Listening to the post-conference and news coverage of these two billionaires waxing poetic about the experience left me searching for the meaning of it all. Branson and Bezos both claimed that what they had achieved was the first step in the commercialization of space, making it more accessible for the average Joe in the near future. But that is hardly the case. To me, the two fulfilled boyhood dreams with billionaire dollars.
They did Disney-like rides to the edge of space. No more. And now millionaires and billionaires with more money than they know what to do with can sign up for the same joyride to experience 3 to 4 minutes of weightlessness.
For the rest of us, we can have a similar near weightless experience by going swimming or riding a swing. How so?
With swimming, we don’t quite achieve zero gravity, but there is a reason NASA astronauts prepare for long-duration space missions by practicing in a neutral buoyancy tank, the largest and deepest swimming pool in the world. It’s the closest thing to microgravity humans can experience for an extended period of time.
With a swing, we get a glimpse of microgravity when centripetal acceleration at the top of the arc equals the acceleration of gravity creating a temporary microsecond of weightlessness when our bodies are aligned at 180 degrees parallel to the ground.
Branson and Bezos, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other commercial space companies are all singing a tune from the same hymnal. Commercializing space is inevitable with our species achieving new conquests off our planet.
First, it will be in near-Earth space which we will occupy with commercially operated space stations for companies to do research and development in microgravity.
Then there will be space hotels where well-heeled consumers will “enjoy” a week or more confined to a space in outer space smaller than a studio apartment here on Earth.
From there we will expect ventures to move out to larger habitats located at Lagrange points in deeper space with great views of our entire planet and accommodations more suited to millionaires and billionaires and their lifestyles.
And of course, the dream includes habitats and space commercial ventures which within decades may be established on the Moon, and within another lifetime on Mars and beyond to the Asteroid Belt.
The driving forces behind this future, state Branson, Bezos, Musk and others, are the pursuit of commerce and satisfying our human curiosity. But the reality is these ambitions are being driven by boyhood fascinations with the science fiction of Buck Rogers and Star Trek.
So will the three amigo billionaires be the driving force behind the human conquest of the Solar System? The true reason for going to space is best captured by Branson who told the BBC after the Virgin Galactic flight, “I’ve wanted to go to space since I was a kid, and I want to enable hopefully hundreds of thousands of other people over the next 100 years to be able to go to space.”
Bezos’ vision is more complex. He described it to Anderson Cooper in a post-flight interview, where he talked about a future where heavy polluting industries migrate off Earth to space and exploit resources harvested from low-gravity-well sources like the Moon and asteroids, allowing Earth below to return to an Eden-like garden for humanity and the rest of life to enjoy.
Musk’s vision is existential but also seems caught up in childhood fantasy. I am sure, like most young boys, Musk was fascinated by dinosaurs. I certainly was and still am. Their catastrophic ending has captivated audiences from young to old for years. Musk sees us ending the same way the dinosaurs did. He wants to avoid that and as a result has been building SpaceX with a goal to put a city on Mars by mid-century, making humanity a multiplanetary species, and ensuring our survival should a catastrophe strike. This catastrophist vision of the future is his driving force which seems somewhat childish if not adolescent.
I understand Branson. Space is appealing to the inner child in him. Bezos’ Edenesque vision seems almost childishly naive. And Musk sees humanity’s end, like the dinosaurs as the existential crisis that space can solve. I would argue that if Musk wants to avoid catastrophe for humanity, that climate change be his principal focus. Because wouldn’t it be more useful to our planet and its future to see many of those billions of dollars these gentlemen are spending on suborbital space flights and pursuits of a city on Mars, on solutions to reverse global warming so that they can leave a legacy for the children of today and their future children that will be better than the one we currently are creating?
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The Soviet Union (later Russia), America, and China have served as the launching point for human exploration of near space. Twelve walked on the Moon with the last mission ending almost fifty years ago. The International Space Station, ISS, a permanently occupied laboratory in low-Earth orbit was formally announced in 1984 with assembly beginning sixteen years later. The first occupants, a crew of three, flew to the ISS in the fall of 2000. It has been continually inhabited ever since with 241 individuals making ISS their temporary home. It took ten years and 30 missions to assemble all of the components at a cost of $150 billion USD. Having passed the two-decade mark, how much longer can the ISS last? The current end-of-mission date is 2024, but that is likely to be extended to 2028 with rigorous maintenance that has become an ongoing exercise for those onboard.
There have been other space stations. The Soviet Union’s MIR, and NASA’s Skylab. And China has also launched modules to serve as temporary space stations, that is, until now with Tiangong, a multi-module orbiting laboratory that received its first crew of three this week. Tiangong will require 12 missions to complete its construction and will be about 20% of the mass of the ISS. The plan is to house a maximum of 6 with missions extending between three and six months. China hopes to have the station completed within 24 months. No timeline on its durability has been announced.
Meanwhile, Russia has suggested that its participation in the ISS may not continue beyond 2024. The country’s space program has announced plans to work with China on a lunar laboratory that would be crewed jointly. The two nations have invited others to join them.
NASA is proceeding with Artemis, its return to the Moon to stay project. The likelihood of achieving the 2024 goal, to land a human crew on the lunar surface, seems increasingly remote. NASA plans to build a space station in near-lunar space. Called the Lunar Gateway, like the ISS, it will be a multinational effort to construct and will be both a service and waystation for missions to the Moon’s surface. The end goal of Artemis is to build a base and what should become the beginnings of a space economy and infrastructure to support permanent human lunar habitation.
A Japanese space exploration and robotics company, ispace, envisions the Moon as the centre of a sustainable space ecosystem focused on developing advanced technology and science to enrich humanity and planet Earth. It sees a permanent human presence on the Moon by 2040 of 1,000 with 10,000 visiting each year. Humans and robots will create the infrastructure that will inevitably lead to further expeditions into Deep Space. A permanent human presence on the Moon will lead to Mars becoming our next destination. And from Mars who knows where we will go from there.
The real action until we establish a lunar infrastructure is going to happen in the near-Earth space where commercial companies intend to operate. They are already displacing national agencies with commercial space taxis and supply runs by SpaceX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and soon Sierra Nevada. And NASA has opened the competition for commercial operators even further inviting up to four new ones to join in providing near-Earth services to the ISS and other agency operations.
Space tourism is the new frontier with companies like Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Axiom. Private space travel and hotels to visit in near-Earth orbit are no longer just on the drawing boards. Axiom has plans for a commercial space station to accommodate private astronauts to do research or just enjoy the view of Earth below. The first Axiom modules will be attached to the ISS as early as 2024. It is not clear whether Axiom will separate these segments from the ISS at some point to form the core of an independent commercial station, or if it will build an entirely new one in near-Earth space before the decade is out.
With constellations of satellites being launched by multiple vendors to provide telecommunications services, and with the advent of solar-power satellites beaming energy to our planet’s surface, the near-Earth space will be a crowded place. What an opportunity for waste management companies to expand operations that will decommission and deorbit old satellites, and clean up the thousands of pieces of trash that currently circle the Earth.
As commercial operators get their space legs, extracting resources from space will become a profitable business with lunar and asteroid mining. Harvesting water and Helium 3 make the Moon very attractive to private enterprises. And largely metallic asteroids will be worth more than their weight in gold to businesses looking to harvest platinum, nickel, and other battery metals in demand here on Earth.
Recently the XPrize, the organization that launched the competition to inspire the first commercial operator to fly to the edge of space, described its view of the decades that lie ahead this century as the dawn of a golden era for private space industry. In 50 to 100 years those that follow us will live in the Solar System with Earth still the centre of human existence, but with humanity going interplanetary, and further on, interstellar.
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First, there was President George W. Bush who in his administration directed NASA to plan a return to the Moon. Then President Barack Obama altered the objective to cis-lunar space with no planned return to the Moon’s surface. Instead, Obama directed NASA to develop Deep Space habitability and promoted a plan for NASA astronauts to go grab a near-Earth asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit for study. Under Obama, the American Space Shuttle program ended. NASA no longer could fly on American rockets to near-Earth space. It entered into a partnership with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, paying for rides to the ISS. And that’s where NASA’s human space program stands today.
Enter President Donald Trump and his administration with its “America First” agenda. Would it revive NASA’s own capacity to fly to low-Earth orbit? Would it retain the objectives established by President Obama’s administration?
Needless to say, the answer to both questions has been “no.” And the cooperation with Roscosmos and NASA’s other international partners has been brought into question by a new set of Trump objectives. In recent months the Trump administration has announced mission objectives that include a return to the Moon and a future mission to Mars. Trump has increased NASA’s budget for human spaceflight.
While NASA’s human space program has drifted, it has taken Roscosmos and Russia along with it for the ride. The once ambitious Soviet effort to conquer space is today fairly subdued. Other state actors have entered the picture with China the third country to successfully launch human crews into near-Earth space. NASA has never taken steps to ally with China in creating a common human program for exploring space.
And in the absence of any direction within the American space agency, non-state actors have joined the space race. Companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), a Boeing-Lockheed Martin partnership that has been a primary NASA contractor, SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, and Sierra Nevada are now in the mix.
NASA continues to spend billions on a super-heavy rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is a holdover from the George W. Bush era, sucking up billions of the agencies dollars in pursuit of getting to Mars sometime in the 2030s. NASA has abdicated it appears from its role in near-Earth space in pursuit of this Deep Space objective.
ULA has its own Atlas and Delta rockets and its own spaceship, the Starliner, for launching human crews to near-Earth orbit or even into Deep Space. Boeing and Lockheed have both indicated that they have plans to get to Mars with the latter building a permanent human presence in Martian orbit with shuttles to take crews to the planet surface for month-long expeditions.
SpaceX has built its own heavy payload launch capacity and a tried and true near-Earth launch capacity. It has the existing Dragon and near-finished Dragon 2.0 space capsules. It, today, can go to both near-Earth and Deep Space. It has plans to build a rocket to send colonists to Mars with a goal to create a permanent human presence there.
Bigelow Aerospace with its inflatable habitats is ready to put hotels and commercial space stations into near-Earth space. And it has plans to create lunar habitats based on its inflatable technology.
Blue Origin is building its own rockets for near-Earth and lunar space.
Sierra Nevada has a space-freighter and spaceplane designed for use in near-Earth space.
Meanwhile, NASA in the age of Trump is leaderless (it seems no one the President picks is qualified for the job) while attempting to figure out what to do with the ISS in the coming decade as the space station enters its fourth decade of use. The President wants to turn ISS over to commercial operators. The international partnerships appear to be ignored in the midst of this Trump brainstorming.
Even NASA’s non-human flight program is compromised by the lack of a permanent leader to provide a vision going forward. Trump has attacked NASA”s earth-science program because of his climate change stance. He can see a big picture but doesn’t sweat the details. For the agency, this lack of direction may lead to it being put out of business entirely.
The last time I remember two launches in close proximity from a single vendor was during the heyday of NASA’s Gemini program. Two separate launches come to mind. The first was the missions of Gemini VII and VIa, launched 11 days apart in December of 1965. The second was the subsequent mission of Gemini VIII and an Agena Target Vehicle both launched the same morning in March of 1966. Gemini was NASA’s intermediate step in its race to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. Massive resources and money were poured into these missions. Since then no single spaceflight vendor has attempted multiple launches in close proximity, that is, until now.
What SpaceX has accomplished was described in the last week by Jay Bennett, in Popular Mechanics, as “clawing its way up the launch vehicle food chain.” Just how so?
SpaceX has won launch contracts not just with private companies, but also with the United States and other governments, and in upcoming launches with the United States Department of Defense. Its perceived competition, the ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, two of America’s largest military contractors, is being left in the dust largely because SpaceX has demonstrated repeatedly that it can put rockets into space reliably and recover a portion of them, driving down launch costs.
At a Congressional Subcommittee meeting recently Tim Huges, Senior Vice President at SpaceX, he presented a chart (seen below) that illustrates SpaceX growing market share of commercial launches. Its meteoric rise is evident in the blue coloured segments of the bars appearing in the years 2016 and 17 with projections based on current contracts through 2018. SpaceX, according to the chart will surpass more than 40% of all launches this year, and better than 60% of those projected for 2018.
Who are the losers other than ULA?
Russia and Europe principally.
What SpaceX has reversed is the decline in market share of American global launches. This market once dominated by the United States launched no satellites from domestic sources in 2011. Now SpaceX is on pace to achieve 18 missions this year, not including the first launch of its Falcon Heavy Launch System which will become the most powerful rocket on the planet.
Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) operates out of Louisville, Colorado. The company has developed two versions of its Dream Chaser system, a cargo carrying module and a passenger module.
Unlike Cygnus, Orbital’s resupply capsule which burns up on re-entry, and unlike SpaceX’s Dragon capsule which theoretically is capable of reuse, Dream Chaser is a partially reusable space plane designed to withstand a minimum of 15 missions with 90% component reusability. It is 9 meters (30 feet) in length, and roughly 1/4 the size of NASA’s former Space Shuttles.
On dedicated cargo flights the space plane portion is accompanied by an attached cargo capsule. Upon separation from ISS and prior to de-orbit, the space plane jettisons the cargo module which burns up on re-entry. But the rest of it returns to Earth using a low-gravity (1.5 Gs) re-entry followed by a horizontal runway landing.
For crewed flights Dream Chaser is 100% reusable and like Boeing and SpaceX, SNC has ambitions to see it used to transport human crews to low-Earth orbit destinations. Up until now, however, NASA had made SNC a third commercial option awarding it no resupply or human crewed mission contracts. With this new contract Dream Chaser is finally going to fly. The contract is for a minimum of 6 cargo service missions. The company gets the chance to demonstrate a technology once considered moribund.
Why do I say that? Because Dream Chaser started out as a NASA concept to be deployed as a space taxi after the heavy hauling Space Shuttle was no longer needed. The first design concept appeared in the early 1980s and was was designated the HL-20 with HL designating horizontal landing. But NASA, under budgetary constraints, abandoned the HL-20. Former NASA engineers and scientists, however, chose to keep the Dream Chaser dream alive by creating SNC.
Now more than three decades later the space plane taxi is alive and well and available in two flavours. One is the Dream Chaser Cargo System. The second is the Dream Chaser Space System. The new contract covers the first of these two but don’t be surprised if NASA in the near future chooses the second for crewed flights.
So what are the differences?
The cargo system version (seen below) can deliver more than 2.5 tons of pressurized or unpressurized cargo to ISS. The cargo system uses a folding-wing design to allow it to fit inside rocket fairings atop a number of the commercial launch systems NASA uses. It can also serve as an orbital disposal system with the cargo module left to burn up in the upper atmosphere. But experiment results and equipment from ISS can be returned to Earth using the space plane portion of the system.
The space system is a space taxi (seen below in front of the Space Shuttle Atlantis) capable of delivering 7 crew members plus cargo to ISS. It comes with windows, an environmental life-support system and sits atop a launch system. Currently the rocket of choice is the United Launch Alliance, Atlas 5. The space system is capable of a powered launch abort followed by a runway landing.
Both systems feature autonomous launch and landing capability. Both use non-toxic consumables including propellants. Both can be used to boost the orbit of ISS when docked.
In the two images below you see the different configurations for Dream Chaser in launch mode. On the left is the cargo system with folded wings sitting inside a rocket fairing. While on the right is the space system giving a flight crew a much safer and unobstructed position on top of a launch system.
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In all fairness, the problems of resupplying the International Space Station (ISS) has not been limited to commercial rocket failures. The Russians have also had their share of woes. But the Americans hoped to wean themselves off relying on Russian launchers by 2017 and Sunday’s accident suggests the strategy may be flawed.
NASA cannot operate its human missions to the ISS without third parties these days. The retirement of the Shuttle, an over built and costly piece of technology, has left the United States without human launch capacity. In addition the squeeze being put on NASA budgets by the Congress of the United States continues to take money out of the program.
NASA’s answer has been to turn to the commercial sector and a number of companies have emerged with options that have for the most part demonstrated some degree of success. SpaceX before this accident had delivered six resupply modules to ISS without incident. Orbital had successfully supplied ISS in previous missions until its accident last year. At the time of the Orbital accident, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder described the Orbital rocket as a “punchline to a joke.” I’m afraid hubris has caught up with Mr. Musk as it has with the U.S. commercial space program initiative.
It is hard to imagine astronauts relying on a technology that even with redundant safety checks blows up two minutes into a flight. The only saving grace may be the Dragon capsules recent successful completion of a crew abort test. If astronauts had been aboard the Falcon 9, at least they would have stood a chance of surviving although the rocket was flying at supersonic speeds when it blew up and Dragon has yet to be abort tested at that speed and altitude.
But all eyes in the American space program are now on the Falcon 9 which has been designated as a prime launch vehicle for not only NASA but also the U.S. military. Known as the cheap alternative to other commercial launch vehicles, the SpaceX rocket’s string of successes and its maverick approach the company has taken to date will certainly be reviewed. Cost cutting is primarily the raison d’etre for where American space ambitions lie today. There will be many in the military and at NASA who will be saying “you get what you pay for.”
Of course that’s the same as when flying a commercial airliner. The FAA doesn’t apply a standard for airlines when accepting the suitability of paying passengers. All that’s required is that the passenger be notified of potential risks when they buy a ticket or during onboard safety demonstrations. And considering that more than 3 million of us fly on commercial aircraft on about 50,000 flights each day the current standard and regulatory framework seems to be working. It is only when a crash occurs that the FAA or other civilian flight administrator gets involved in investigating what happened.
For those wannabe 700 plus space voyagers who have put a deposit down (only 20 have cancelled since the crash of SpaceShipTwo) on flying Virgin Galactic to sub-orbital space there appears to be not much more than what passengers flying commercial airliners are subject to before flight. Virgin states that all passengers must go through a three-day screening program to be judged physically and mentally fit to fly. But no one is regulating that pre-screening. One hopes that Virgin Galactic is borrowing best practices from those government space agencies mentioned above but with no regulatory oversight there is no guarantee.
For that matter, what regulatory body determined whether SpaceShipTwo was airworthy at the time of the accident that occurred last month? The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) normally is called in whenever there is a commercial airplane crash. But what kind of permits governed SpaceShipTwo? Apparently an experimental permit for two powered test flights was issued in November of 2013 to Scaled Composites, the company that built the sub-orbital spaceplane. A number of drop tests were done with and without rocket engine aboard. And there was at least one powered test flight. But it is unclear if Virgin’s subcontractor stuck to the limits of the license. Which begs the question, who was watching to ensure the company met the restrictions of the permit?
With one of the two test pilots killed when SpaceShipTwo disintegrated, it also begs the question, who has oversight to determine the qualifications of the pilots to fly a sub-orbital spaceplane? It’s not like there are a lot of them out there. Does a person with a commercial license to fly aircraft qualify? Are there other types of licenses with “test pilot” stamped on them? With pilot error the possible cause of the accident, although a mechanical cause has not been ruled out, it would seem that lack of regulation is no longer the accident waiting to happen, but one that has already occurred.
Commercial space flight is the new frontier and like all frontiers, it appears to be writing its own rules with little in its way. In the U.S. the rationale by government has been this: no one wants to get in the way of progress in developing commercial options for getting to orbit after the NASA Shuttle program shelving.
So SpaceShipTwo’s replacement (60% built at the time of writing) and others planning commercial sub-orbital and near-Earth orbit spaceflight continue to operate in what is equivalent to the American “Wild West” of the 19th century. Commercial space operators, and in future, their passengers are like those hikers who accompanied by guides ascend Mount Everest. One in 62 die.
A lawyer and professor of space policy at George Washington University, Henry Hertzfeld, when recently interviewed by MIT Technology Review questioned if we even know how many test flights are needed to determine whether a suborbital spacecraft is airworthy enough to take on passengers. For those passengers he states, “People do those types of things because they are crazy, stupid, or thrill-seeking.” In other words, we can’t stop them if they want to be the first to die trying.
With lack of sufficient knowledge and experience related to commercial space ventures, and the lack of government willing to regulate oversight expect more accidents to happen and many more lives to be lost.
