Who needs government to go to Venus?

Space scientists have waited nearly four decades to send a taxpayer-financed spacecraft on a death plunge into the atmosphere of Venus. Rocket Lab USA Inc, a private space launch provider, announced that the wait is nearly over. But rather than rely on a government space agency to pay the fare, Rocket Lab will finance the mission itself, launching in May 2023. If successful, it will become the first private spacecraft to visit another planet.
It won’t be the last. Thanks to the emergence of private, low-cost rockets and satellites, space science is about to undergo a welcome revolution. No longer will scientists need to rely solely upon taxpayer and government largesse to explore the solar system. Instead, private institutions and funders will increasingly play a
crucial role in paying for
exploration and basic science beyond Earth. Human knowledge will grow as a result of this shift. Eventually, so too will the bottom line.
Historically, science was a private endeavor pursued by those who had the leisure time, money and motivation to do it. Benjamin Franklin’s groundbreaking work on electricity was a hobby; so, too, were the flying machines constructed in the Wright brothers’ Ohio
bicycle workshop. If an individual lacked money,
institutional support from universities, scientific societies and museums might fill the gap, as the Smithsonian did for Robert Goddard when he ran short building the first liquid-fueled rockets in the early 20th century.
World War II and the Cold War changed the funding equation. To ensure that innovation remained an engine for the US economy, and for national security reasons, Congress centralized scientific funding in institutions like the National Science Foundation.
Aerospace funding and research was concentrated in the military and in civilian programs like Nasa. Some of it, like the moon landings, had an obvious application (beating the Soviets). But other research programs were tilted more to science for science’s sake. For example, on Dec. 14, 1962, Nasa’s Mariner 2 spacecraft conducted the first successful mission to another planet when it flew by Venus. Over the next half-century, Nasa and Congress supported dozens of additional robotic explorers, including pioneering flybys of every planet in the solar system.
Yet for all of the scientific merit of these missions, decades can and do pass between the time they are conceived and the time they are launched. In large part, the problem is funding; only a handful of missions are selected out of the dozens that are proposed to Nasa.
Fortunately, innovation is starting to erode the government’s lock on space exploration. Over the last two decades, private and public entities have developed a new class of small, cost-efficient satellites knowns SmallSats and CubeSats. These miniaturised craft are built to standardised dimensions, some as small as a Rubik’s Cube, and typically weigh just a few pounds.

—Bloomberg