The Space Business E-Book

Andrew May

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

Dreams, schemes and opportunity as space opens for tourism and commerce. Twentieth century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but there is a parallel history which has set the template for the future. Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites - a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialisation is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have long trumpeted plans to make space travel a possibility for ordinary people and those ideas are inching ever closer to reality. At the same time, other companies plan to mine the Moon for helium-3, or asteroids for precious metals. Science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining, in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of our quixotic quest to commercialise the final frontier.

Leseprobe

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Hot Science is a series exploring the cutting edge of science and technology. With topics from big data to rewilding, dark matter to gene editing, these are books for popular science readers who like to go that little bit deeper …

AVAILABLE NOW AND COMING SOON:

Destination Mars: The Story of Our Quest to Conquer the Red Planet

Big Data: How the Information Revolution is Transforming Our Lives

Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe

The Graphene Revolution: The Weird Science of the Ultrathin

CERN and the Higgs Boson: The Global Quest for the Building Blocks of Reality

Cosmic Impact: Understanding the Threat to Earth from Asteroids and Comets

Artificial Intelligence: Modern Magic or Dangerous Future?

Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universeii

Dark Matter & Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe

Outbreaks & Epidemics: Battling Infection From Measles to Coronavirus

Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery

Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures

Origins of the Universe: The Cosmic Microwave Background and the Search for Quantum Gravity

Behavioural Economics: Psychology, Neuroscience, and the Human Side of Economics

Quantum Computing: The Transformative Technology of the Qubit Revolution

The Space Business: From Hotels in Orbit to Mining the Moon – How Private Enterprise is Transforming Space

Game Theory: Understanding the Mathematics of Life

Hot Science series editor: Brian Clegg

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THE SPACE BUSINESS

From Hotels in Orbit to Mining the Moon – How Private Enterprise is Transforming Space

ANDREW MAY

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CONTENTS

Title Page 1Space for Everyone?2Suborbital Adventures3Into Orbit4Vacations in Space5Extraterrestrial Industries6The Billionaire Space Race Further ReadingIndexAbout the AuthorCopyrightviii

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1

SPACE FOR EVERYONE?

Imagine saving up for the trip of a lifetime to Sky Hotel, orbiting 16,000 kilometres above the surface of the Earth. There, you can indulge in a choice of activities, from familiar ones like cordon bleu dining or gambling in the casino, to the very far from usual, such as zero-gravity sports. Or how about swimming round and round on the inside of a rotating cylinder, where the water is held in place by centrifugal force? Then there are the views of Earth – which you can see in its stunning entirety, from pole to pole, or magnified through a telescope so you can see individual buildings in any city you choose to focus on.

That’s the scenario that Arthur C. Clarke described in his article ‘Vacation in Vacuum’, published in Holiday magazine way back in 1953. Best known as a science fiction author, Clarke was also a scientist and visionary who was among the first to grasp the real-world possibilities of space travel. In 1945 he famously championed the idea of geosynchronous 2communication satellites, two decades before they became a reality. His key realisation was that space isn’t just interesting, it’s useful. When the space race turned its attention to the Moon in the 1960s, most people saw it as a purely political goal – or at best an exercise in pure science. Clarke was one of the few who could see further than that. In his 1966 book Voices from the Sky, he wrote of the Moon that:

A century from now it may be an asset more valuable than the wheatfields of Kansas or the oil wells of Oklahoma – an asset in terms of actual hard cash, not the vast imponderables of adventure, romance, artistic inspiration and scientific knowledge.

The idea of making money from travelling to the Moon – rather than sinking billions of dollars into simply planting a flag on its surface – was a novelty, and one that few people outside the world of science fiction took seriously. Yet the basic concept was as sound then as it is now. Take lunar tourism, for example – the basis of Clarke’s novel A Fall of Moondust (1961). If people are going to splurge out for a vacation in Earth orbit, they’ll splurge even more for one on what is effectively a whole different world.

There are other types of space business that don’t depend on milking super-rich customers. They just make hard-nosed economic sense, or they will do once they’re established. That’s true, for example, of another of the topics discussed by Clarke, lunar mining. As we’ll see later, there are valuable elements that are far easier to extract on the Moon than 3here on Earth. The same is true – maybe even more so – of near-Earth asteroids. A staple of science fiction since the early 20th century, asteroid mining has the potential to be one of the most lucrative undertakings beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

A vision of asteroid mining from the December 1935 issue of Amazing Stories.

(Public domain image)

Sixty years after the first humans were launched into orbit, we still haven’t quite achieved Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of a thriving, self-sustaining space business – but we’re getting there. Although communication satellites have been around since the 1960s, it’s only in recent years that they’ve been built, launched and operated entirely by private companies – and in a big way, too. Just think of Elon Musk’s 4SpaceX and its vast constellation of Starlink satellites, which aim to bring broadband internet to remote locations all over the world.

Similarly, we’re now seeing the birth of the first privately operated space tourism companies, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, with their modest offering of brief suborbital hops. Far more ambitious plans – including orbiting hotels and trips around the Moon – are in advanced stages of preparation. Other companies are working on the technology needed to extract minerals from asteroids, or to operate robotic mining equipment on the Moon.

All these topics – space tourism, private satellite constellations, asteroid mining and more – will be discussed in detail in the chapters to come. First, however, we need to address one very obvious question. Why is the space business taking so long to get up and running?

Space Is Hard

You may have heard the phrase ‘space is hard’, because it’s become something of a cliché. Richard Branson said it in the wake of the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane during a test flight in October 2014. The following June, the phrase was used by astronaut Scott Kelly on board the International Space Station (ISS), after a SpaceX cargo craft was destroyed en route to the station. And Peter Diamandis, the founder of the Lunar X Prize for the first 5private company to put a robotic lander on the Moon, said the same thing when the most promising contender, Israel’s Beresheet, crashed onto the lunar surface in April 2019.

The fact that the phrase gets used so often, and under circumstances like these, more or less proves that it’s true. Space really is hard, for a variety of reasons. It involves highly complex – and often new and untested – technology, hence the frequent mishaps and accidents. It’s an immensely expensive business, particularly in the developmental stages, so even wealthy companies can struggle to get the necessary funding together. Hardest of all, it involves doing things that evolution just hasn’t prepared humans for, such as ascending for hundreds of kilometres against the pull of Earth’s gravity, or surviving in the vacuum of outer space.

Up to a certain point, there’s no fundamental physics preventing us reaching higher and higher altitudes. Both helium balloons and jet aircraft, if they’re specially designed for the task, can climb to 30 kilometres or a little beyond that. But that’s when the problems start, because the higher you get, the less atmosphere there is to support you. At 40 km the air density is only a 300th of its value at sea level, and at twice that height it is 200 times smaller still.

It’s easy to see why a helium balloon has an altitude limit. The balloon starts to rise because, at sea level, it’s lighter than the air it displaces. The mass of the gas inside the balloon is less than the mass of the same volume of outside air. But as it rises and the air density decreases, there comes a point when that’s no longer true – and the balloon stops rising.6

The situation with a jet plane is a little more complicated, because it involves two different effects. Unlike a balloon, a fixed-wing aircraft is heavier than air, but it’s still able to rise due to the aerodynamic lift produced by the flow of air over its wings. But for that to work, there has to be enough air in the first place. So producing lift becomes harder and harder as the surrounding atmosphere gets thinner.

A jet needs the atmosphere for another reason, too. Its forward thrust is produced by pulling large quantities of air into its engines, and using the oxygen in it to burn fuel and drive a turbine – which then blasts out a fast-moving stream of exhaust which pushes the jet along. This too ceases to work at high altitudes, where there simply isn’t enough atmosphere.

By convention,* space starts at an altitude of 100 km, known as the ‘Kármán line’. That’s a nice round figure, and with an air density more than 2 million times smaller than at sea level, few people would dispute that for all practical purposes it’s outside the atmosphere. But there’s a more concrete reason why the pioneering aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán picked that particular value. He calculated that for an aircraft to stay aloft at that altitude through aerodynamic lift, it would have to travel at orbital velocity (a concept we’ll explore in more detail shortly) – and it would then stay aloft anyway, even in a total vacuum.

If balloons and jet aircraft are out, then, the only realistic way to get to the Kármán line – and beyond – is with the aid of a rocket. This works on the same physical principle as a 7jet, blasting out a fast-moving stream of gas in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in. The difference is that a rocket is entirely self-contained. While a jet can get most of the working material it needs from the surrounding atmosphere, mixing it with a relatively small proportion of fuel to give it the necessary energy, a rocket typically has to carry all its fuel and propellant along with it.

Actually, once you’ve cracked the problem of building a working rocket, simply getting into space – beyond the Kármán line – isn’t really that hard at all. The difficult part is staying up there without falling straight back to Earth. To see this, you only have to consider the curious case of MW 18014 – the curious thing about which is that it’s hardly ever mentioned in the history books.

MW 18014 was a V-2 – which, in a more generic sense, certainly hasn’t been forgotten by history. The first rocket powerful enough to carry a substantial payload over a distance of hundreds of kilometres, the V-2 wasn’t designed as a space launcher but as a weapon of war. It entered service with the German army in 1944, and was used, among other things, to attack London from launch sites on the Dutch coast – a distance of some 300 km.

Unlike an aircraft, the V-2 wasn’t powered throughout its flight – only during a short initial boost phase to get it up to the desired speed – after which its own momentum kept it going. Its trajectory was similar to the parabola that a ball follows when you throw it. If you throw the ball up at a steep angle, it goes very high, but doesn’t travel very far horizontally before falling back to the ground. Conversely, if 8you throw it at a shallow angle, the horizontal range will be much longer, but the maximum height reached will be lower.

The V-2’s designers were faced with a similar trade-off. Because the rocket didn’t rely on aerodynamics to keep it aloft, it made sense to fly as much of the trajectory as possible in the thin upper atmosphere, in order to minimise drag forces. To achieve the desired range with a full fuel load, the highest point of the parabola – technically called the apogee – worked out at around 80 kilometres, much higher than any aircraft or balloon had flown.

In the case of a ball, you know intuitively that the way to get it as high as possible is to throw it vertically upwards. It’s the same with rockets, and that’s where MW 18014 comes in. It was a test launch that took place on 20 June 1944, several months before the V-2 entered military service, at the army’s research establishment at Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast. Unlike an operational mission, this particular rocket was fired vertically upwards, in order to check that it still functioned correctly at very high altitudes. It hit apogee at 176 km, well above the Kármán line – a feat that meant it was the very first human-made object to reach outer space.

Yet MW 18014 didn’t make the history books. No one claims the space age started on 20 June 1944. The reason is that, having reached that height of 176 km, MW 18014 immediately started falling, to plunge ignominiously into the depths of the Baltic. When it reached apogee its speed was zero, after which it was entirely at the mercy of gravity. And gravity, in its inimitable way, pulled MW 18014 back down to Earth.9

Things would have been different if the rocket had been launched at an angle rather than vertically. In this case it would have a horizontal component of velocity as well as a vertical one, and even at apogee it would still be moving parallel to the surface of the Earth. Of course, if exactly the same rocket was used it wouldn’t be able to reach the same record-breaking altitude on a non-vertical trajectory. For the sake of argument, then, let’s assume the rocket has a more powerful engine, allowing it to reach the same altitude regardless of its horizontal motion.

Gravity will still pull the rocket back down, but the rocket will travel horizontally in the process, eventually crashing at some distance from the launch site. Given enough horizontal speed, it might even have reached London, which is much further from Peenemünde than from the operational launch sites – about a thousand kilometres, in fact. That’s far enough, in relation to the radius of the Earth, that the flight path would actually curve around the surface of the planet. If the rocket was even more powerful, allowing it to reach an even greater horizontal speed, it would curve that much further round the Earth before coming back down.

You’ve probably noticed that if you drive too fast round a corner, you feel a force pushing you in the opposite direction to the turn. It’s called centrifugal force, and some people will tell you it isn’t a real force at all, but an illusory one produced by your own inertia. From your point of view inside the car, however, it’s real enough – and, in the same way, it’s real enough to a rocket as it flies around the curvature of the Earth. In the latter case, if the rocket travels fast enough 10– around 28,000 kilometres per hour if it’s just above the Kármán line – the centrifugal force is strong enough that it exactly counteracts the downward pull of gravity. The result, which sounds like black magic no matter how many times you hear it, is that the rocket never falls back to Earth. It’s in orbit.

The difference between a suborbital rocket launch and an orbital one is the much higher velocity required by the latter.

It’s at this point that ‘space is easy’ suddenly becomes ‘space is hard’, because 28,000 kph is an eye-wateringly high speed. You may remember from high school physics that potential energy – the energy required to raise an object through height h – is proportional to h, while kinetic energy – the energy to increase its speed by v – is proportional to v squared. In the present context, this means the energy needed to get a payload up to the Kármán line, 100 km above the Earth’s surface, is nothing compared to the energy needed to get the same payload up to orbital velocity.

It will be easier to visualise the difference we’re talking 11about if we return to the ball-throwing analogy. Rather than throwing it all the way up to the Kármán line, let’s scale things down by a factor of 10,000. That brings the altitude down to ten metres, which a reasonably fit person might manage quite easily. Working out the required speed is a little harder, because that factor of 10,000 applies to v2 rather than v, so we only have to divide orbital velocity by the square root of 10,000, which is 100. The bottom line is that, if reaching the Kármán line is like throwing a ball 10 metres up in the air, then reaching orbital speed would involve throwing it with the superhumanly fast speed of 280 kph. That requires far more energy, by a factor of 30 or so, than the first throw.

Having to accelerate a rocket all the way to orbital speed introduces new problems that the V-2 designers never had to contend with. More acceleration means more energy, and more energy means more fuel. But more fuel means more mass, and more mass means it needs even more energy to get to the desired speed. It’s a vicious cycle that gives rocket scientists nightmares, and even today, no single-stage rocket has ever made it into orbit. Instead, they have to be constructed in multiple stages – two or more – with the earlier stages dropping off as their fuel is used up in order to minimise the mass that has to be shifted.

After MW 18014’s success in breaching the Kármán line, it took another thirteen years of intensive effort by teams on both sides of the planet – the United States and what was then the Soviet Union – before an object was put into space that actually stayed up there. This was the Soviet satellite 12Sputnik 1, launched on 4 October 1957 – and it was the real start of the space age.

An Exclusive Club

Sputnik 1 had two objectives, one stated and one unstated. The stated objective was scientific research, the unstated one was a show of military strength. The rocket that launched the satellite into orbit was a repurposed intercontinental ballistic missile, a Cold War status symbol that only the Soviet Union possessed in 1957. As different as they are, these two objectives have at least one thing in common – they’re both essentially preoccupations of government, not the private sector. Doing pure science, like building up weapon stockpiles, is something that costs money – it doesn’t make money.

This set the tone for the space sector for decades to come. It was a government monopoly – initially just the great Cold War rivals of the Soviet Union and United States, then with other countries following suit. By the 1990s, Japan, China, India, Israel and the European Union also had space launch capabilities – and in every case, it was government-owned, government-funded and government-operated.

This isn’t a bad thing per se, because governments are able to pump money into developing highly complex technology where the lead times are measured in years or decades, which would quickly bankrupt any private company. But it did leave the world with the impression that space was 13only useful for doing government-like things, and that it was destined always to remain the exclusive preserve of governments.

Of course, those governments accomplished some remarkable feats in the last four decades of the 20th century – not least the advent of human spaceflight. Three and a half years after Sputnik 1, on 12 April 1961, an upgraded version of the same launch rocket was used to send the first person into orbit, Major Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force. As with Sputnik, this was seen around the world as another high-profile victory for the Soviet side in the Cold War.

The US response to Gagarin’s flight was interesting. At the time, they didn’t have the capability to launch an American into orbit – that had to wait until John Glenn’s flight in February 1962. But they reasoned that as far as the history books were concerned, ‘space’ meant anywhere beyond the Kármán line, not necessarily an orbital mission. So they did the best they could, with what was essentially a piloted version of MW 18014.

Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was launched atop a single-engined, single-stage Redstone rocket – only slightly more powerful than a V-2 – from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 9.34 a.m. local time on 5 May 1961. Around two and a half minutes later, when the Redstone had completed the boost phase, Shepard’s three-metre-long Mercury capsule separated and continued upward on a parabolic trajectory. It reached apogee at 188 km – only a dozen kilometres higher than MW 18014 – and then gravity took over and it started to fall back to Earth. Slowed by parachutes, the capsule 14splashed down in the Atlantic about 400 km off the Florida coast. The time was 9.49 a.m.; the whole flight had taken just fifteen minutes.

It’s tempting to be cynical about Alan Shepard’s place in the history books, given that MW 18014 – which did much the same thing seventeen years earlier – is almost completely forgotten. That’s not really fair, though, because it ignores the importance of the human angle. The V-2 engineers merely witnessed MW 18014’s flight into space, whereas Shepard experienced it for himself. He saw the Earth from much the same altitude that Yuri Gagarin did, albeit for a much shorter time. And, unlike MW 18014, he survived the flight. He travelled in the same type of Mercury capsule John Glenn would use on his orbital mission, which protected him from the vacuum of space and brought him safely back to Earth.

The fact is that Alan Shepard really did travel into space, and with significantly less sophisticated technology than that required for an orbital flight. If you’re a thrill seeker in search of a genuine space experience, and you want to keep your costs to a bare minimum, there’s only one way to do it – by following in the footsteps of Alan Shepard. There’s a genuine market here, because the world has never had a shortage of wealthy thrill seekers. So it’s astonishing, in hindsight, that it took entrepreneurs so long to spot a golden opportunity. It’s only in recent years that they’ve finally cottoned on, and people like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are planning to offer Shepard-style ‘suborbital’ flights to budding space tourists – as we’ll see in the next chapter.15

On the other hand, back in the 1960s, it doesn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind that space travel might be of serious interest to anyone other than powerful nation states. More narrowly still, it was often seen exclusively in the context of the bitter Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR. This is demonstrated as clearly as anywhere in the first piece of international space legislation, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Its formal title is ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ – and that use of the word ‘states’, rather than a more general term, is telling. The treaty was put together against the backdrop of Cold War paranoia, and its main focus was on limiting the military use of space.

That’s an admirable enough goal, and the treaty did have the laudable effect of preventing nuclear weapons being deployed in space. But in other ways it was short-sighted to the point of incompetence. By repeatedly emphasising that word ‘state’, it gave the impression that national space programmes, rather than private ones, would always be the norm. At one point it even says that ‘states shall be responsible for all national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities’. It then says, ‘outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or exploitation, or by any other means.’

The Outer Space Treaty was an idealistic exercise in world harmony, at a time when the animosity between East and West was as intense as it has ever been. When Apollo 11 16landed on the Moon in 1969, the astronauts famously planted the Stars and Stripes – not to claim sovereignty, but to symbolise America’s victory in this particular race against the Soviets. Immediately before raising the flag, they unveiled a plaque that read ‘We Came in Peace for all Mankind’. This wasn’t just a nice gesture, it was required by a clause of the Outer Space Treaty: ‘The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.’