The Future of Space Travel
How Home-built Rockets and “Space Nerds” in Copenhagen are Democratizing the Spaceflight Industry
“There’s an old tongue-in-cheek saying that goes: ‘When two Danes meet, they shake hands. When three Danes meet, they set up an association,’” Šarūnas Kazlauskas tells me. “And that might be true, since that is pretty much how Copenhagen Suborbitals was founded — mixing the fuel that was the feeling of disappointment due to the slow advancement of space exploration, together with the oxidizer that was the emerging promise of private, democratized space travel.”
I interviewed Šarūnas, the Content Manager for Copenhagen Suborbitals (CS), via email after I completed a tour of their facility. The tour, which was an Airbnb Experience, is one of many initiatives that Šarūnas and his team created to bring more attention to their work and build an international network of supporters.
I attended the tour on a balmy August afternoon. I was in the Danish capital for a few days and wanted to do something unexpected and more unique than a typical city walking tour — so visiting a crowd-funded space program certainly fit the bill.
I was early, so I waited in front of the large white rocket that marked the entrance of the CS building. I squinted at the rocket before me, shading my eyes from the bright light.
Clément, my guide for the day, met me here a few minutes later. After brief introductions, we went inside to get some reprieve from the heat. A volunteer from France, he told me that he had been with CS for eight months. We started our tour, and he shared his passion for the project while we roamed through the rockets together.
Copenhagen Suborbitals currently sits in a former shipyard on Refshaleøen, an old industrial site in the harbour. The building that houses this non-profit and all of its rockets is a warehouse that was originally used for painting ships. The team affectionately calls it HAB (or Horizontal Assembly Building) — a reference to the Kennedy Space Center’s VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building).
The organization’s website states, “Our goal is simple but audacious: to fly an amateur astronaut to space and return them safely to Earth.” But more than being just a pipe dream, CS’s lofty goal has been in the works since its inception in 2008; and they have already designed and flown six rockets and capsules, funded by donors from all over the world and supported by a team of sixty volunteers. Their next mission — Spica-1 — has no set date but will be their most ambitious yet: their first launch of a passenger-capable, liquid-fueled space rocket.
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One of the first stops on our tour is the “CS museum” — a collection of all the remnants of CS’s previous missions. Proudly displayed in front is the Nexø II rocket, which stands tall and looks to be in better shape than the others beside it. This was the sixth and most recent mission carried out by Copenhagen Suborbitals, and their tireless efforts paid off. With a gross lift-off weight (GLOW) of 292 kilograms, this rocket flew up to an altitude of 6,500 metres, staying correctly on its flight path. The parachute was then deployed and the rocket splashed down into the sea, gently enough that if an astronaut had been inside, he or she would have survived.
As Clément informed me, this was the first time that a CS rocket had landed with its parachute. And the systems and technologies used proved to be successful, which means that the team can now scale them up for the Spica — a much larger rocket capable of carrying a human to space.
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Clément and Šarūnas are just two of the sixty volunteers who make all of these missions happen. Šarūnas was born in Lithuania and currently works for a company that manufactures satellites — and he likely would not have found himself on his current career path had he not started volunteering with CS six years ago.
In fact, he came upon Copenhagen Suborbitals entirely by accident; he was on a photography tour that passed through the shipyard when he saw a large rocket casually displayed outside.
“I was a bit of a space nerd even back then,” Šarūnas admits. “So after the tour, I snuck into the workshop to ask what that rocket was. Long story short, here I am six years later!”
All CS’s volunteers come from different backgrounds and have different skills to offer — but the main qualities the organization looks for in its volunteers, according to Šarūnas, are “one relevant skill, a cultural fit, proactiveness, problem-solving, and dedication to work on the project long-term.”
I was surprised to discover that knowledge of engineering and aerospace were not required — although, of course, it is appreciated. The skills needed for the space program are as diverse as the volunteers themselves and include electronics, welding, metalworking and even sewing, as skirts and sails are needed for the parachutes.
“It’s not only about engineering,” Šarūnas insists. “There’s space for photography, writing, design, and much more.”
When I asked what the impetus was for him and others to volunteer hours of their free time here, he explained that they are “motivated to join because they have a passion for space, are drawn to complex challenges, like learning new skills, and wish to grow the space industry in Denmark. Space is where the next industrial revolution is likely to take place due to new manufacturing possibilities emerging in the microgravity environment.”
But beyond the obvious reasons for being part of the program, like skills training and professional development, there is also something compelling about simply exploring the unknown. “Many of us were greatly inspired by the Moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” he tells me. “It’s more than 50 years later, and human spaceflight, even in its most basic form like we are trying to achieve, is still a capability developed by only three nations in the world. We simply want to change that.”
Not only have just three countries — Russia, the U.S., and China — been able to send humans into space on domestically-built rockets, but there are also just two suborbital spaceflight systems that are currently operational. Both are bankrolled by billionaires: New Shepherd is funded by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Spaceship Two is funded by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
As can be seen, the full democratization of space travel is still a long ways away — but this is something that CS is working to change. Even in this early stage of development, their work has inspired other spaceflight projects and helped new space companies develop their own testing processes.
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While the organization has many achievements under its belt, not all of its launches have been met with pure success.
I noticed the remains of these failed launches during our visit to the CS museum, where a battered and bright orange capsule with the words “Tycho Brahe” emblazoned on its side now rests.
As Clément tells me, this is from the HEAT-1X mission — CS’s very first mission back in 2011. The 9.38-metre-long rocket, weighing 1,630 kilograms at lift-off and carrying a crash-test dummy to emulate a human astronaut, managed to reach an altitude of 1,400 metres. But it veered from its flight path, pitching forward by 30 degrees. At that point, the motor was manually shut down, and the booster hit the sea in a spectacular fashion, disintegrating and sinking upon impact. The spacecraft itself stayed afloat and was recovered, along with its torn parachute.
Clément and I also view an engine that has seen better days. I learned that this engine was retrieved from the HEAT-2X rocket that sits outside by the entrance to the workshop. It is one of the remnants of the failed static test (a test of the rocket’s operation and functionality without it leaving the launchpad) in 2014 — which ended with a huge fire.
There were big hopes for this rocket, as it was the first one capable of flying in a suborbital trajectory to space — loosely defined as anything above the Kármán Line, 100 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. But during this test, after just one second, the cooling jacket of the engine ruptured. The entire fuel load spilled out within seconds and engulfed the platform and the engine in flames, thus dashing any hopes CS had of making it to space that year.
“It was our first bi-liquid rocket [a rocket which contains separately stored fuel and oxidizer that come together in a combustion chamber], and we lost the technological gamble on that occasion,” Šarūnas tells me, also stressing that the team “takes as many safety precautions as possible and are aware of the risks at all times, so no one was injured.”
While incidents like this are setbacks in their overall mission of crewed spaceflight, the CS team doesn’t just see them as failures, but rather as learning opportunities — especially if they can obtain helpful data from them. “These ‘failures’ and data inform our next design, and we keep iterating,” says Šarūnas.
From the HEAT-1X mission, the team came away with important learnings: it was actually possible to launch a rocket of that size and weight from a sea platform, but not possible to fly it unguided. And from the HEAT-2X mission, they noted several key technologies that they needed to improve upon before they would be able to put a human inside.
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The team faces additional challenges aside from launches that do not go according to plan. Šarūnas admits that it has become much harder than before to attract new volunteers. “Nowadays, the barrier for entry is seen as high for many outsiders since our systems have become rather sophisticated for a hobby project. It doesn’t help that we lack a smooth onboarding process due to our limited time resources.”
Šarūnas adds that recently, however, the recruiting team has “been trying to take on small groups of people and get their feet wet in rocketry by working on their own small-scale rockets from scratch. We lend them our existing know-how and mentorship before they transition to working on our primary mission.”
Another issue is the exorbitant cost of building rockets. Even though none of the team members are paid, and they have received — and continue to receive — generous donations from interested parties, it is still an ambitious and expensive mission. There is flight hardware, logistics, fuel, maintenance, and assembly costs to cover, among other things.
And in a project that involves continuing innovation and experimenting with new technologies, there is always the issue of “sunk-cost fallacies.” Šarūnas explains that this is “admitting that you have been working on a solution that leads to a dead-end. This can be months or even years into the development of a part or a system.” What this means in real terms is that the team spent valuable funds on something that did not work — and now the problem needs to be tackled again from the beginning.
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But all of these challenges and learnings are helping the team prepare for their first crewed mission aboard one of the future Spica launches, which, at the moment, is at least five years away. The Spica vehicle will be launched from their usual site, an offshore platform in the Baltic Sea, 40 kilometres east of the Danish island of Bornholm. After it reaches apogee (the highest altitude in the flight), the capsule will re-enter the atmosphere, landing in the sea by parachute.
This future mission is bold and without precedent in a number of ways. It will be the first time an amateur astronaut has flown into space in a home-built rocket. If the mission is successful, it will be the first crewed spaceflight developed by a third-sector organization (non-governmental and non-commercial), developed and flown from Europe, and launched from an aquatic launchpad.
As CS’s rockets are home-built, it makes sense that the astronaut should also be home-grown — an amateur who is part of the current team. At the moment, there are three candidates, but there is a chance for others, even from outside the program, to be considered. According to CS’s website, to be selected, “her/his family must accept the risk involved, [and she/he must have a] mature, reflective personality, and, of course, great determination.” But importantly, the selected astronaut should be an ordinary person rather than a professional: “someone like ourselves… with a very, very special dream and balls made of rocket-grade alloy.”
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Near the end of our tour, Clément and I pass a plywood wall lined with wrenches and screwdrivers of every shape and size, hung neatly above a table cluttered with every tool imaginable. Also on the wall is a framed picture of Andreas Mogensen, a Danish engineer and the first Dane to go to space. The picture has the famed astronaut’s signature at the bottom along with a personal message:
Til Copenhagen Suborbitals,
held og lykke
“Good luck,” Mogensen tells the team in his handwritten note.
But it is due to more than luck that Copenhagen Suborbitals has been in existence for a decade and a half. The creative initiatives that their team carries out, like this Airbnb Experience tour and the live-streaming of their rocket launches, have brought attention to their mission from a wide variety of supporters. Their launches have attracted interest from sponsors that include large corporations to individual donors, both domestic and abroad. They continue to recruit and mentor a team of volunteers who do everything from software engineering to sewing. And they take any failures in stride, learning and improving from these setbacks in order to one day accomplish their mission: launching a human on a suborbital ride to space — and eventually democratizing the spaceflight industry.
Šarūnas and his co-hosts run their Airbnb Experience, “Explore a crowd-funded space program,” out of Copenhagen. Follow Copenhagen Suborbitals on Instagram, learn more about them on their website, and become a supporter.
*Quotes have been edited for clarity and flow. Read about other Airbnb and travel experiences I’ve done all over the world!
