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The business of space is in fashion again — or at least back in the news. Learn how space exploration today differs from the Sputnik era.

Published October 1, 2018

By Charles Ward

Fifty years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey thrilled audiences with a vision of space travel, as a Pan Am space shuttle docked and delivered passengers to an international space station, all to the ravishing notes of Josef Strauss’ The Blue Danube.

The station embodied life in space as the futurists of 1968 saw it: all-white physical environs, iconic red Olivier Mourgue lounge chairs, and an international cast of characters devoting themselves equally to science, business and hospitality, while they awaited scheduled departures for other destinations.

The business of space has always been a delicate balancing act, poised between the intense romance of popular imagination and decidedly unglamorous mechanics that it takes to bring vision into reality. The prosaic details include technology, capital outlays, human organization, the marshalling of resources, and legal or policy frameworks.

During the period when Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey with the film’s director Stanley Kubrick, the authors had more than imagination behind them: Peak-year funding for the U.S. Apollo program reached four percent of the American GDP, an extraordinary financial commitment and the tangible tip of a huge mobilization of public enthusiasm.

The Business of Space

Now, the business of space is in fashion again — or at least in the news. In February 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to privatize the International Space Station (ISS) operations beginning in 2025. Three private space companies led by high-profile businessmen — Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — are proclaiming ambitious public goals and even more ambitious timetables.

Derek Webber, author of The Wright Stuff: The Century of Effort Behind Your Ticket to Space, has been to this rodeo before. In 2010, he was Vice Chair of Judges for the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, the latest in a line of scientific competitions designed to push the frontier of space travel.

Webber has been a long-time advocate for space tourism, conducting original market research and contributing to the development of regulations via various working groups associated with the regulators such as the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Travel.

“I was forecasting 2012 as the start date for the sub-orbital space tourism business,” says Webber. “It was particularly exciting in 2004, during the Ansari XPRIZE competition, when commercial sub-orbital space tourism seemed just around the corner, but here we are, some 14 years later, still waiting.”

The re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey gave Webber the opportunity to compare the vision of 1968 with the realities of 2018. He is well aware of the power of visionary pull — and its practical undercarriage.

“I saw that movie and I loved it. I’m still carrying the torch,” he says.

“But I think in practice things are going to be more nuts and bolts than we saw in ‘2001.’ The reality of things is less exotic,” he added, reflecting on a favorable regulatory environment, ample funding and recurring peaks of interest.

When I look at a television series with a sequence of a space vehicle under repair, with astronauts in pods buzzing around scaffolding,” says Blachman, “I want to know who provided the worker’s comp.”

At the Intersection of Capital and Technology

Amir Blachman is well positioned to consider nuts and bolts. As Vice President of Strategic Development at Axiom Space, he leads the financial planning, funding and growth strategy of a company that currently provides astronaut training services and is working towards operation of the world’s first private, international commercial space station when the ISS is decommissioned in 2024. Blachman’s own professional background includes the U.S. Air Force and the investment management industry.

“When I look at a television series with a sequence of a space vehicle under repair, with astronauts in pods buzzing around scaffolding,” says Blachman, “I want to know who provided the worker’s comp.”

Blachman takes the longitudinal view of an evolving industry, marking off key inflection points in an accretive build-up of capital infusions, practices, technologies, processes and infrastructure. One of the most apt historic analogies, Blachman says, comes from Dr. Howard McCurdy’s 2013 research report, The Economics of Innovation: Mountaineering and the American Space Program, which in nearly forensic detail examined the parallel logistical challenges and economic paths of climbing Mount Everest and crewed space flight.

“Climbing Everest and going to space are expensive and have risk,” says Blachman, “and they’re both motivated by science, commerce, national prestige and a personal desire for challenge and exploration. The similarities are uncanny.”

A Six-Phase Development Model

McCurdy chronicled a ten-fold reduction in the cost of expeditions in the first 90 years of climbing Everest, and parallel falls in mortality rates. Building off his work, Blachman outlines a six-phase development model, in which:

1) Innovation leads to cost reductions;

2) Lower costs encourages entrepreneurs to enter;

3) The promise of profits encourages investors to enter;

4) Profits lead to competition;

5) Competition produces further innovation, cost reduction and scale;

6) Price becomes low enough so ordinary people can afford it.

“In terms of space we are at step three and it will probably be another twenty to thirty years before we get to the point where ordinary people can afford it,” says Blachman. “But it is happening.”

The emerging ecosystem of actors for the business of space, says Blachman, will still include incumbents like governments and their space agencies, as well as traditional “cost-plus” defense and aerospace private contractors such as Boeing.

An additional slice will be made up of an emerging mass of micro-gravity innovators, who are building the companies focused on manufacturing and research in space. Rounding out those segments are “intrapreneurs,” in-house entrepreneurs who are developing the services and technologies used in low Earth orbit, or providers of additive manufacturing sub-platforms.

The Not-So-Hidden Hand

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith coined his “invisible hand of the marketplace” concept as the ultimate guide to economic history. But in space, the highly visible hand of the U.S. government has been and still remains the prime agent for space-related developments.

The government made the massive initial investments in space activity; the ISS alone is reported to have cost $100 billion to build. Some industry observers say NASA’s switch from purely cost-plus contract bidding to fixed-fee bidding, was as significant a financial advance for the industry as SpaceX’s successful reusable launch vehicle was a technological advance.

Dr. Peter Martinez is keeping a wary eye on governments and commercial players for their effects on another invisible hand: the treaties and regulations which currently set the rules for all parties. Martinez is the Executive Director of the Secure World Foundation, a private operating foundation that works with governments, industry, international organizations, and civil society to develop and promote ideas and actions to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of outer space. He recently chaired the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Working Group on the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities, which was tasked with producing voluntary space sustainability guidelines for States and space actors.

“There are new actors coming into the space arena, people who traditionally don’t have this background,” says Martinez, speaking of the diverse individuals in what some call the New Space movement. “These are people who are personally passionate, like Musk, not content to sit around and wait for national space programs to develop the capabilities to take people to the moon or to Mars or whatever. They’re actually going to go out there and do these things themselves.”

Can Space Resources be Appropriated?

From Martinez’s perspective, the commercialization of space is opening up new questions, including “can space resources be appropriated?” Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the first and most important of the five U.N. treaties that govern space-related law, the moon and asteroids are not subject to the territorial claims of any nation.

Three years ago, however, the U.S. upped the ante, with its “Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015” (“Spurring Private Aerospace and Competitiveness Entrepreneurship Act”), opening the doors for private parties to “engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of space resources,” excluding biological life. According to Martinez, the Act was careful not to assert U.S. sovereignty over any terrestrial body, but it does allow private entities rights to “extract, own, transfer and sell materials derived from other celestial bodies.”

For now, the legal regime that governs outer space is largely bearing up under the stresses and strains of many new players on the scene, according to Martinez. The Outer Space Treaty, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in October 2017, still provides the international legal foundation for all outer space activities carried out today.

Space Law-Making

Subsequent to the adoption of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, four other treaties were adopted that address issues such as liability for accidents involving space objects, the registration of space objects, the rescue of astronauts and return of space objects that land on Earth, and the exploration and use of the moon and other celestial bodies. Following this period of space law-making in the 1960s and 1970s, the international community has focused on the implementation of the treaties, supplementing them with additional “soft-law” mechanisms, such as principles and guidelines that address topics such as remote sensing, space debris, and the use of nuclear power sources in outer space.

The field of space law has largely focused on implementation issues arising from the growth of space activities. There are still many open, unaddressed issues, he says, for example the lack of an international agreement on delimitation between airspace and outer space.

“The real danger, of course, is that the reality of development will outpace the ability of regulators to keep up,” he says, outlining scenarios in which commercial entities, looking for the most favorable regulatory environment, could engage in “regulation shopping” and choose to put themselves under the legal auspices of nations with unsophisticated legal systems.

Other legal developments stem from the fact that space is no longer purely the province of science, or even regarded as “somewhere out there,” says Martinez. Citing GPS, he says, “Space is part of the plumbing of everyday life. Most people are unaware of the critical role that space plays in our daily lives. If space were to go down for one day, it would be catastrophic — for stock exchanges, elevators, airports. The glamour is there, but we’re so used to it, we don’t see it anymore.”

The future is always the projection screen on which we throw our plans for today.”

Awareness and Attitudes

While government-sponsored agencies like NASA may be retreating from crewed space activity, government hasn’t entirely abandoned the field. Military imperatives have always played an enormous role in the evolution of the space industry, their public profile whether obvious or not, their under-the-radar initiatives never disappearing entirely. When Vice President Pence announced the formation of the U.S. Space Force, he called it “an idea whose time had come.” The Vice President went on to say, “It is not enough to merely have an American presence. We must have American dominance in space.”

Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz invites audiences to simply be aware of the underlying attitudes in terms such as “dominance.” Walkowicz, based at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, straddles the professional worlds of hard science, education, art and philosophy. She’s the author of Fear of a Green Planet: Inclusive Systems of Thought for Human Exploration of Mars, and speaks frequently on the implications of space-related imagination and futurism.

As just one example, she points to magazine illustrations envisioning man in space published in popular American magazines during the 1950s. Those illustrations had outsized impact on the public imagination then, and their influence can still be found in the marketing materials of commercial space companies today. A lot of those images are rooted in the military history of space, notes Walkowicz, with hierarchic organization of missions or crews.

Part of a Larger Ecosystem

“The reason that they are expressed that way visually is that they’re expressions of different philosophies about how human beings should live, not only in space, but here on Earth,” she says. “The future is always the projection screen on which we throw our plans for today.”

Walkowicz does a lot of public communication about the implications of ideas on a day-to-day practical basis. For more specialized audiences, like her astronomy graduate students, she delves into the ethical implications of professional development, and the responsibilities of science and scientists.

Against very real facts such as the discovery of frozen underground bodies of water on Mars, Walkowicz helps peers and generalist audiences alike look differently at grand schemes such as “terraforming” planets like Mars to make them more like Earth and suitable for human colonization.

“If it was possible to do a large-scale global engineering project that transformed Mars into Earth, we wouldn’t have climate change here on Earth,” says Walkowicz.

“Astronomers need to be aware they are part of a larger ecosystem. Technology is not separated from the rest of human endeavor, and it shouldn’t be,” she says. “We can look at our own history and see myriad examples of places where we pushed ahead in areas and did not consider the impact prior to going ahead. That, generally speaking, has turned out badly.”

Mimi Aung of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory gives a glimpse of what to expect from the launch mission of the Mars Helicopter.

October 1, 2018

By Charles Cooper

Sometime around February 2021, NASA will drop a new rotorcraft on Mars that will be the first device to fly in the atmosphere of a planet besides Earth.

“In deep space exploration we have never done anything like this before,” said Mimi Aung, the project manager overseeing a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that has labored since 2013 to demonstrate the viability of heavier-than-air flying vehicles on Mars.

The Mars Helicopter, as it’s called, is a technological marvel. Weighing in at slightly less than four pounds, it sports a fuselage that’s about the size of a softball. NASA used off-the-shelf materials, including lightweight avionics, solar cells, high-density batteries and carbon fibers. The flying device is also a completely “green” piece of equipment. It includes solar panels that can collect solar energy to recharge the battery when the helicopter is at rest.

Upon landing, the helicopter will spend most of the day on the Martian surface recharging its lithium-ion batteries as it prepares to venture into the Martian atmosphere during the planned 30-day flight test campaign. The idea is to perform reconnaissance missions of nearby regions that the Rover cannot access due to ground impediments or steep terrain.

The First Flight

In its initial flight, the helicopter will hover three meters above the surface for about 30 seconds. NASA hopes to send the helicopter as high as 40 meters into the atmosphere. The maximum flight distance will extend a few hundred meters from the Rover. The longest it will remain aloft at any one time is 90 seconds.

“When we explore the surface with Rovers we want the ability to see ahead with high-definition images. This is going to allow detailed information about the Martian surface that we’ve never had before,” Aung said.

NASA controllers will send commands to the Rover, which will then relay information to the helicopter. The transmissions will take between four and 12 minutes to arrive. Time lag will vary depending on the relative position of the Earth and Mars.

The helicopter will need to survive on its own through the cold Martian nights. Temperatures can get down to 90 degrees below zero centigrade. The unit includes a heating mechanism controlled by an onboard computer that reads the temperature sensors to prevent freezing. NASA envisions that future generations of aerial vehicles will be equipped with far more robust features, allowing them to travel farther and higher.

Also read: The Final Frontier of the Future

About the Author

Charles Cooper is a Silicon-valley based technology writer and former Executive Editor of CNET.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of the next century will be to build a space infrastructure that will serve all of humanity, rather than only a privileged few.

Published October 1, 2018

By Marie Gentile

If you are a person of a “certain age,” you may remember a bright summer day nearly 50 years ago when grainy black and white images were beamed down to our television sets from the surface of the moon.

The world watched in awe as an astronaut named Neil Armstrong stepped gingerly onto its dusty surface. When he uttered the now immortal words “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” we knew we had done it.

Humankind had achieved what was once thought to be laughably impossible — developed the technology to escape the gravitational pull of our home planet and land on another terrestrial surface. How could anyone feel anything other than the most incredible sense of pride and wonder? And of course, for Americans, it was a defining moment —
as a nation we had won the “space race” through a technological achievement by which all others would be measured.

In the decades since, space travel has become relatively commonplace. There were seven subsequent manned moon missions, as well as unmanned missions conducted by the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, Japan, India and the People’s Republic of China. Later, the Space Shuttle would serve as the world’s first interstellar “work horse,” carrying and fetching loads back and forth from the International Space Station. Such trips barely registered on the news cycle.

The New Space Race

Fast forward to 2018 and we stand on the precipice of a new “space race.” There are billions of dollars in private investment being pumped into various space related start-ups around the world, making the commercial space race — in theory at least — anyone’s to win.

Technology and capital hurdles aside, this is an opportunity for humanity to get something right from the beginning. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, launched in 2015, represent an unprecedented global commitment to addressing global challenges through collective action in science and technology.

But they are also a potent reminder of what is at stake if we fail — combatting hunger, educating children, developing new treatments for disease and new technologies to support sustainable infrastructure and economic development. As we mobilize to address these worthy goals, we must also recognize the lessons to be learned from our past mistakes, and apply them to the sustainable development of space for human use.

Unlike Earth, space has no borders. We cannot rope off a section or build a wall and say to others “this is ours and you may not enter.” Perhaps the greatest challenge of the next century will be to build a space infrastructure that will serve all of humanity, rather than only a privileged few.

A Myriad of Issues to be Addressed

How will we construct buildings in space and where will we put them? How will we grow food? How will space traffic be managed? Who will collect all that space trash? There are already a myriad of issues to be addressed — and these are the ones we know about. It will require collaboration across all of our planet’s governments, and across the global scientific community, to develop answers to these questions and the ones still to be asked.

Much of our work at the New York Academy of Sciences is tied to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals because we believe that they can be achieved, and they WILL be achieved, if we work together. As NASA, other space agencies and private sector companies ponder humanity’s future in space, it is incumbent on all of us in the scientific community and the public at large to consider what that future might be.

If we’re smart and are willing to learn from past mistakes, we stand a very good chance of getting it right from the beginning. And maybe as we aim for a sustainable future in space, we’ll succeed in solving the major challenges facing our own planet along the way.

Also read: Conservation on the Final Frontier

How scientists are approaching the critical need to minimize the creation of space debris, even as we expand space explorations.

Published October 1, 2018

By Robert Birchard

In 1957, the former Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Not to be outdone, the United States responded with its first successful satellite, Explorer, in 1958. The Space Race was officially on.

Sixty plus years later, Earth’s orbit is no longer the exclusive realm of Cold War superpowers. Today satellites are ubiquitous, launched by operators from the public and private sectors, touching all aspects of the economy and modern life. When Sputnik first left Earth’s orbit this frontier seemed limitless, but it has become more crowded with over half a century of satellite launches.

Mostly concerned with getting satellites into orbit, few scientist and engineers bothered about what happened once they got there, until NASA scientist Donald Kessler posited what is known as the “Kessler Syndrome.” This nightmare scenario envisioned a point where the density of objects in orbit would be such that a collision would generate enough space debris to increase the likelihood of further collisions, eventually rendering Earth’s orbit unusable for any satellites.

What is Space Debris?

Space debris refers to the manmade objects that still orbit the Earth, but no longer serve any purpose. This includes anything from derelict satellites and their abandoned orbital launchers, to tools lost by astronauts on spacewalks, to specks of paint chipped off the exterior of a satellite. It is estimated that Earth’s orbit contains 21,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters (cm), 500,000 objects from 1-10 cm in diameter, and over 100 million objects smaller than one cm.

According to Juan Carlos Dolado-Pérez, PhD, Head of the Space Debris Modelling and Risk Assessment Office, the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (the French Space Agency), the increase in catalogued space debris followed a rather linear increase of nearly 200 objects per year from 1957-2007. Recent catastrophic events have demonstrated the resulting risk and the difficulties in navigating an increasingly crowded orbit.

The Chinese Fengyun satellite was destroyed in 2007 during an anti-satellite test adding over 3,000 catalogued debris fragments to orbit. Then a 2009 collision between the active Iridium-33 and out-of-service Cosmos-2251 satellites created over 2,000 catalogued debris fragments.

Not If, but When

“The real question is not if, but under which conditions, exponential growth of space debris will create more serious problems for space activities,” said Dolado-Pérez. “We study this question with space debris evolutionary models. Such models don’t predict the future, they allow space debris experts to study the most likely future. This is a very complicated task with many uncertainties, which need to be taken into account during calculations.”

“In many models future launch traffic is defined based on past activity, but with the emergence of the commercial space sector, aspects of these models have to be updated and take into account the uncertainty of how space will be used in the coming decades,” he says. “Moreover, the quality of debris mitigation efforts and levels of compliance will have a major impact on the size of the debris population.”

Factors Outside of Human Control

Besides variables like the increasing rate of satellite launches, there are factors outside of human control affecting space debris in orbit.

“The solar activity affects orbital drag, which can make it easier or more difficult for space debris to drop out of its orbit, and unfortunately our capability for properly predicting future solar activity is limited,” Dolado-Pérez explained. “Also the increase of gases like carbon-dioxide, (due to human activity), will have an effect on the Earth’s upper atmospheric density, which will affect the time it takes for space debris to fall out of orbit.”

Sir Isaac Newton is credited with the adage that “what goes up must come down,” but when referring to Earth’s orbit, the rate at which items can fall to Earth, varies.

“Low Earth orbit is heavily populated with satellites. Everything sent there will come down eventually,” said James Ryan, PhD, a professor in the Department of Physics and Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire. “The other extreme is geosynchronous orbit where the orbital lifetime is practically unlimited. But mid-level orbit may be the most problematic. The orbital lifetimes there are extremely long. Junk will accumulate over hundreds of years.”

These timeframes are too long to rely on natural forces to clear Earth’s orbit. Human efforts to remove debris requires overcoming several hurdles and there is no curb-side pick-up in space.

“Manually removing debris from any orbit is awkward, inefficient, expensive and energy consuming,” Ryan explained. “One has to sidle up to the errant object, and either move it to a lower orbit, capture it or boost it to an out of the way orbit. This takes energy and is basically a one-by-one process on thousands of objects.”

“An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure”

Ryan would prefer to focus on preventing the buildup of space debris in the first place.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said. “The design of satellites must include policies and procedures for carrying out easy deorbiting. Recycling boosters like those used by SpaceX solves a lot of problems, and shows promise. Piece-by-piece removal is impractical, except for very specific circumstances, such as a large spacecraft with no means to remove itself from orbit.”

“We should not only design resilient satellites, we also need to operate them responsibly … and ensure we minimize the creation of new debris as we expand orbital operations,” said Nikolai Khlystov, Lead for the Aerospace Industry at the World Economic Forum. “The key challenge with the current regime is that current international guidelines are not enforceable.”

Khlystov suggests that a framework called the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR) could help minimize the creation of new space debris. The SSR was developed by the Global Future Council on Space Technologies, a multi-stakeholder group of international space experts and passed on to the Forum for actual development.

The SSR would provide a single, simple and transparent system to identify debris mitigation compliance in satellite design, launch and operation, thereby limiting confusion caused by overlapping and non-binding regulations put forth by various government space agencies. Private companies would benefit by “showcasing and advertising their rating without disclosing any sensitive details, as the rating would be published by a neutral third party,” he said.

More Transparency and Public Input

The SSR would provide transparency and allow the public to identify the responsible actors in the space sector.

“The fact that private actors have been entering the space sector in large numbers is a good thing. Their entrance brings innovation, new ideas, increased funding and lots of other benefits. We need to work together in a public-private partnership way to solve this particular challenge,” he added.

“Beyond SSR, one could imagine in the future a sort of consortia of public-private stakeholders — space agencies, satellite operators, launch providers, insurance companies and even investors — who come together and pool resources to solve the common problem of space debris. Of course, this kind of set-up would need careful planning and agreement,” Khlystov explained. “In principle all these actors are interested in maintaining the sustainability of orbits as they all have resources and interests that are at stake.”

Although space is infinite, Earth’s orbit is not. Its harshness belies its fragility.

“Our society is extremely reliant on space activities. Digital TV and radio broadcast, weather reporting, GPS, bank transactions and the internet all require satellites to function,” said Dolado-Pérez. “When we launch new satellites, it has to be done in a manner that keeps space sustainable. Earth’s orbit needs to be cherished because it is unique.”

Also read: The Unglamour of Space.