Beyond: Our Future in Space (14 page)

The first high-profile success for the private sector came in May 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (
Figure 22
). Elon Musk’s gumdrop-shaped capsule is made by a company with fewer than 3,000 employees with an average age of thirty. It’s a minnow compared to NASA, with 18,000 employees and 60,000 contractors and an average age of over fifty. The docking was not without incident. Dragon aborted on its first approach to the station and then had sensor problems, but eventually astronaut Don Pettit reached out 10 meters with the robot arms and grabbed it, as wild cheers erupted at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston and the SpaceX control center in California. “We’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” said Pettit. When he went through the air lock the next day to inspect the cargo, he said, “It smells like a new car.”
²

Early in 2013, and again in 2014, Dragon was back in low Earth orbit, fulfilling the first stage of a twelve-mission, $3.1 billion contract with NASA to haul cargo to the ISS. In September 2013, the business became competitive for the first time as the Orbital Sciences Corporation docked its Cygnus capsule (after an aborted attempt a few weeks earlier), unloading hundreds of pounds of valuable supplies, including chocolate for the astronauts. Orbital has its own contract to ferry supplies to the station, valued at $1.9 billion.
³

On the same day that Orbital was ferrying candy into low Earth orbit, SpaceX made a bold move with the first launch of a beefy version of its Falcon 9 rocket. After it successfully carried up a Canadian weather and communication satellite, flight controllers tested a new method of lowering costs by reusing the rocket. But it didn’t work as planned. The goal was to leave a little fuel in the rocket, reignite it, and fly it back to the launchpad. But the restarted rocket began spinning and sloshing the fuel against the side of the rocket, which starved the engines and made the rocket crash. Musk was chipper. He tweeted, “Between this flight and Grasshopper tests I think we now have all the pieces of the puzzle to bring the rocket home.”
⁴
Grasshopper has metal struts for legs and is designed to land back on its launchpad, like a cartoon rocket. A small prototype made eight successful test flights between 2011 and 2013, and the full-size Falcon 9 version made its first test flight early in 2014. Grasshopper is designed to fly to 90 kilometers (54 miles), just short of the Kármán line, and land as accurately as a helicopter.

Other active players have promising prototypes about to emerge from skunkworks projects, so Elon Musk needs to keep innovating. He’s said that when SpaceX covers its costs with satellite launches and supply runs to the Space Station, he will turn his attention to Mars.

Virgin Galactic has competition for suborbital tourist business from XCOR. The Texas-based company is developing the Lynx rocket plane, which is designed to carry a pilot and a paying passenger up 100 kilometers and down in just under half an hour. XCOR has presold nearly 300 flights for $95,000 each. Richard Branson probably isn’t worried. He has three times as many signed up, with ages ranging from eleven to ninety. The sales literature points out: “SpaceShipTwo’s cabin will have lots of room for zero-G fun.” Virgin Galactic has the bulk of the celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Cruise. Paris Hilton mused about her prospective flight: “What if I don’t come back? With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’ ”
⁵
It’s all entertaining to contemplate, but these celebrities should read the fine print carefully—the sobering truth is that the risks are real and people will likely die as the industry goes through its teething phase. Branson has a showman’s hyperbole, but he was chastened by the loss of a pilot’s life in 2014.

Space Adventures is the only private space company with a track record. The US-based company has a variety of space initiatives, often using hardware developed by other companies. It partnered with the Russian Space Agency to send seven civilians to the International Space Station between 2001 and 2009. The Russians suspended the arrangement due to limited Soyuz capacity but plan to start including paying passengers again in 2015, when British music superstar Sarah Brightman is scheduled to go up. She and others are paying $45 million for a two-week stay—more than the $20 million paid by the first set of space tourists but less than the $62 million the Russians charge when American astronauts hitch a ride.

Space Adventures hopes to get a piece of the suborbital action too, and they have ambitious plans for a commercial lunar flyby, starting in 2015. One unnamed person has already paid $150 million for this trip-of-a-lifetime and the company is in negotiations to sell a second seat.
⁶
The ubiquitous Richard Branson is also talking about Moon trips, but first he has to get an orbital launch vehicle and build a space hotel.

Robert Bigelow is sure he’ll be the first to put a hotel in orbit. An iconoclastic billionaire who started the Budget Suites hotel chain, he now has higher-level accommodations in mind. Bigelow is quirky—he believes in UFOs and the power of prayer, and not in the big bang theory—but he’s not to be taken lightly. His company has launched two inflatable prototypes that are still in orbit, albeit slightly deflated. NASA was impressed enough to order a unit for the Space Station, to be delivered in 2015 by a SpaceX Dragon rocket. He also plans to work with SpaceX to put a capacious 330-cubic-meter bubble in orbit. That could hold six people in relative comfort. For the smaller 110-cubic-meter version, his business model calls for $50 million to buy a return flight and a two-month stay. A year of naming rights for advertisers costs $25 million. Bigelow’s products are all vaporware, so it surprised many people and was an important milestone when the company signed an $18 million contract with NASA in late 2012 to build an inflatable module for the Space Station.

The dark horse in the new space race is Blue Origin. Established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin is following an incremental approach to go from suborbital to orbital flights. The company motto is
Gradatim Ferociter
, Latin for “Step by step, ferociously.” Because Amazon so deftly progressed from online bookseller to merchandising behemoth, most experts expect Blue Origin to be a major player in space. But company documents originally projected suborbital tourist flights once a week by 2010—like their competition, they’ve been overly optimistic. The company website hasn’t announced the expected date of its first flight with paying tourists.

Billionaires Bezos and Bigelow are both notoriously publicity-shy, and there’s amazingly little public information about Blue Origin. It was founded in 2000, but its existence was only revealed in 2003, when Bezos started rapidly aggregating land in Texas under a set of shell companies. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will use a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rocket that’s fully reusable.

After being named valedictorian of his high school class, the eighteen-year-old Bezos said he wanted “to build space hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for two or three million people who would be in orbit.”
⁷
Neal Stephenson, the author of
Snow Crash
and other science fiction novels, worked part-time for Blue Origin for several years.

Meanwhile, NASA isn’t simply giving up and passing the baton. It’s like an older brother with achievements under his belt who suddenly has a set of young, talented, and rambunctious siblings. NASA has been outsourcing much of its cargo-carrying business,
⁸
but it has ambitious plans that bump up against the limitations of the budget. These plans require a beefy rocket to get large payloads into Earth’s orbit. It clearly chafes against agency (and national) pride to pay the Russians to ferry American astronauts to the International Space Station. The Constellation program was announced in 2005, with goals of resupplying the ISS and eventually launching manned flights to the Moon and Mars. But when a combination of technical problems, delays, and budget cuts left the Constellation program in disarray, President Barack Obama killed it in February 2010.

A few months later, the Space Launch System (SLS) rose phoenixlike from the ashes of Constellation.
⁹
It will reuse parts of the technology planned for Constellation and keep many of the same contractors in place—an expedient move, since the work is being done in some pivotal congressional districts. The launch vehicle will be upgraded in stages to lift 130 metric tons, making it more powerful than the mighty Saturn V. The newly designed Orion spacecraft will eventually carry six astronauts; in late 2014 it had a successful test flight.

All dressed up and nowhere to go? NASA officials are acutely aware that such an impressive and expensive capability needs a compelling destination. But the paymasters are unpersuaded by the Moon and they recoil at the cost of Mars. Here was President Obama in a major space policy speech given at the Johnson Space Center on April 15, 2010: “I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: we’ve been there before.”
¹⁰
As a goal, NASA came up with the Asteroid Redirect Mission. This idea is to use a robotic spacecraft to pluck a small asteroid out of deep space and haul it into a stable orbit around the Moon, where it could be studied more closely.
¹¹
NASA has a number of promising missions under development and this one was seemingly plucked out of thin air to be a centerpiece of NASA’s strategy. Advisory committees and senior planetary scientists have been skeptical of the mission, and it faces an uphill battle to be funded, let alone executed. Meanwhile, NASA’s overachieving young siblings are going from strength to strength.

Bound in Red Tape

We’re used to being bound to the Earth by gravity, but the nascent commercial space industry is in danger of being bound to the Earth by bureaucracy.

In 2006, the US Government released 120 pages of rules for space tourism, ranging from preflight training to medical standards for the passengers. Most of the regulations are easily followed, such as requiring those flying the spacecraft to have FAA pilot certificates and those just along for the ride to sign a form saying they had been informed of the risks involved. Other rules are vexing space entrepreneurs.
¹²
The most troublesome law is America’s International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). Rocket systems are like tanks and guns, in that a license is required for their export. But a license is also required if they are worked on by a non-US citizen, or even shown to a non-US citizen. ITAR controls are the bane of many researchers, as they have been applied to detectors and electronic systems that have no real strategic importance.
The Economist
estimates that strict ITAR controls on satellite technology have halved the US share of the global commercial-satellite industry since 1999.
¹³

Virgin Galactic has been stung by ITAR. It operates out of Spaceport America in New Mexico and has an international client list. Export regulations delayed Virgin Galactic’s deal with Burt Rutan for SpaceShipTwo by several years, and Rutan doesn’t mince words when talking about his dealings with the FAA: “The process just about ruined my program. It resulted in cost overruns, it increased the risk for my test pilots, did not reduce the risk to the non-involved public . . . and removed our opportunities to seek innovative safety solutions.”
¹⁴
Then there’s the problem of international passengers, who might not be allowed to see the insides of a spacecraft governed by ITAR. If British ticket-holders arrive at the Spaceport only to be sent home, or told they can go up wearing a blindfold, it won’t be good for business. Virgin finessed the problem by designing its procedures so passengers don’t see behind the scenes, but they’ll face another headache when they pursue their plan to launch from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, since the UAE isn’t classified as a “friendly country” under ITAR.

The issue isn’t unique to the United States. All spacefaring nations are trying to spur private investment. In Europe, Arianespace has half of the world market for satellite launches. It gets big government subsidies but is also hampered by the hyperbureaucracy of the European Union. The Russian Government has sold the majority of RCS Energia to private investors, but Russia is hostile to entrepreneurs, so Energia is locked into forty-year-old Soyuz technology. At the moment, the UK regulatory environment is so forbidding that Virgin Galactic is unable to launch from Branson’s home country. However, he caught a break in May 2014 when the FAA cleared Virgin Galactic to launch into space from its Spaceport America facility.

Another issue is insurance. Space insurance is a simple extension of other kinds of travel insurance, but insurers still haven’t calculated the exact risk. Rockets have significant but highly variable failure rates, and satellites are typically insured for 10 percent of their replacement cost, which can be tens of millions of dollars. For private launches, premiums are being quoted at about $300,000 for $100 million of coverage. Big rockets benefit from federal indemnification in the United States, which means losses beyond $100 million and up to $3 billion would be covered by taxpayers. Which leads to an issue that space tourism companies don’t like to dwell on.

People are going to die.

Consider this passage from the
Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report
: “There is great risk in placing human beings atop a machine that stores and then burns millions of pounds of dangerous propellants. Equally risky is having humans then ride the machine back to Earth while it dissipates the orbital speed by converting the energy into heat, much like a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere.”
¹⁵

This explains the two shuttle disasters, which account for most of the twenty-one fatalities in the history of the space program (three astronauts died on the ground in the Apollo 1 fire). In 1986, an O-ring on one of Challenger’s solid rocket boosters failed during the fiery ascent and led to an explosion. In 2003, a breach in a protective panel allowed the heat of Columbia’s reentry to penetrate and then destroy the spacecraft.