economically productive technology is a baker who buys an oven that lets him bake and sell more bread. His investment is driven by a profit motive for the immediate future, that technology investment today means more money tomorrow. From the beginning, NASA made it clear that wasn’t what they were doing. Space wasn’t a new form of capital investment, it was capital waste. Less oven, more money pit. But wasting capital on things that weren’t profitable or were hard for the private sector to undertake was what the government was good at. In turn, that waste could be performed in ways that were indirectly useful, like in developing underdeveloped regions or providing jobs to the jobless. In its own way, waste was useful, if not productive. No one could figure out how human spaceflight would be at all profitable anytime soon, but there was a lot of interest in doing it, so we got a government-run model aimed at useful waste.”

NASA leaders recognized that waste was a precarious principle, however. So they buttressed the space program with other secondary values like boosting national security and national prestige, and pioneering new technological frontiers through smaller space projects like satellite development. The Cold War offered the best rationale. As long as the Soviet Union was achieving remarkable space feats, like the launch of Sputnik 1 that kicked off the Space Race in 1957, presumably Americans would care about competing.

“Apollo and the moon landings, that was science fiction becoming government policy,” Hahamovitch says. “Quietly copying the communist style of state planning in the Soviet 5 Year Plans, NASA developed an extraordinarily ambitious 10 year plan which aimed at putting humans on the moon. But they had plans beyond that for huge space stations, Mars missions, planetary colonies, and much more. People don’t realize it today, but the long-term goal that Apollo was meant to fit into was the colonization of the solar system. But even before the Apollo program was cancelled, political and economic pressures saw those long-term plans fall apart.”

It’s that rapid rise and fall of long-term planning that Hahamovitch aims to better understand. Among the many factors contributing to the decline in American funding for space programs, Hahamovitch says the greatest among them sprang from America’s own success in the Space Race. As American investment in a moon landing increased into the billions, the Soviet lunar program dwindled until it was largely abandoned by the late 1960s. Though Soviet space exploration continued, including very advanced space station development, after the moon landing there was a common perception that Americans had spent a huge amount of money to win a race no one else was running.

Things changed on the military space side too, never far from the civilian side of space exploration. As soon as 1960, US spy satellite programs revealed the Soviets’ military capabilities were far less than had been feared. Prior to these programs, the first being CORONA, Hahamovitch says the prevailing sense in the U.S. was that the Soviets had thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles to the U.S.’s hundreds. But the CORONA observations revealed that the Soviet Union only had a handful.

“By the 1970s, NASA was in crisis,” Hahamovitch says. “There was no national appetite for anything like Apollo, and the core justifications for space exploration had all been undermined. Politics had changed, too, in a deeper sense. Americans of all sorts had come to be suspicious of the high spending that produced Apollo. Many also felt that all government spending was in some way “wasteful,” and that waste was now a definitely bad thing.”

Hahamovitch argues that decline in public investment in space programs is symptomatic of a larger decline in Americans’ belief in technological progress generally, born out of technological and economic stagnation.

For about a century since the 1860s, he says, a series of massive technological innovations, like indoor plumbing, lightbulbs, and telephones, significantly improved the quality of life for wide swaths of people and led to a commonly held sense that technological progress was a reliable path to solving society’s problems. But in the 1960s, that idea began to fall apart. Fewer innovations, coupled with inflation, lower economic development, and growing wealth inequality weakened the country’s shared sense of progress.

“At the start of the space program, it was a given for many Americans that technological development would somehow lead to social progress, even if the route wasn’t clear,” Hahamovitch explains, “but by the 1970s that was no longer true. The value of technology had to be proven. It had to be obviously materially significant and produce returns quickly.”

Searching for a new justification, and a new way of building the future, NASA embraced profit rather than waste as the goal of space development starting in the 1970s. The agency had to start producing technologies that were more like a baker’s oven and less like a money pit.  

“Many of those have been useful, and even world-changing, like GPS, computerization, virtually everything about our phones today has some connection to the space program,” Hahamovitch explains. “But the problem is whether human spaceflight is compatible with that system.”

Things appear to be changing rapidly now, Hahamovitch notes. There has been a rapid revival of human spaceflight in the past decade, mainly in the Artemis program, which aims to put people back on the moon and to stay. Profit-driven companies, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, are much more prominent than their predecessors were in the 1960s, but the more prevalent rationale is less profit and more beating China to the moon. That, he says, makes it look a lot more like Apollo, and many of the same critiques that began to haunt NASA in the Apollo era are also creeping back into discussions of Artemis.

Putting aside whether space is a worthwhile investment, the long-term planning that put astronauts on the moon, and that sent Artemis II farther from Earth than any other crewed spacecraft, Hahamovitch says, is a rare capacity in a capitalist society that needs to be better understood. Such an ability to plan and invest for the distant future is critical to addressing many of the major issues we face today—from climate change and healthcare to the collapse of the welfare system and the aging crisis.

“Some argue that what made the politics of the mid-20th century different from today is that the future occupied an incredibly important role in politics. Whether it was social democracy, socialism, or fascism, the future was the essential terrain around which the politics of the present were decided. But today the future no longer takes that central role. For some even argue the future ‘died.’ But I don’t think it has to be irretrievable” he says. “Studying how the future existed in the past can  help people explore the limits and possibilities of long-term state planning. I’m trying to give people the tools to understand their relationship with the state, with society, and with the future.”