Julie Johnsson Chicago
WHILE Elon Musk dreams of missions to Mars, fellow billionaires Paul Allen and Richard Branson focus on breakthrough spaceflight closer to home: cheap cargo trips to Earth orbit.
From start-ups to aerospace giant Boeing, entrepreneurs and for-profit companies are working to shake up a $6 billion (R72bn) commercial launch business whose crowded schedules may require years-long waits to loft $200 million communications satellites.
Instead of heavy boosters fired from conventional pads, the new rocketeers envision smaller spacecraft taking off from venues as varied as the remote South Pacific and a giant plane dwarfing Howard Hughes’s famed “Spruce Goose”. Cut-rate rides will let them loft the latest miniature satellites, which are being built for as little as $10 000 and deployed in swarms to monitor crops, create web hotspots and track weather systems.
“Any time you start shaving zeroes off the cost of doing something, people will start trying something they never tried before,” said AJ Piplica, the chief operating officer of Generation Orbit Launch Services, which is designing a lightweight rocket fired from a Gulfstream business jet.
Space symposium
Allen and Branson’s ideas will be showcased this week in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at the Space Symposium trade show. The entrepreneurs share Musk’s aim of paring spaceflight costs. But unlike the Space Exploration Technologies founder, they and their lower-profile peers are focused closer to Earth.
The alternative-launch ventures had the potential to slash prices in a field still attuned to government contracts and multimillion-dollar satellites, Marco Caceres, the director of space studies for Virginia-based consultant Teal Group, said. For years, annual satellite deployments ran in a range of 70 to 150, he said.
Now, with units as small as a credit card, the pace is quickening. The 2014 tally included 303 satellites from 1 kilogram to 1 000kg with a market value of $1.9bn, according to Teal Group data.
“That’s the trend for the future,” Caceres said. “If someone says we might be launching thousands of these satellites a year, it’s not an outrageous statement.”
The new launch operators are challenging incumbents such as United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.
The catch, Caceres said, was keeping rates to less than the $12m US companies typically pay to put payloads on Russian-made Dnepr rockets, converted Cold War-era missiles that offer the cheapest lift.
“The launch part of the space industry is like a stuffy old man’s golf club: very elite,” said Peter Beck, the chief executive of Rocket Lab USA, which is developing light rockets.
Rocket Lab plans to charge $4.9m to fly cargo in its lightweight, all-black Electron, an 18-metre rocket that would be overshadowed by a 34m Dnepr. It’s targeting start-ups and universities whose small satellites cannot wait two years to hitchhike as a secondary payload on a larger rocket. – Bloomberg