The demise of the Lewis and Clark satellite projects, which the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had hoped would help to usher in a new era of commercial Earth observation from space (see page 5), could be seen as a mark against the space agency's ‘better, cheaper, faster’ way of doing business. But that interpretation is too glib. Large, expensive satellites fail, too, and other low-cost projects — such as the Lunar Prospector now circling the Moon — appear to be doing well.

The post-mortem reports on the two satellites should help to determine whether more time or money would have improved either mission's chances of survival. While waiting for these reports, however, NASA needs to examine its often confused policy toward ‘commercialization’ — the introduction of market forces into the management of space missions.

Lewis and Clark were far from being market-driven ventures. They were NASA's idea, developed with NASA funding. At the time they were conceived, a genuinely private remote-sensing industry had just come into being, and some start-up companies complained that government involvement was unnecessary. Four years later, the fledgling industry has grown to include major companies, such as Lockheed-Martin and Kodak. But its prospects are still uncertain. The first remote-sensing satellite built with private money — the EarlyBird 1, owned by Colorado-based Earthwatch, Inc. — lost radio contact with the ground shortly after its launch in December.

Part of the Lewis and Clark experiment was to turn over most day-to-day management decisions to the satellites' private constructors. But this hands-off policy appears to have backfired for NASA. Neither contractor — both experienced companies — succeeded, perhaps because the missions were underfinanced in the first place.

Despite such failure, NASA leaders and many in Congress continue to insist that the private sector can work miracles, and that commercial projects — or even quasi-commercial ones — are by definition better than those run by the government. Commercial space advocates in Congress have been pushing NASA to rely more on Earth science data furnished by the private sector, even though those data do not yet exist. And the agency has reserved substantial room on the space station for customers who may not, in the end, appear.

As they venture into the wilderness of commercial activity, space policy-makers should take care not to imagine markets into being. Outside advice will be most welcome: to its credit, NASA has recently organized a panel of Wall Street advisers to help it to devise a strategy for commercialization, and to sort wishful thinking from cold economic analysis. A small step for the agency; a big step for the future of space missions.