Saudi Arabia’s Center for Space Futures will support lunar mission and $2 trillion global space economy, NASA chief tells Asharq TV
The Center for Space Futures, hosted by the Saudi Arabian Space Agency, will bring together space industries to send a mission to the Moon and build a $2 trillion global space economy by 2035, NASA administrator said Bill Nelson.
During a visit to Saudi Arabia this week, the head of the American space agency said in a special interview with the “Asharq” television channel: “The future of the space center is to bring together the space industries, the commercial companies, together with the government programs”.
On April 29, the Saudi Space Agency and the World Economic Forum signed an agreement to establish a space-focused Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, the Center for Space Futures will be the first center in the C4IR network. It aims to facilitate public-private discussions on space collaboration and help accelerate space technologies.
Nelson told business host Maya Hojeij that, after a half-century hiatus, NASA plans to “go back to the moon.” However, she added: “This time not only with commercial partners, but also with international partners.”
He emphasized that the Center for Space Futures “will bring together those commercial and government programs in order to build a meaningful space economy.”
Earlier this year, NASA announced that its Artemis II lunar mission will aim to land the first astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole in September 2025.
The NASA administrator added: “We’re talking about a space economy that will be worth nearly $2 trillion by 2035 – just over a decade away – a significant portion of a country’s economic sector.”
Elaborating, he said “the $2 trillion is global. And these are many startups, like the ones I saw today here in Riyadh, that collaborate with other companies around the world that include incentives from the Saudi government.
“So we do it in America, and that’s where I said we’ll go back to the Moon, this time after half a century, because we were on the Moon half a century ago. This time we will return to the Moon for a different reason, we will learn, we will invent, we will create so we can go to Mars and beyond. And this time we return to commercial enterprises.”
NASA’s Apollo 17, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in December 2022, was the space agency’s sixth and final mission to land humans on the moon.
The mission landed on the Taurus-Littrow site, which offered a mix of mountain plateaus and valley plains, allowing the crew to collect 741 lunar samples.
Nelson told Asharq’s Hojeij that NASA has collaborated with Saudi Arabia on multiple scientific instruments to send Artemis II to the moon for economic benefits and to better understand climate change.
