Why investors are following Musk, Bezos in betting on the stars, Washington Post
“The new space investors are catching up with the slow, but growing development of the commercial space sector, which NASA has been fostering for years. With the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has awarded billions of dollars in contracts to commercial companies so that they could develop rockets to fly cargo and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. Still, the industry is diverse, and different sectors are more advanced, and profitable, than others. Cubesats, the tiny satellites that can swarm around the Earth beaming back images of the planet, are already in high demand. Launching commercial and government satellites is also big business. But the emergence of other sectors, such as space tourism and asteroid mining, is still in the future.”
Two steps forward…one step back. But ever so slowly it’s finally coming together. Three cheers for the billionaires.
Maybe. But the list of things to actually do in space that will make money continues to…be the same:
1. at some point the birds we need in orbit will be in orbit. The launch market will shrink.
2. cube sats are in demand, maybe, but the numbers I see are quite small.
3. space tourism is several decades away. At least. Where are the facilities? What will folks actually DO in orbit? Where’s the hotel, the cushy up and down ride? Where’s the safety?
4. asteroid mining, of course, is the Big Dog, but again it is many many decades away. (Brings out the same old drum): Where is the in situ research? methods for extracting and smelting ore in microG? semi autonomous space craft to move rocks about? manufacturing facilities that can take smelted or and create-oh, I don’t know, a space ship, maybe?
We are still thinking that everything must be manufactured on earth and catapulted at great expense into space. This is old think. In so many ways access to space has very little to do with technology and everything to do with the way we think.
Well Michael, aren’t you Mr. Sunshine this Monday morning. It’s gonna be one baby step at a time. This year maybe we’ll see: Beam to ISS…3-D manufacturing facility to ISS…Falcon Heavy launch…Falcon reuse…Virgin testing…Dreamchaser testing…Lynx testing…Blue Origin payload flights…Brownsville groundbreaking…and I imagine that I’m missing a few items. Cheer up Bucko.
1. at some point we’ll need to replace the birds in orbit because they’ve failed, run out of propellant, or are simply obsolete.
2. cube sats will always be a “bargain basement” payload. There has never been much money in launching them, except as secondary payloads.
3. Bigelow Aerospace will likely provide the space hotels. That is, after all, why the company was formed in the first place.
4. Meaningful in-situ research will likely come from private investment, eventually.
The next clear step is to stop throwing away launch vehicles, upper stages (i.e. space tugs), satellites, and manned vehicles! New space companies are the only ones making visible progress in this area with launch vehicles.
Propellant depots are a logical next area ripe for investment. ULA has a lot of the tech needed for LOX/LH2 depots, and their upcoming ACES upper stage would make for quite a capable “tug”.
Perhaps a better answer. Who knows?
Didn’t we all read these same articles in the 1990s? Billionaires and large corporations were funding the efforts then also. How did that turn out?
Not very well, but much has changed in two decades.
This time around, the move is much more demand driven, technologies are better, costs are lower, value propositions are better, and pockets are deeper. Not a guarantee, but very, very different.