The Future of Space Travel
In the midst of daily headlines about all the stressful stuff going on around the world (suspicion of the murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the U.S. public at each other’s throats over a Supreme Court nominee, a stock market sell-off, to name just a few) it’s easy to forget that there’s more to the universe. But there are an increasing number of players looking to make escape from this planet a viable option.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, three of the most successful entrepreneurs of our era, are racing to make commercial space travel a reality. But other companies are also forming to mine the resources of the moon and asteroids, the 21st-century version of a gold rush.
Meanwhile, there is increasing talk of how defend ourselves when there is more activity overhead. We normally talk about defending a nation’s airspace. Will we increasingly be talking about defending a nation’s space air? (I realize there is no air in space but the line sounded good rhetorically.)
In this edition:
- The companies planning to commercialize the moon
- Asteroid mining and the world’s first trillionaires?
- What it’s like to test fly rockets
- Trump’s proposed Space Force
- How to clean up space trash
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
Recommended Readings
1. SHOOTING THE MOON
“The Moon is Open for Business” — The Atlantic (5 min)
Summary
“A number of companies have set their sights on the moon, and they’re ramping up their plans to deliver spacecraft to its surface. They’re finalizing spacecraft designs and securing launch contracts, and they’ve set some fast-approaching deadlines. Only three nations — the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — have successfully soft-landed on the moon, and their missions were all carried about by national agencies. (Other nations have crash-landed, which is exactly what it sounds like.) No company has ever placed a spacecraft on the moon, but if a few key players have their way in the next decade, the lunar surface may soon be littered with them.”
“For these companies, the moon is not the nationalistic dream that it was during the Apollo era. It is a marketplace. Instead of leaving flagpoles in the regolith, they want customers, in the government and commercial sectors, who will pay them to deliver their hardware to the moon, or mine its crust for minerals. They want to help convert the ice on the moon into usable resources, such as fuel for a deep-space mission. And they want the work to produce revenue, just as rocket launches have for SpaceX.”
2. THE NEW 49ERS
“Asteroid Mining — Who Wants to be a Trillionaire?” — Engineering.com (7 min)
Summary
“Scarcity has been a defining feature of human existence, driving economies by making goods in limited supply more expensive than those that are abundantly available. But scarcity has been built into our way of doing business because we view resources as entirely Earth-bound. That could soon change.
Today, a group of entrepreneurs are beginning to think that asteroid mining could help eliminate the scarcity of some resources and make some people insanely wealthy at the same time.
3. FLY BOY
“Virgin Galactic’s Rocket Man” — The New Yorker (79 min)
Summary
What kind of man volunteers to be the first to fly an untested rocket at 11,000 MPH?Long but interesting profile of Mark Stucky, the lead test pilot for Richard Branson’s space travel startup.
Selection
At 5 a.m. on April 5th, Mark Stucky drove to an airstrip in Mojave, California, and gazed at SpaceShipTwo, a sixty-foot-long craft that is owned by Virgin Galactic, a part of the Virgin Group. Painted white and bathed in floodlight, it resembled a sleek fighter plane, but its mission was to ferry thousands of tourists to and from space…
…Inside the hangar, he and his co-pilot, a Scotsman named Dave Mackay, spent thirty minutes in a flight simulator that approximated the current weather and wind conditions. Afterward, Stucky announced to colleagues that he and Mackay felt “pretty comfortable.” If all went according to plan, they would strap themselves into SpaceShipTwo — which was attached like a marsupial to the belly of amother ship, WhiteKnightTwo — and take off from the runway, like an ordinary plane. At an altitude of forty-five thousand feet, WhiteKnightTwo would release SpaceShipTwo as if it were a bomb. Then, on Stucky’s command, Mackay would ignite SpaceShipTwo’s rocket. It would burn for thirty seconds, bringing them to a speed of more than eleven hundred miles an hour — nearly twice the speed of sound — and sending them to roughly ninety thousand feet, higher than Stucky had ever flown. (Passenger jets cruise at about thirty-five thousand feet.)
If the flight landed successfully, and Virgin Galactic then completed a few more supersonic tests, the company could soon start offering spaceflights to the six hundred customers who have already paid a quarter of a million dollars for the thrill.
Article link: This is long but interesting.
4. AIM HIGH
“How Exactly Do You Establish a Space Force?” — The Atlantic (6 min)
Summary
In speeches this year President Trump has made off-hand comments about desiring to create a “Space Force” as a sixth branch of the U.S. armed services. But we haven’t created a new military branch in seventy years. So what would a new military branch look like and what are the steps to create it? Hint: it would require an act of Congress.
Selection
“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,”Trump said. “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces. That’s a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force — separate but equal. It’s going to be something.”
The president then singled out the man for this job. “General Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored,” Trump said, turning around to look for Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, behind him. “Where’s General Dunford? General? Got it? Let’s go get it, general.”
Despite this enthusiastic proclamation, there was no mention of a space force in the space-policy directive the president signed on Monday. So what exactly is Trump saying when he directs Dunford to go forth, to “go get it”?
And here’s a recent follow-up piece:
“Trump Space Force Plan Grounded in Real Needs But Still Hazy” — The Washington Post
“This isn’t science fiction. This isn’t about creating space marines or some expeditionary space force that is going to go out and conquer the universe,” says Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is simply a reorganization” of existing space assets so that they can be use more effectively in a unified chain of command with one person in charge.”
5. SPACE TRASH
Four Critical Tests for a Spacecraft That Will Clean Up Space Debris IEEE Spectrum ( 7 min)
Go Fish: In one test, the spacecraft will toss out a net to snare a CubeSat.
Summary
The more crafts we send into space, the greater the likelihood of a disaster like the scene in the film Gravity, where a small piece of space debris, hurtling at hundreds of miles an hour, smashes into a manned craft.
NASA thinks they have an answer: “A spacecraft may soon be able to snare space junk by firing harpoons and nets. A European mission was expected to begin tests in late May of space-age versions of those ancient tools to clean up Earth’s cluttered orbital lanes.”
Selection
“Space junk has already destroyed at least one satellite, damaged others, and periodically forces the crew aboard the International Space Station to take evasive action. There are more than half a million pieces of space debris larger than a marble and tens of thousands of significantly larger specimens left over from spent rocket boosters and defunct satellites. To head off future catastrophe, experts from NASA and the European Space Agency have proposed removing 5 to 10 large pieces of debris each year.”
Postscript
For the last couple decades innovation has largely been about making things smaller. Computers used to take up whole rooms. Now they fit in your pocket. Purchased music used to fill up your shelves in the form of CDs. Then they only took up space on your iPod. Now they don’t even do that — you can stream songs from someone else’s server. Digitalization makes things smaller.
That’s cool and all. But…
I think we’re all kind of waiting for the kind of innovation that makes our world bigger. And it’s starting to happen. For a brief moment in time, the world was transfixed with a possibility that stirred imagination: the promise of landing on the moon, and eventually, exploring the cosmos. But then, slowly, we turned from that goal. There were more important problems to deal with on the ground: poverty, inflation, drugs, and on down the list.
I won’t argue that we made the wrong choice. Those problems were (and still are!) real. But I think we’ve been exploration-light for too long, and we need a little more adventure, to raise our sights above the dirty business of politics and daily life.
We are at our worst when we are trying to divide a fixed pie. It’s ugly when we are arguing about who gets which tax cut or entitlement spending. We’re much better off when we are focused on building things together. Space exploration is one of those endeavors that has the promise of dramatically expanding the pie.
My business partner Evan and I named our company Saturn Five in honor of the rocketthat took the astronauts to the moon. Even today it is the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever built. We are amazed that a group of smart people with vision built technology so remarkable back in the 1960s, when even their strongest computers were less powerful than my iPhone. Like our namesake, our company hopes to be an engine that propels adventurous ventures forward, but in our case in the form of successful companies that make life better for our employees, customers, and neighbors.
I’m not sure what the future will bring but I’m rooting for those bold souls who are willing to embrace the adventure.
Read widely. Read wisely.
- Max
P.s. Did you enjoy this reader? Share it with a friend who lives in a different part of your Milky Way!
