An unusual visitor recently pulled into the Department of Transportation’s driveway across the street from the National Mall: a gleaming, 11-foot-tall four-wheeler named FLEX that, if all goes to plan, will soon be carting goods around the moon.
FLEX had to keep it moving: The rover also stopped at the Department of Commerce, where officials took turns posing for photos and riding the rover, a prototype developed by the space travel company Astrolab. FLEX’s visit was a harbinger of what’s to come: As commercial business on the moon gets close to becoming reality, lobbyists and policymakers are jockeying over who in government will oversee the new space economy and how they’ll do it.
“People like me are saying, ‘How do we make sure this thing we’re going to send to space is ready to go to space?’” said Caryn Schenewerk, a space policy consultant who has worked on Capitol Hill and at the White House. “It shouldn’t, in my opinion, be that we can solve the technical hard problems of getting to space, but we can’t solve the problem of our regulations being so burdensome that we can’t get into space.”