One of the most vexing problems in space research is that so little has changed in 50 years about the way we get to space. Consequently, space access remains both expensive and rare. It has still not reached the stage where scientists can themselves routinely travel there to conduct research, unlike oceanographers, who routinely reach the deep ocean, or geophysicists, who venture to the poles.
All this is poised to change. The advent of for-profit commercial spaceflight—most recently highlighted by the successful launches of the Dragon space cargo capsule, built and operated by SpaceX, to the International Space Station (ISS)—will likely transform space research. Scientists will enjoy lower launch costs, far more frequent access to space and the opportunity to personally run their experiments in orbit. These advances will not only help the big space research enterprises at NASA and the Japanese and the European space agencies, they will also probably make space access affordable to a broad, global base of nations, academic institutions and corporations.
I first became interested in the potential of commercial spaceflight when I served as NASA’s associate administrator in charge of all space and Earth science studies. Since then, I have advised commercial space companies, served as chief scientist for two Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, and purchased commercial human research spaceflights through my home institution, the Southwest Research Institute based in San Antonio, Tex. I have seen the promise of commercial spaceflight grow firsthand.
A rich variety of commercial space systems coming online in the next few years will offer important new capabilities of interest to space researchers—scientists who, ever since the post–World War II days of converting captured German V-2 rockets into research platforms, have been clever opportunists looking for better ways to accomplish their work. Although some plans now in the works may falter, others will surely succeed. And with the well-known present-day environment of tightening budgets, cost overruns and a long-standing stagnation in space access, that success cannot happen fast enough.
I believe it is a fair bet that the 2010s and 2020s may be just as pivotal to how we explore space as the 1950s and 1960s were. Indeed, we are already witnessing a revolution in the making. From the suborbital flights that are commonly touted as “tourist” ventures (but that will also offer scientists a seat) to orbital trips to the ISS and beyond, the coming years will reshape our relation to the still mysterious world just above Earth.
The Suborbital Future
One of NASA’s most productive—and unfortunately perhaps least known—spaceflight efforts has been its suborbital program. In place for decades, this program launches one or two brief space missions every month onboard throwaway unmanned rockets, giving researchers the opportunity to put their instruments in space for a few minutes at a time. Despite the brevity of these flights, suborbital missions have produced key scientific results in solar physics, supernova studies, upper atmospheric science, astrophysics and comet research. In addition, they have proved invaluable for testing new spacecraft and sensor technologies before they are committed to billion-dollar missions, and they have trained countless space experimentalists, including some of the most accomplished astronomers, atmospheric scientists and planetary mission leaders in the U.S.
Despite repeated calls by the scientific community over the past 20 years for steep increases in flight frequencies, however, NASA’s suborbital program launch rate has stayed frustratingly low. The reasons why are many, but they center on expense. The average cost to conduct one of these missions is about $2.5 million, which makes significantly higher rates impossible within NASA’s suborbital program budget. Yet the advent of new, reusable suborbital vehicles, built by commercial companies such as XCOR Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems and Blue Origin, offers breakthrough capabilities that are expected to radically improve both the pace and the productivity of suborbital research.
How is this possible? First, by flying reusable rather than disposable launchers, these companies can dramatically lower flight costs and increase launch rates. This potent pair of advances will most likely affect space research the way that the PC revolution changed computing—creating an access revolution.
NASA now flies roughly 20 to 25 suborbital launches a year. Suborbital flight provider Virgin Galactic expects its very first vehicle to eventually fly once every day. And each flight will be capable of carrying six payload racks or six researchers (or a mix thereof). This one company could provide about 2,000 opportunities to experiment every year.
Virgin Galactic is not alone in this new market. XCOR Aerospace, one of Virgin’s toughest rivals, expects to launch four times a day with each of its reusable vehicles, several of which have already been leased to countries that include South Korea and Curaçao. Just imagine how fast research fields could advance with flights this frequent. Life scientists, for example, could take hundreds of astronaut zero-gravity data sets each year, up from the handful of such studies we currently get.
Of course, high flight rates alone cannot a revolution make. The other key attribute of these reusable systems is their lower cost. Virgin Galactic plans to sell a 200-pound payload or research position on a suborbital mission for $200,000—which is about 10 times less expensive than a conventional-sounding rocket mission launch. XCOR’s quoted price, like Armadillo Aerospace’s, is nearer to just $100,000.
The reusable rocket revolution will also make possible new kinds of science. For example, with frequent access to the scientifically crucial high-altitude atmospheric region researchers call the “ignorosphere”—too high to reach with aircraft and balloons and too low for satellites to dip down to without tumbling back to Earth—scientists will be able to study many atmospheric phenomena, including mysterious high-altitude electrical bursts known as red sprites and blue jets.
These new vehicles also offer huge advantages in terms of their revolutionary capability to fly researchers with their payloads. For the first time since the dawn of the space age, space research might soon just enter the realm every other research field has long enjoyed: a laboratory environment where scientists can conduct their own experiments, on the spot, without the need for robotics.
Although much of this may sound like science fiction, researchers from some institutions are already making flight reservations for themselves and their experiments. By the middle of this decade, next-generation suborbital technology may be blossoming in the same way sounding rocket research did in 1950s—going from rare to routine. Would that alone be a dramatic change? Yes, but these flights are only the first of several emerging commercial space capabilities that have relevance to the space research community.
Inexpensive New Ways to Reach Orbit
In the U.S., the launch vehicles that have historically been used for most of NASA’s orbital science missions—the Pegasus, Atlas and Delta rockets—have each more than doubled in cost since the late 1990s. It used to cost about $15 million to launch a small science mission onboard a Pegasus rocket; it now costs more than $40 million. And the price of high-end rockets that can carry the largest payloads—so-called heavy lifters such as the Atlas V—has gone from $150 million to $350 million or so. With space science budgets squeezed between funding cuts and cost overruns, science program managers at NASA could find less expensive commercial launch entrants to be a godsend. For example, consider the Falcon launcher line created by SpaceX. The company conceived, designed, developed, tested and made operational its Falcon launcher line for less money than the government took to build just the launch tower for its now defunct Ares rocket. SpaceX currently offers the Falcon 9 for about $65 million—about half what its medium-lift Delta II competitor costs. And by 2014 SpaceX is planning to field a much larger Falcon called the Falcon Heavy, or FH. The FH will be able to lift about twice what the largest Atlas and Delta rockets can but for only $100 million, less than a third of its competitors’ price.
Historically, NASA has launched between three and five orbital science missions a year. Sending just half these missions on a Falcon Heavy would save between $2 billion and $3 billion over five years. Those savings are enough to field several new Discovery-class missions to another planet or nearly 10 Small Explorer missions used for astronomy and solar physics. They are even enough to fund a new flagship Mars rover akin to Curiosity.
Another cost-saving option that commercial space companies are pioneering is the ability to piggyback scientific payloads on commercial flights. For example, each of the 72 spacecraft in the second-generation Iridium communications satellite constellation offers space to paying customers. The host mission provides the launch and satellite costs, and the science instrument pays only a small fraction of that. Currently this “hosted payload” concept remains a boutique market. It works only when scientific instruments are able to fit onboard communication satellites and operate from their specialized orbits, and it is clearly not useful for large telescopes and other missions that require their own dedicated satellite. Yet it creates opportunities to launch modest payloads for tens of millions of dollars instead of the hundreds of millions it now takes to launch and operate a satellite mission.
Toward the Moon and Mars
These piggybacked payloads could soon bring scientific instruments well beyond Earth orbit. More than two dozen teams from Europe, North America, Asia and other places have entered the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition, which will reward the teams who complete the first commercial robotic lunar landing mission with a prize purse valued above $30 million [see “Bound for the Moon,” by Michael Belfiore; Scientific American, April 2012].
Teams such as Moon Express and Astrobotic are already signing contracts to bring scientific payloads to the moon. These and other companies see the Lunar X PRIZE itself as just a first demonstration mission. The long-term goal is to generate a steady revenue stream from researchers and nations that do not have hundreds of millions of dollars and the technical experience to themselves land on the moon but that do have the funds to buy a single payload berth on someone else’s proved lander. A $10-million ticket is still 100 times cheaper than the $1-billion government-led missions of the recent past.
Many lunar and planetary scientists are optimistic that at those prices, significantly more countries will be able to afford to send experiments to the moon, creating a second renaissance in studying the “fifth terrestrial planet” (after Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus).
Looking beyond the moon to Mars, SpaceX is discussing the possibility of outfitting Dragon capsules originally designed to carry payloads to the ISS for carrying large ones to Mars. That would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than recent Mars landers. If SpaceX can sell NASA or foreign space agencies on the idea, it may be able to create an inexpensive new way to carry out Mars research at just the time when space agencies across the world are struggling to afford to continue Mars exploration. Private Space Stations
About 90 percent of the 194 nations on Earth are not ISS partners and therefore do not have good prospects for substantial access to that single, large station. For nations such as China, India and South Korea, private commercial space stations may be the best bet for extended access to space for microgravity, fundamental physics, technology testing and space life sciences research, not to mention national prestige.
First and probably best known among these efforts is Bigelow Aerospace’s private space station. Without much fanfare, the company has already built and is testing two prototype space stations in low Earth orbit. By providing berths for up to six researchers, Bigelow’s first human-tended station will double the number of researchers in orbit at any given time. In doing that and by using private space taxis such as Boeing’s planned CST-100 or SpaceX’s Dragon (which are both being designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS), Bigelow’s station may well be able to offer researchers, agencies and companies—both in the U.S. and abroad—quicker access to space for costs that are half or less what a Soyuz launch and ISS stay are estimated to cost.
But Bigelow is not alone in this pursuit. A second firm, called Excalibur Almaz, plans a similar but smaller station using spare Soviet-era space station modules and crew transport vehicles.
SpaceX’s Dragon space capsules may also be used as long-term space stations. At present, Dragon vehicles are under contract to NASA to ferry cargo to and from the ISS. In the near future, they should also be able to fly astronauts. Yet Dragon capsules can do much more. SpaceX plans both automated and manned DragonLab missions that can fly to Earth orbit, loiter there for weeks to months as they conduct research with both internal and external payloads, and do so at a lower cost than the commercial space stations are likely to offer.
Return to the Wild Black Yonder
These innovations represent the first fundamentally new ways that we have had to access space since the 1950s and 1960s, the years that suborbital research, planetary missions and Earth-orbital satellites all came of age. Yet we are still in the early stages of our budding commercial revolution, and many questions remain. How profoundly will the emerging companies change space science, how deeply will they inspire the public and how rapidly will they convince more entrepreneurs to come to the commercial space revolution? The answers depend in no small measure on how innovative researchers and space agencies can be and how quickly they learn to adapt to, and exploit, the world of commercial space to improve the ways we do space research.
Indeed, if the commercial suborbital and orbital ventures already under way succeed, they may open up another path to explore the solar system’s asteroids, planets and moons. Science could benefit in much the same way it did from the private expeditions that opened up the polar regions. Why not? Such predictions are certainly one case where the sky is not the limit.
All this is poised to change. The advent of for-profit commercial spaceflight—most recently highlighted by the successful launches of the Dragon space cargo capsule, built and operated by SpaceX, to the International Space Station (ISS)—will likely transform space research. Scientists will enjoy lower launch costs, far more frequent access to space and the opportunity to personally run their experiments in orbit. These advances will not only help the big space research enterprises at NASA and the Japanese and the European space agencies, they will also probably make space access affordable to a broad, global base of nations, academic institutions and corporations.
I first became interested in the potential of commercial spaceflight when I served as NASA’s associate administrator in charge of all space and Earth science studies. Since then, I have advised commercial space companies, served as chief scientist for two Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, and purchased commercial human research spaceflights through my home institution, the Southwest Research Institute based in San Antonio, Tex. I have seen the promise of commercial spaceflight grow firsthand.
A rich variety of commercial space systems coming online in the next few years will offer important new capabilities of interest to space researchers—scientists who, ever since the post–World War II days of converting captured German V-2 rockets into research platforms, have been clever opportunists looking for better ways to accomplish their work. Although some plans now in the works may falter, others will surely succeed. And with the well-known present-day environment of tightening budgets, cost overruns and a long-standing stagnation in space access, that success cannot happen fast enough.
I believe it is a fair bet that the 2010s and 2020s may be just as pivotal to how we explore space as the 1950s and 1960s were. Indeed, we are already witnessing a revolution in the making. From the suborbital flights that are commonly touted as “tourist” ventures (but that will also offer scientists a seat) to orbital trips to the ISS and beyond, the coming years will reshape our relation to the still mysterious world just above Earth.
The Suborbital Future
One of NASA’s most productive—and unfortunately perhaps least known—spaceflight efforts has been its suborbital program. In place for decades, this program launches one or two brief space missions every month onboard throwaway unmanned rockets, giving researchers the opportunity to put their instruments in space for a few minutes at a time. Despite the brevity of these flights, suborbital missions have produced key scientific results in solar physics, supernova studies, upper atmospheric science, astrophysics and comet research. In addition, they have proved invaluable for testing new spacecraft and sensor technologies before they are committed to billion-dollar missions, and they have trained countless space experimentalists, including some of the most accomplished astronomers, atmospheric scientists and planetary mission leaders in the U.S.
Despite repeated calls by the scientific community over the past 20 years for steep increases in flight frequencies, however, NASA’s suborbital program launch rate has stayed frustratingly low. The reasons why are many, but they center on expense. The average cost to conduct one of these missions is about $2.5 million, which makes significantly higher rates impossible within NASA’s suborbital program budget.
How is this possible? First, by flying reusable rather than disposable launchers, these companies can dramatically lower flight costs and increase launch rates. This potent pair of advances will most likely affect space research the way that the PC revolution changed computing—creating an access revolution.
NASA now flies roughly 20 to 25 suborbital launches a year. Suborbital flight provider Virgin Galactic expects its very first vehicle to eventually fly once every day. And each flight will be capable of carrying six payload racks or six researchers (or a mix thereof). This one company could provide about 2,000 opportunities to experiment every year.
Virgin Galactic is not alone in this new market. XCOR Aerospace, one of Virgin’s toughest rivals, expects to launch four times a day with each of its reusable vehicles, several of which have already been leased to countries that include South Korea and Curaçao. Just imagine how fast research fields could advance with flights this frequent. Life scientists, for example, could take hundreds of astronaut zero-gravity data sets each year, up from the handful of such studies we currently get.
Of course, high flight rates alone cannot a revolution make. The other key attribute of these reusable systems is their lower cost. Virgin Galactic plans to sell a 200-pound payload or research position on a suborbital mission for $200,000—which is about 10 times less expensive than a conventional-sounding rocket mission launch. XCOR’s quoted price, like Armadillo Aerospace’s, is nearer to just $100,000.
The reusable rocket revolution will also make possible new kinds of science. For example, with frequent access to the scientifically crucial high-altitude atmospheric region researchers call the “ignorosphere”—too high to reach with aircraft and balloons and too low for satellites to dip down to without tumbling back to Earth—scientists will be able to study many atmospheric phenomena, including mysterious high-altitude electrical bursts known as red sprites and blue jets.
These new vehicles also offer huge advantages in terms of their revolutionary capability to fly researchers with their payloads. For the first time since the dawn of the space age, space research might soon just enter the realm every other research field has long enjoyed: a laboratory environment where scientists can conduct their own experiments, on the spot, without the need for robotics.
Although much of this may sound like science fiction, researchers from some institutions are already making flight reservations for themselves and their experiments. By the middle of this decade, next-generation suborbital technology may be blossoming in the same way sounding rocket research did in 1950s—going from rare to routine. Would that alone be a dramatic change? Yes, but these flights are only the first of several emerging commercial space capabilities that have relevance to the space research community.
Inexpensive New Ways to Reach Orbit
In the U.S., the launch vehicles that have historically been used for most of NASA’s orbital science missions—the Pegasus, Atlas and Delta rockets—have each more than doubled in cost since the late 1990s. It used to cost about $15 million to launch a small science mission onboard a Pegasus rocket; it now costs more than $40 million. And the price of high-end rockets that can carry the largest payloads—so-called heavy lifters such as the Atlas V—has gone from $150 million to $350 million or so.
Historically, NASA has launched between three and five orbital science missions a year. Sending just half these missions on a Falcon Heavy would save between $2 billion and $3 billion over five years. Those savings are enough to field several new Discovery-class missions to another planet or nearly 10 Small Explorer missions used for astronomy and solar physics. They are even enough to fund a new flagship Mars rover akin to Curiosity.
Another cost-saving option that commercial space companies are pioneering is the ability to piggyback scientific payloads on commercial flights. For example, each of the 72 spacecraft in the second-generation Iridium communications satellite constellation offers space to paying customers. The host mission provides the launch and satellite costs, and the science instrument pays only a small fraction of that. Currently this “hosted payload” concept remains a boutique market. It works only when scientific instruments are able to fit onboard communication satellites and operate from their specialized orbits, and it is clearly not useful for large telescopes and other missions that require their own dedicated satellite. Yet it creates opportunities to launch modest payloads for tens of millions of dollars instead of the hundreds of millions it now takes to launch and operate a satellite mission.
Toward the Moon and Mars
These piggybacked payloads could soon bring scientific instruments well beyond Earth orbit. More than two dozen teams from Europe, North America, Asia and other places have entered the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition, which will reward the teams who complete the first commercial robotic lunar landing mission with a prize purse valued above $30 million [see “Bound for the Moon,” by Michael Belfiore; Scientific American, April 2012].
Teams such as Moon Express and Astrobotic are already signing contracts to bring scientific payloads to the moon. These and other companies see the Lunar X PRIZE itself as just a first demonstration mission. The long-term goal is to generate a steady revenue stream from researchers and nations that do not have hundreds of millions of dollars and the technical experience to themselves land on the moon but that do have the funds to buy a single payload berth on someone else’s proved lander. A $10-million ticket is still 100 times cheaper than the $1-billion government-led missions of the recent past.
Many lunar and planetary scientists are optimistic that at those prices, significantly more countries will be able to afford to send experiments to the moon, creating a second renaissance in studying the “fifth terrestrial planet” (after Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus).
Looking beyond the moon to Mars, SpaceX is discussing the possibility of outfitting Dragon capsules originally designed to carry payloads to the ISS for carrying large ones to Mars. That would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than recent Mars landers. If SpaceX can sell NASA or foreign space agencies on the idea, it may be able to create an inexpensive new way to carry out Mars research at just the time when space agencies across the world are struggling to afford to continue Mars exploration.
About 90 percent of the 194 nations on Earth are not ISS partners and therefore do not have good prospects for substantial access to that single, large station. For nations such as China, India and South Korea, private commercial space stations may be the best bet for extended access to space for microgravity, fundamental physics, technology testing and space life sciences research, not to mention national prestige.
First and probably best known among these efforts is Bigelow Aerospace’s private space station. Without much fanfare, the company has already built and is testing two prototype space stations in low Earth orbit. By providing berths for up to six researchers, Bigelow’s first human-tended station will double the number of researchers in orbit at any given time. In doing that and by using private space taxis such as Boeing’s planned CST-100 or SpaceX’s Dragon (which are both being designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS), Bigelow’s station may well be able to offer researchers, agencies and companies—both in the U.S. and abroad—quicker access to space for costs that are half or less what a Soyuz launch and ISS stay are estimated to cost.
But Bigelow is not alone in this pursuit. A second firm, called Excalibur Almaz, plans a similar but smaller station using spare Soviet-era space station modules and crew transport vehicles.
SpaceX’s Dragon space capsules may also be used as long-term space stations. At present, Dragon vehicles are under contract to NASA to ferry cargo to and from the ISS. In the near future, they should also be able to fly astronauts. Yet Dragon capsules can do much more. SpaceX plans both automated and manned DragonLab missions that can fly to Earth orbit, loiter there for weeks to months as they conduct research with both internal and external payloads, and do so at a lower cost than the commercial space stations are likely to offer.
Return to the Wild Black Yonder
These innovations represent the first fundamentally new ways that we have had to access space since the 1950s and 1960s, the years that suborbital research, planetary missions and Earth-orbital satellites all came of age. Yet we are still in the early stages of our budding commercial revolution, and many questions remain. How profoundly will the emerging companies change space science, how deeply will they inspire the public and how rapidly will they convince more entrepreneurs to come to the commercial space revolution? The answers depend in no small measure on how innovative researchers and space agencies can be and how quickly they learn to adapt to, and exploit, the world of commercial space to improve the ways we do space research.
Indeed, if the commercial suborbital and orbital ventures already under way succeed, they may open up another path to explore the solar system’s asteroids, planets and moons. Science could benefit in much the same way it did from the private expeditions that opened up the polar regions. Why not? Such predictions are certainly one case where the sky is not the limit.
