7 minute read
LIFT OFF
“Few have come before and many are about to follow,” Commander Jared Isaacman said last September as he and three Americans strapped themselves inside a slightly sooty 229-feet-tall Falcon 9 rocket and blasted off from Florida into space. “The door to space is now open.”
The five-hour jaunt, part of Tesla boss Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket programme, was the first around the Earth by private citizens and it certainly won’t be the last ‘civilian’ space flight. Sir Richard Branson, the British serial entrepreneur, who successfully flew to the edge of space in his Virgin Galactic Voyager craft in July, says he’ll begin taking paying passengers on stellar flights “early next year”.
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He claims to have signed up 700, including Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. Each will pay $250,000 for the experience. Virgin Galactic hopes to raise prices as demand grows. “I think we’re going to be deluged with people wanting to go to space,” Branson says.
A steep price? It’s worth the price, says Hayley Arceneaux, one of Isaacman’s crew members. “That last view of the Earth from the cupola made me emotional because it was just so awe-inspiring, and I knew I’d be thinking about that for the rest of my life,” she said after landing. “All you could see was the entire planet… stars and the moon, and that was such a lifechanging moment.”
As well as space tourism, Branson has his sights on longhaul air travel above the Earth’s atmosphere, where lower gravity and lack of air resistance would save vastly on time and fuel. He believes it will be possible, in his lifetime, to fly ‘hypersonic’ through space from London to Australia in a couple of hours. Sydney for lunch, anyone?
Branson and Musk are not alone in their cosmic ambitions. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with a net worth of almost $200 billion, travelled into low orbit in his Blue Origin craft a week after Branson last summer. He unbuckled his safety harnesses and experienced weightlessness before the roughly four-minute free-fall back to Earth. “Best. Day. Ever,” he proclaimed in a message from the capsule. He is expected to sell tickets to paying passengers for between $200,000 and $300,000.
Good old-fashioned ego is the rocket fuel of the privatesector rivalry among the new space cowboys. Being the first to create a business that is out of this world will give Musk, Branson and Bezos bragging rights for life. But there’s cash at stake, too. Lots of it. Analysts estimate that the global space industry will grow from about $400 billion now to more than $1 trillion by 2040, comprising tourism and possible mineral extraction.
Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have created dedicated teams to conduct financial research on the emerging space travel sector. Wall Street likens it to bioscience: an area that will produce big “hits” for investors over the long term, even if the short-term risks are great.
Bezos hopes that many of us will one day work in space, in manufacturing and mining. Asteroids hold minerals that will eventually be exhausted on Earth. “We have sent robotic probes to every planet and we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Earth is the best,” he says. “The only way to protect it is eventually to move heavy industry off
Earth. Space is a much better place to do heavy manufacturing. In space, you have 24/7 solar power. Every kind of element is available.”
Bezos also wants humans to live in space. In May, he unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon’, as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements. “It’s time to go back to the moon – this time to stay,” Bezos said in Washington DC in May. “We are going to build a road to space and then amazing things will happen.”
Exactly what these settlements might look like so far remains unclear. But Harold Bloom, a member of the board of governors of the National Space Society, reckons that Bezos is heavily influenced by Gerald O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton, whom Bezos met as a student.
“Bezos is keeping alive the idea of the O’Neill colonies that can be 20 miles in one direction and 1 mile around and that can have 500 square miles of territory with forests, parks, farms, and puppy dogs, plus cities,” Bloom recently said.
Musk also aims to set up permanent colonies on the Moon and (ultimately) Mars to guarantee our survival in the event that Earth suffers a devastating asteroid strike or devastating global pandemic. “Becoming a multi-planet species beats the hell out of being a single-planet species,” he says with typical ambition. Could it really be possible to colonise other planets? Mars is a stretch alright. Of the 49 missions up to December 2020, only about 20 have been successful, despite some big names throwing bucket loads of cash at the voyage. In 2016, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli Mars Explorer crashed into the surface. Ongoing technical difficulties have forced the ESA to postpone its next mission until 2022.
But Nasa is on the hunt for a lunar base that can guarantee light and frozen water. It faces competition from a planned joint Russian-Chinese lunar research station which Moscow and Beijing say should be ready for crewed visits by 2036.
The challenges remain huge. The first is cost – $100 billion is often quoted as the anticipated cost to set up a few settlements on the Moon. Even establishing a basic outpost would be a grindingly costly affair. Robots would have to excavate rock samples and return them to Earth for analysis to find a suitable site. Unmanned spaceships would then have to transport the construction materials the Moon and more robots would have to use them to create settlements. Eventually, the humans would turn up.
The Numbers
I believe that, once people have gone to space, they will come back with renewed enthusiasm to try to tackle what is happening on this planet
Previous page, from left The Earth from space, as captured by NASA; The crew of Shepard by Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos; New Shepard lifts off from its Texas launch pad in July 2021 This page, from left Virgin Galactic’s Vss Unity spaceship glides home after a supersonic flight; Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-build commercial spaceport; Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson; A sneak peek inside the Vss Unity spaceship The new ‘astropreneurs’ have their critics. Detractors argue they could better invest their cash on Earth to benefit more people. Promoting space tourism when ordinary citizens are being asked to change their Earth-bound diets and travel and consume less to fight climate change is a very tough sell. In a recent interview, Prince William wondered whether the likes of Musk, Bezos and Branson don’t need to get their heads out of the clouds and focus on what’s at their feet. “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” he told the BBC.
But perhaps, as so often is the case, the answer lies in pursuing both arguments at once. Fixing the climate emergency will take time. Many countries aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The new space cowboys argue that by that time we could already be moving carbon-heavy industries such as mining off Earth.
In any case, the successors to Gagarin, Armstrong and Aldrin have achieved one thing: they have made it possible for any of us – for a price – to knock on heaven’s door and maybe change it and the world for the better.
EACH VIRGIN GALACTIC PASSENGER WILL PAY $250,000 THE GLOBAL SPACE INDUSTRY WILL GROW FROM ABOUT $400 BILLION NOW TO MORE THAN $1 TRILLION BY 2040 SPACE IS A MUCH BETTER PLACE TO DO HEAVY MANUFACTURING. IN SPACE, YOU HAVE 24/7 SOLAR POWER RUSSIAN–CHINESE LUNAR RESEARCH STATION SHOULD BE READY FOR CREWED VISITS BY 2036
