Space: The Final Economic Frontier Forty to fifty years ago, space stations and commercial space travel were part and parcel of nearly everyone’s vision of the 21st century. We all remember the “Pan Am space-plane” arriving at the enormous rotating space station in the early moments of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But 2001 has come and gone, and today’s state-of-the-art is the 1970s vintage space shuttle design and the cramped and incredibly expensive International Space Station.
As so often happens, economic realities have kicked the best-laid plans of mice and men right in the head. However, that’s all in the process of changing. As we’ll discuss, fundamentally new technologies are now emerging that promise to make space tourism and other large-scale space applications a money-making reality within the next quarter century.
Let’s start by examining the trends that will enable us to exploit this “final economic frontier” as well as the implications of doing so.
Both the private sector and government are enthusiastic about making the most of space. Exciting new possibilities like space tourism, zero-G factories, giga-watt solar energy plants operating 24/7, and claiming “the ultimate high ground” for defense systems each represent the basis for an embryonic industry.
When these are combined with the benefits that could be derived by doing a better job in areas like natural resource management, weather forecasting, global communications, and military reconnaissance, the enormous potential of space commercialization becomes apparent.
Today, small but important steps are being taken by government and private industry towards making space more accessible to everyone for a wide range of applications. The Bush administration recently laid out its vision of a permanent moon base and a manned mission to Mars. The Federal Aviation Administration and lawmakers are drafting a new licensing system that would let entrepreneurs start offering sightseeing flights to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, perhaps by 2007. And entrepreneurs are busily designing, assembling, and testing private rocket ships that may eventually carry paying passengers into orbit.
A growing number of industry enthusiasts foresee a subsequent era, starting around 2010 to 2015, in which launch vehicles could deliver passengers to a permanent tourist structure such as a space hotel. This vision is not completely out of touch with reality. For example, Bigelow Aerospace wants to build one using inflatable components that would be so lightweight that they would be relatively inexpensive to blast into space.
The company’s owner, Robert Bigelow, believes he can build a profitable business around space travel for individual passengers. He intends to launch a test structure on the Falcon V booster that is being developed by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX.
But, according to a report in the Economist, it will take a huge leap in cost and technology to cross the gap between sub-orbital vehicles, such as Space Ship One, to safe, reliable orbital flight. Elon Musk, who is the founder of SpaceX and a co-founder of PayPal, explains that this gap is the reason SpaceX is developing the Falcon V satellite launcher.
In the meantime, Musk is working on a stripped-down version of the Falcon V, called the Falcon I, which can be used to launch satellites multiple times at low cost. Its price is expected to undercut the competition by more than 70 percent. Already, SpaceX has received three contracts, including the launch of a satellite for the Defense Department.
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Some experts expect that the market for space tourism will quickly reach $20 billion a year. Three firms are waiting for the FAA to grant them permits to test spacecraft that can be used for more than one flight. According to The Wall Street Journal Europe, the first passenger sub-orbital trips would be made in these experimental designs, probably at a cost of more than $100,000 per person. The passengers would only be on a sub-orbital trajectory for about 15 minutes, and they would experience weightlessness for just a few minutes when the craft briefly left the Earth’s atmosphere.
This scenario could happen within the next three or four years. One of the keys to this and our longer term success in opening up space will be unleashing the power of free market entrepreneurship. To keep costs down, NASA has increasingly turned to private contractors. In fact, more than 90 percent of the $3.2 billion that the space agency spends on the shuttle program every year ends up in the hands of corporations.
As the Los Angeles Daily News recently reported, a Bush administration panel on space exploration has recommended that NASA increase the role of private contractors in the push to permanently settle the moon and eventually explore Mars. But, as the newspaper adds, the long-term solution for America’s space program may be to privatize it completely. To succeed, space exploration demands creativity and innovation, not bureaucracy and politics. Commercial satellite launches have already become common events, so it wouldn’t be unheard-of to turn over the entire program to companies.
However, a big hurdle to the exploitation of space is the enormous cost of sending people and cargo into space. For many years, the cost has plateaued at roughly $10,000 per pound.
Even if the business plans of the pioneering companies we’ve discussed work out as expected, they won’t be able to get the cost much below $3,000 per pound, even for non-living cargo. This implies that putting an average person into orbit with food and other necessities would cost at least $600,000. While that may be a winner for commercial or military satellites, it’s a no-go for any kind of mass space tourism market.
But, all is not lost. New breakthroughs in materials science are resurrecting a highly controversial, but increasingly feasible alternative technology: an elevator to outer space. If constructed, this solution promises to orbit payloads for $100 per pound or less.
The idea was introduced by a 19th century Russian space visionary named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It was later popularized in a 1979 novel titled The Fountain of Paradise, written by Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. The Trends editors have been familiar with the concept since the mid-1970s, but until recently they, like most other analysts, dismissed it as unrealistic.
However, thanks to pioneering work by Dr. Bradley Edwards, funded by NASA, it now looks like the “impossible” has been transformed into the “merely difficult.” In March 2000, Edwards published a paper on the space elevator in the journal Acta Astronautica, and then spent two years transforming that concept into a detailed plan for NASA.
As explained by Brad Lemley in Discover magazine, that plan calls for using a “deployment booster” assembled in low-Earth orbit to carry two spools of 5- to 10-inch-wide “pilot ribbon” into orbit, 22,000 miles above the equator. The ribbons will unwind down toward Earth as the spools holding the ribbons rise to 62,000 miles into space.
When it reaches Earth, Lemley writes, “the dangling ends of the ribbons will be anchored to a platform similar to an offshore oil rig in the Pacific Ocean. From there, an unmanned device called a climber, equipped with traction treads, will ‘zip’ the ribbons together as it is powered by lasers focused on the climber’s solar cells.
“Then 229 more climbers will follow, adding more nanofiber-composite filaments until, after two years, the ribbon reaches a width of roughly three feet. All 230 climbers will cluster under the deployment booster at 62,000 miles above the earth to serve as a permanent counterweight. The completed ribbon and counterweight can support a steady stream of climbers, each capable of hoisting 13 tons of cargo and/or people at 125 miles per hour and reaching geo-synchronous orbit in seven days. In the early stages, ascended climbers can be put into parking orbits. As more ribbons are constructed and operating costs drop, the climbers can be rounded up and brought back down.”
The direct cost of the first such elevator would be roughly $6 billion and the complete program might cost $18 to $24 billion. However, subsequent elevators would only cost an average of $2 billion, less than replacing one space shuttle.
Dr. Edwards and several scientists from various fields have identified a number of technological hurdles to be overcome. The biggest will be to perfect the carbon nano-tube composite filament itself.
Today, such filaments exist, but they contain only about 1 percent carbon nano-tubes and 99 percent polymer matrix. To achieve the strength required for the proposed “space elevator,” the filament will need to consist of 50 percent or more carbon nano-tubes.
The challenge is to get the polymer matrix to form a strong chemical bond with the nano-tubes. But fortunately, several Fortune 500 companies and lots of startup with lots of money are working on this and closely related problems for a wide variety of applications. Therefore, while neither the solution nor its timing is certain, the Trends editors are highly optimistic.
The other major challenges associated with the space elevator proposal are non-trivial engineering problems, but the basic science to address them already exists. Consider five of the biggest objections raised by scientists reviewing Edwards’ proposal:
First, there are about 110,000 pieces of space junk moving at about 30,000 miles per hour. If any of these struck the cable, serious damage could result. Fortunately, there is a lot of room up there and NASA has done a good job of tracking those pieces of junk. By using a platform similar to a floating offshore oil rig as the attachment point on Earth, the cable could be repositioned to avoid impact by any tracked pieces of space junk.
Second, corrosion of the cable by atomic oxygen at higher atmospheric levels could cause the cable to weaken and snap. This can be prevented by coating the relevant portion with a gold or platinum coating only a few atoms thick.
Third, solid state lasers capable of beaming 2.4 megawatts of energy to power the climbers over long periods of time have never been built. However, all of the necessary research on building such lasers was done for the Strategic Defense Initiative begun during the Reagan years. Solid state and optical physicists who have critiqued the project don’t believe building and operating these lasers will be a problem. In addition to the primary lasers located on the anchoring platform, at least two other installations would be constructed to provide energy in case of a failure or blockage of the platform lasers by clouds. At a future date, space-based lasers powered by solar energy could be added.
Fourth, what about damage from storms and lightning? Wind problems disappear if you make the bottom five miles narrower and thicker than the rest of the cable. Furthermore, Edwards proposes building the elevators in the relatively “lightning free” zone in the Pacific Ocean, west of Ecuador.
Fifth, what about terrorists; isn’t this a perfect target? A space elevator would be treated the same way as any extremely high-value military site. Assuming the United States was a major sponsor, the U.S. Navy would probably be called upon to secure the area.
If the technological hurdles we’ve discussed can be overcome, space flight will become 100 times cheaper over the next two decades. That means that we can realistically talk about zero-G hotels, factories in space, missions to Mars, and space-based solar electricity farms generating giga-watts of power.
How do we see this coming about? At this stage, we can take some educated guesses. Here are five for your consideration:
First, over the coming decade, sub-orbital space tourism will become a small, but viable industry aimed at wealthy thrill-seekers. Like African safaris and climbing to the top of Mount Everest, there will be a small segment of adventurous people who are willing to pay for the experience. However, the Trends editors don’t expect the potential $20 billion space tourism industry to be realized until the cost of an orbital flight comes down to under $100,000. That would require a 500 percent improvement on the most optimistic forecasts that rely on a conventional launch vehicle.
Second, with the enormous amount of effort being devoted to carbon nano-tube research, we estimate the odds at 80 percent that the technology for manufacturing the 50%+ nano-tube composite filament for the space elevator cable will be developed by 2015. Since the other engineering challenges can be addressed with existing technology, it’s likely that it will be feasible to deploy the first such space elevator between 2015 and 2020.
Third, the Trends editors believe that the strategic and economic implications of this technology are so enormous that the U.S. will move very quickly, in concert with its allies, to exploit the enormous first-mover advantage associated with the space elevator. The first elevator will require an enormous investment in R&D, manufacturing facilities, and launching the original “filament deployment booster” into space. However, once those costs are incurred, the first elevator can be used in conjunction with the manufacturing facilities that created its filaments and climbers to build additional elevators. Therefore, while the total program cost of the first elevator might total $18-24 billion including R&D, the variable costs of subsequent elevators will be only $2 billion each.
Fourth, the space tourism business will blossom shortly after the first space elevator is operational. A basic trip would probably involve a 7-day trip up to a geo-synchronous orbital station on a crawler at 125 miles per hour, and another 7-day trip traveling back down. With the cost of going into orbit dropping to $100 a pound, the two-week round trip, including meals, might eventually drop to $50,000 per person or less; this would not be a vacation for the masses, but certainly within reach for the 20 million or more individuals worldwide in 2020, with investable assets of over $1 million. And it would be a far better trip in every respect than today’s $20 million trip to the International Space Station. To put this in perspective, it would require only 40,000 such trips to fully amortize the cost of a $2 billion space elevator built exclusively for that purpose.
Fifth, the new industrial possibilities suddenly unleashed by being able to deliver payloads to geo-synchronous orbits for $100 a pound or less will provide a huge boost to the global economy. Growing crystals and synthesizing molecules in space in zero-G plants will make possible unforeseeable breakthroughs in computing and pharmacology. Paper-thin solar cells, hundreds of square miles in area, will beam giga-watts of low-cost electricity to Earth. Interplanetary voyages costing a tiny fraction of today’s forecasts will be possible because the cost of getting the payloads into space will be so much less costly. And, realistically basing military and scientific teams on the moon will become as trivial as basing them in Antarctica. However, only time will tell what the full potential of this breakthrough will be.
References List :
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke is published by Penguin Books. ⓒ Copyright 1968 by Arthur C. Clarke. All rights reserved.2. The Economist, June 24, 2004, "The Starship Free Enterprise," by Kevin Davis. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Economist Newspaper N.A., Inc. All rights reserved.3. The Wall Street Journal Europe, January 30, 2004, "And You Thought the Cost of a Business-Class Ticket to the States Was Steep?" by Andy Pasztor. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Dow Jones & Company. All rights reserved.4. Los Angeles Daily News, June 24, 2004, "Free Space Program: Only Private Enterprise Can Unleash America’s Potential," by Robert Garmong. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by the Daily News. All rights reserved.5. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke is published by Orion Publishing Company. ⓒ Copyright 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. All rights reserved.6. Acta Astronautica, November 2000, Vol. 47, Iss. 10, "Design and Deployment of a Space Elevator," by Bradley C. Edwards. ⓒ Copyright 2000 by Elsevier Science, Inc. All rights reserved.7. Discover, July 2004, "Going Up," by Brad Lemley. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Buena Vista Publications. All rights reserved.
