Beyond: Our Future in Space

by Chris Impey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Bound in Red Tape

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

  In 2006, the US Government released 120 pages of rules for space tourism, ranging from preflight training to medical standards for the passengers. Most of the regulations are easily followed, such as requiring those flying the spacecraft to have FAA pilot certificates and those just along for the ride to sign a form saying they had been informed of the risks involved. Other rules are vexing space entrepreneurs.12 The most troublesome law is America’s International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). Rocket systems are like tanks and guns, in that a license is required for their export. But a license is also required if they are worked on by a non-US citizen, or even shown to a non-US citizen. ITAR controls are the bane of many researchers, as they have been applied to detectors and electronic systems that have no real strategic importance. The Economist estimates that str
ict ITAR controls on satellite technology have halved the US share of the global commercial-satellite industry since 1999.13

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

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

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

  People are going to die.

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

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

  Space travel is indeed dangerous, though not quite as dangerous as you might think. Interestingly, given its smothering influence in other areas, the FAA has been very casual with vehicle certification. For now, they’ve agreed to license private spacecraft without certifying, as they do for aircraft, that they are safe to carry people. To quote the regulations: “The FAA has to wait for harm to occur or almost occur before it can impose restrictions, even against foreseeable harm.” So safety criteria will only be applied when specific problems arise, or there’s an actual fatality rate. Meanwhile, space tourists will have to waive any claims against the American government and the operator. Which begs the question: What are the risks?

  As of late 2013, about 540 people have been in space, and twenty-one have died, a fatality rate of 3.9 percent. The result is similar if counting launch or reentry attempts that have killed their crew; for both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle, which account for the vast majority of launches, the fatality rate is 2 percent.16

  The statistics are reassuring, but the particulars of the losses are chilling. It was soft-pedaled by the media, but both of the doomed Space Shuttle crews almost certainly survived the initial incident and were conscious as they plunged to Earth. Some of the Soviet losses were equally grim, when the details emerged from a veil of secrecy. When Soyuz 1 crashed in 1967, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov knew he was going to die and raged against the engineers for ignoring prior warnings. Three cosmonauts died in 1971 returning from the Salyut 1 space station. Their ventilation valve ruptured 100 miles up, exposing them to the vacuum of space and asphyxiating them. There were also some close calls. The most memorable was Apollo 13, but in 1965 the Russian Voskhod 2 spacecraft missed its reentry site and the cosmonauts landed in a heavily forested wilderness at night. The two cosmonauts huddled in the cold, gripping pistols as wolves and bears roamed outside. The first Moon landing was so risky that President Richard Nixon had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were stranded. It read: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.”17 If that had happened, America’s space program might have played out very differently.

  Figure 23. The accident rate in US commercial aviation since World War II. Improvements in safety marked by circles represent (from left to right): pressurized cabins, radio communication, long-range radar, radar navigation, automation, autopilots, and large new jets.

  How do these fatality rates compare to more prosaic modes of travel and risks we take without thinking about them? Commercial aircraft are remarkably safe, with 1.3 deaths per hundred million miles flown in 2008. That converts to a lifetime probability of death in an airplane of one in 20,000, or 0.005 percent. In 1938, a more pioneering era in aviation, odds of death while flying were ten times higher. But the eye-popping number is the death rate from driving, giving a lifetime probability of death of one in 84, or 1.1 percent.

  So, assuming it’s a once-in-a-lifetime joyride, traveling into space is four hundred times more dangerous than flying but only twice as risky as driving (Figure 23).

  _________

  In the early fifteenth century, the eunuch Chinese admiral Zheng He sent a fleet of 320 ships and 18,000 men on seven major voyages to India, Arabia, and Africa. Their goal: to seek out new curiosities and animals and make any civilizations they encountered submit and swear fealty to the Chinese emperor. But that vast effort was squashed. Nobody in China was allowed to own a ship and foreign trade was discouraged. Exploration simply ended. At the end of that century, Europeans began to explore in ships that were much smaller and less sophisticated than the ships of the Chinese fleet. They had some government seed money but the exploration was spurred mostly by trade and colonization. Some of these settlers embraced free enterprise and declared freedom from the smothering embrace of their former rulers, becoming the United States of America. Therein lies a lesson for the best way to go beyond the horizon into space—accept the risks and give the visionaries a free rein.

  Rockets Redux

  Bureaucracy is a human construct. An optimist might imagine that it can be reduced or even avoided in an ideal world. But physics is more obdurate. So the young Turks of the commercial space industry face something they can’t duck: the tyranny of the rocket equation.

  As we’ve seen, rockets are machines for generating momentum. They spew gas out of a nozzle at high speed and the rocket attached to it goes in the opposite direction. Isaac Newton defined the physics and Tsiolkovsky codified it into an equation with three variables. Specify two of the variables and the third is cast in stone. No sleight of hand or cleverness can change that fact. One variable is the energy needed to work against gravity and get to the destination, which for low Earth o
rbit corresponds to accelerating from rest to eight kilometers per second. The other two variables relate to the fuel: how much energy or impulse it provides, and what fraction it is of the total rocket mass.

  The energy for a rocket comes from rearranging atoms. So modern rockets work at the limit of what’s possible in chemistry. (One day we may be able to power rockets by rearranging atomic nuclei in a fusion reaction, but for now we’re stuck with chemistry.) The most efficient reaction uses combustion, or oxidation, of hydrogen. It’s clean burning, because the product is water, but it has the big complication that both molecules are gases at room temperature, so they both must be cooled and pressurized into liquid form. How does hydrogen-oxygen burning compare with other common fuels? It releases three times more energy per kilogram than gasoline or natural gas, five times more energy than coal, and ten times more energy than wood. The only thing that comes close is a highly refined and volatile kind of kerosene called RP-1.18

  With the fuel specified, the final variable is locked into place. A solid or kerosene-powered rocket must be 95 percent fuel, and a hydrogen-oxygen–powered rocket must be 85 percent fuel. The latter number was the fraction of total mass in fuel when Saturn V and the Space Shuttle launched. Just compare the 85 percent fuel fraction to that of a cargo plane (40 percent), a diesel train (7 percent), a car (4 percent), or a container ship (3 percent). These spacecraft were both mostly just hauling fuel around; the actual payload was 4 percent for the Saturn V and 1 percent for the Space Shuttle (Figure 24).