July - August 2001

Space: Free Market Frontier or Pipe Dream?

by George F. McClure

Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist, has joined advocates for a citizens-in-space program at a Senate roundtable...

A Las Vegas hotel tycoon who planned at one time to build a luxury tourist cruise ship to orbit the moon, Tito is now looking for occupants for two inflatable space structures, which will be ready for deployment in two years and will each offer two and a half times the interior volume of any element of the International Space Station (ISS)…

Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to set foot on the moon, founded ShareSpace, aimed at promoting mass-market space travel...

Tito, 60, an ex-NASA aerospace engineer turned businessman, contracted with the Russians for a space station visit for $20 million, including almost $1 million for nearly four months of pre-flight training in Russia. At the time, Mir was planned as the destination, but when it was removed from orbit, the ISS, which is 85 percent-owned by the United States but in which Russia has investments, became the venue.

Are we on the threshold of commercial applications for space? Serious studies have been made of the prospects for initiating orbital or suborbital space tourism between 2010 and 2025. Looking at the number of people affluent enough to afford the fare — millionaires and billionaires — the study predicts 10,000 suborbital travelers in the first decade and 4,000 orbital passengers in the decade beginning five years later. This venture will require 1,500 suborbital launches and 950 orbital launches.

Hurdles to Space Tourism

What are the obstacles to commercial space travel? Reliability and affordability for space launches top the list.

Tito figured his chance of survival for the trip to be 99 percent, and he flew in the non-reusable Soyuz spacecraft. For the reusable Space Shuttle fleet, NASA puts the probability of a launch disaster at 1 in 438. For commercial jet travel the fatality rate is much lower than one per 100,000 flights. The contrast here highlights the reliability concerns.

As for affordability, today's cost to launch payload into low-Earth orbit is about $10,000 per pound; cutting that by two orders of magnitude would open space to many more applications than communications and remote sensing satellites, but doing that is easier said than done. To illustrate cost obstacles, consider:

• NASA's $4.5 billion Space Launch Initiative is directed toward a 2005 decision on a second-generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) to replace the 20-year old Space Shuttle. More than $1 billion was spent before two related programs, the X-33 and X-34, were canceled recently. The X-33 was a half-size prototype for "VentureStar," a single-stage-to-orbit RLV that would have been able to reduce launch costs to $1,000 per pound.

• At one time, Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, planned to use VentureStar to ferry components to space to assemble a half-mile-long cruise ship that could accommodate 100 passengers and 50 crew. The ship would orbit the moon permanently. To be affordable to his clients, launch costs would have had to drop to $550 per pound.

• A 1997 NASA reexamination of using solar-power satellites to beam power from space concluded that launch costs would have to drop to less that $200 per pound for these satellites to become a competitive energy source.

It's a Wide-Open Frontier

Despite the hurdles, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and adventure-seekers have not abandoned the idea of entrepreneurial space activity. For example:

• Entrepreneurs are looking at ways to link up with asteroids and claim property rights, so they can gather minerals for space manufacturing and water/ice for space propulsion.

• The X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first privately funded team that can demonstrate the ability to fly a reusable three-person spaceship on two consecutive (within two weeks) suborbital flights. Some 20 teams have already registered for the competition. In addition, you can sign up for a Foundation credit card that enters you in a lottery to win space travel with each use. (See sidebar "For More Information" section for Web address.)

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce now has a Space Enterprise Council, and the Space Transportation Association presented a conference in June 2001 that focused on developing of space travel and tourism.
  

George F. McClure is IEEE-USA's Technology Policy Editor and co-chair of the IEEE-USA Workforce Committee.