Twitter is a very
useful communication medium, but I sometimes forget its limitations
and my limited skill in utilizing it. I posted a couple of summary
tweets from a talk that I gave this morning but wasn't able to formulate
my opinions well in the limited space. Blogging seems like the better
avenue of expression in this case.
This morning I gave
a talk and sat on a panel titled Space Commercialization hosted by
the Space Coast Technical Council's Aviation & Aerospace
Committee. My fellow panelists were Don Platt, the CEO of Micro
Aerospace Solutions, and Mike Vinje, Small Business Technology
Manager at NASA KSC. I've met both Don and Mike previously and had a
good idea of what they might touch upon. And so, I made my talk a
general overview.
Where is the profit
in space? It's important to note from the start that money in space is not
fictional. According to the Space Foundation's 2015 report, the space
industry was a $330 billion business globally in 2014. Roughly half
of that comes from government spending. This year was also a big year
for venture capitalists with several large investments into companies
such as SkyBox, OneWeb, and Planet Labs.
Traditional space
profit-makers are large satellite constellations used for navigation
(GPS, for example), communications, TV, and radio. Many of the
companies involved in these sectors are publicly traded with revenues
in the hundreds of millions through tens of billions. Many of these
ventures began as military applications with government funding. All
have branched out to capture the private commercial market.
Remote sensing and
specifically Earth observation is also a huge and diverse industry.
Applications for military intelligence are obvious, but alternate
applications are vast. Weather and climate monitoring, mapping, and
environmental monitoring beyond weather (logging, agriculture, water
and plant resources and quality, mineral locations, traffic,
infrastructure development or disruption, etc.) are just a few
examples of how space data can be useful to businesses on Earth.
The launch industry
in the United States is almost entirely commercial with government
paying for services as needed. There are too many players to list, but some of
the current successes are: Orbital ATK, United Launch Alliance,
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic / Scaled Composites / The Spaceship Company,
Blue Origin, XCOR, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Masten Space Systems,
UP Aerospace, and zero2infinity.
Space components
needed for satellites, launching, and ground infrastructure are too
numerous to mention. Space manufacturing is an area of potential
profit but has not reached its time. Material science, fluid science,
biotechnology, biomedical sciences, and protein crystals are some
areas of research which show promise. Recent advances in 3D printing
have great potential in space as Made in Space has recently
demonstrated. Space utilization and integration – providing means to allow others
to utilize space – is a great niche area, as NanoRacks has shown.
Space tourism
remains an area for the very rich. Space Adventures has flown 7
paying individuals (private astronauts, spaceflight participants,
whatever term you'd prefer) to the International Space Station.
Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and Sierra Nevada want to enter into the space
tourism market as well. Perhaps someday, space tourism will become more commonplace and affordable. I'm hoping to buy myself a ticket someday!
Potential areas of
future space commercialization include space mining (on asteroids,
the Moon, Mars, or other planetary bodies), rapid global
transportation (sometimes called point-to-point transportation),
space-based solar power (beaming solar power to Earth's surface), and advanced tourism in deeper space or
other planetary bodies. Sign me up for a trip to the Moon.
Panel discussion
that I want to highlight has to do with the bottleneck of small
satellites needing transportation to space. The small sat and cubesat
community is very active in central Florida. Due to the relative ease
and inexpensive of building such small satellites, the door has
opened for almost anyone to build one, including
student groups. But the means to launch these small sats into space
is still very limited. For smaller, newer companies who are trying to
respond to this market need, there is a large learning curve.
Building a spacecraft and operating successfully is a complex,
difficult, expensive, and time-consuming process. I cheer on the
small launch community in the hope that soon we will see more
frequent access to space for these smaller payloads.
Another area that I
want to highlight is the continued high expense of launching to orbit
or beyond. Generally speaking, launching has gotten more expensive
over time. The old technology of chemical propulsion has not seen
many improvements over the decades. More R&D into new propulsion
technology is needed. Reusability may bring costs down, but it may
not be enough (I apologize for leaving out the word “may” in my
tweets). We have yet to see a truly reusable rocket so it's hard to
judge how such technology will effect the market. I am a skeptic, and
my guess is that it won't be enough to make any major dents in launch
costs, but I'd love to be proven wrong. It's certainly a step in the
right direction.
Florida's Space
Coast remains one of the best areas in the world to launch to orbit
because of its existing infrastructure, skilled workforce, and geographic
positioning. In a conversation I had at a space function last night,
we agreed that more rural areas such as Mojave, Texas, and New Mexico
offer better areas for test launches. But to create a transportation
hub, a population with establish infrastructure is a better bet. It
was slow-going for a few years after the retirement of the space
shuttle program, but I had no doubt that this area would bounce back
and thrive in the evolving space industry. Florida has a lot to offer
and has been making a fantastic effort over the years to evolve with
the industry, even lead the industry at times. I'm proud to live
here.
