Congressional funding for space science has been steady at a few billion dollars per year, so there is a known, existing market. Until the early 1990s, each deep-space mission cost taxpayers about $2.5 billion. Since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced the concept of "faster, better, cheaper," the cost of deep-space missions has dropped to $250 million and less. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) and the Lunar Prospector missions had full lifecycle costs of about $250 million and $100 million, respectively. Both had five science experiments, so the average taxpayer cost of the new knowledge per mission was about $50 million for each data set for NEAR and about $20 million each for Lunar Prospector.

Beginning in 1997, commercial space companies such as SpaceDev have offered to collect desired space science data at their own corporate risk and to sell it to NASA, which is the agency responsible for collecting...