As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
On June 4, 1876, on the eve of our Nation’s centennial, the Transcontinental Express completed its inaugural voyage across America’s newly constructed coast-to-coast railroad, traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific in just 83 hours. This milestone marked the end of the Railroad Race and the beginning of the Gilded Age, epitomized by its rail barons and drastic wealth disparity.
On June 12, 2026, as America approached its 250th anniversary, it gained the world’s first trillionaire. This milestone marks the latest phase in a Billionaire Space Race, the driving force behind a New Gilded Age, epitomized by “space barons” and previously unimaginable wealth.
Like the race to build transcontinental rail, the commercial space race is a rush to establish cheap infrastructure for a new frontier. Just as the railroads dramatically reduced the cost of shipping, commercial space services similarly promise to reduce the cost of putting payloads into orbit.
The commercial space race echoes its steam-powered predecessor in more than just exploration. The private space industry is likewise subject to the whims of its billionaire owners and supported by monopolistic, eye-popping, and ever-growing government contracts.
If America fails to institute common-sense regulation of this commercial space cartel, we are on track to relearn the hard lessons of the Gilded Age, with its questionable business dealings, dodgy practices, and relentless pursuit of profit.
The rail barons were empowered by government contracts and laws, effectively giving them carte blanche in the West. Their monopoly on railroad construction meant they could charge taxpayers as much as they wanted, cutting corners and inflating costs wherever they could, making the transcontinental railroad construction process ruinously dangerous, expensive, and inefficient.
After killing NASA's Space Shuttle program in 2012, the United States became dependent, overnight, on Russia for launch capabilities. Since 2020, this liability has shifted to our private sector, with SpaceX providing launch services, alongside other emerging companies like Blue Origin—and just like the railroad race, the corporate space race is administered through lucrative government contracts.
The key tenets of international space law—establishing outer space as the “domain of all mankind,” preserving it, and preventing land claims—apply to state actors, not private ones. While nations are theoretically responsible for addressing violations by private companies under their jurisdiction, a country dependent on private companies for launch services has little incentive to hold them accountable.
For-profit companies are not beholden to the international community or even to our Nation; they are responsible only to their owners, the space barons who hold monopolies on American space travel.
In the race to build a transcontinental railroad, the lack of meaningful regulation led to lengthy detours, needless worker deaths, and wasted taxpayer money. The commercial space race ups the ante exponentially. A brief glance at recent history demonstrates these risks.
On January 16, 2025, a SpaceX Starship launch exploded over the Caribbean, showering flaming wreckage and toxic chemicals over an area roughly three times the size of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, endangering life below, and putting at risk dozens of passenger airlines flying through the debris field.
The following year, on May 28, the failure of a Blue Origin rocket test resulted in the second-largest explosion in space-launch history, destroying a historic NASA launchpad and again putting lives at risk on the ground.
These tragedies, which underscore real-life dangers posed by a poorly regulated commercial space industry, are only two examples; the list goes on.
The United States space program has yet to return to its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That it has taken us over half a century to get back to the Moon is simultaneously a testament to the ineffectiveness of our current model and to the benefits of the previous model, with its publicly owned infrastructure.
Contractors always have been, and always will be, a necessary component of space travel; but the only way to guarantee safety and accountability to the taxpayer is through a combination of NASA ownership/operation of launch infrastructure and better regulation of the private space industry.
There remains a place—indeed, an imperative—for private launch services, but they must play by the same rules as their public counterparts and uphold the same standards of safety, transparency, and accountability. Only in this way can our public/private space partnership avoid repeating the mistakes of the Railroad Race at our Nation’s centennial, and successfully navigate America's final frontier in our 250th year and beyond.Ira Parsons, 17, Scottsdale, AZ
Ira Parsons, 17, Scottsdale, AZ
