Translator: Jack Kuang-Che Kuo Reviewer: Denise RQ
Rockets, satellites, human expeditions,
they all have to obey the space commandment:
do whatever it takes, and take as long as you need
to make sure you don't fail;
the rocket doesn't blow up,
and the space craft doesn't die when it gets to orbit.
This is the prime commandment.
If, for example, you launch a gyroscope
after giving it 37 different tests, and it works,
the next time you launch it, you'll do the same 37 tests, plus a few more.
And that will continue for the indefinite future.
If you launch a computer, and it works,
you will use that very same computer again,
and again and again.
And many times computers retired only because the manufacturer stops making it.
The result of all this is that space enterprises
which used to be the leading edge of technology,
now actually are lagging.
You probably have, on your desk,
a more powerful computer [than the one] that powers
the many of the spacecrafts that are flying right now.
And the whole process of making sure
you don't change anything, and you follow the rule book,
has turned traditional space activities
into a very constrained and hard to change region;
somewhat similar
(Laughter)
- Here we go! -
to this poor frog who's trapped in amber;
he's never going to make a giant leap again.
And that's what faces the traditional aerospace industry.
Thankfully, in the past several years,
a lot of outsiders are pushing their way into the aerospace game and shaking it up.
One of the most interesting is Elon Musk of SpaceX.
He cofounded Paypal, he made 300 million dollars,
and he said, "What can I do with my money?"
I think, what I'd like to do with my money
was put a terrarium on Mars and grow a plant on the red planet.
That's what I'd like to do.
So he went shopping for the rocket that he would need.
He went to Russia and at that point they have cut prices on launch vehicles,
got a good price,
and then, unfortunately,
the Russians found out how rich he is and they doubled the price.
(Laughter)
Elon said, "The heck with that.
What's so hard about building a rocket? I'll do it myself."
So he built the Falcon 1, he launched it, and it failed.
He built another one and improved it, launched it, then it failed.
He made some more improvements, launched it, and it failed the third time.
Fortunately, he had enough money that he could launch it a forth time.
And it worked. It got to orbit.
But at that point, he's pretty much out of cash.
The other thing that made him ultimately successful is a change at NASA.
A group of us in the space commercialization field
was working on NASA to get them to consider placing a side bet
in its new push to go back to the Moon and on to Mars.
Everyone knew that NASA would have to spend tens of billions of dollars
with Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop Grumman;
and ever so slowly, they would make progress.
And maybe the agency should take 5% of that money
and place a bet on non-traditional ways of doing space exploration.
And so, about the same time that Elon proved he had the guts to keep trying,
NASA got up the courage to put this bet on what was called
the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program.
In essence, they said,
"We will give you, at the beginning about 300 million dollars,
to build a bigger version of your rocket that can actually deliver cargo,
and eventually people, to the International Space Station."
In the end, I think, they put more like 800 million dollars into it.
And that picture shows
Elon's private spaceship berthing with the International Space Station.
It's a tremendous change in the way that space is done.
And Elon is not the only one who's muscling their way in.
Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft,
is currently building the world's largest airplane
so he can carry a rocket up to altitude
and give it a head start on getting to orbit.
And that, what is; in essence a reusable first stage
that can fly back and get ready to launch the next one.
Jeff Bezos is taking part of his Amazon.com fortune
and going smaller;
He's building a sort of a three-person personal spaceship
because that's what he wants to do with his billions.
And those aren't even the only billionaires involved;
we also have Sir Richard Branson,
who's backing Virgin Galactic
to do several little space trips, and eventually evolving to go into orbit.
You don't even have to be a billionaire.
There's a great guy named Jeff Greason,
who's an ex-chip designer for Intel.
He decided, "Hey, I'd like to build a spaceship too."
So he has been building at his company XCOR, the Lynx spacecraft
which may actually get to fly at roughly the same time
that Sir Richard's spacecraft is flying.
So what's coming is an era
in which getting into space will be much less expensive than it's now.
We'll have lots of different options.
And the question is, "How do we make it less expensive to actually stay in space,
operate there, grow an enterprise in space?"
What I'm involved with is using space resources, primarily asteroids,
to be able to provide propellant and other goods to enterprises in orbit.
What you see on the screen now is the asteroids we learned about as kids;
those are the main belt asteroids in orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
There're a long way away, and they're not what we're going after in the new era.
Instead, we are going after "near-Earth asteroids".
If you can see the blue line and the blue dot
that's rising up on the right hand side, that's Earth going around the Sun.
As you can see, there are a lot of asteroids
that basically take the same orbit, they are very nearby.
They have differences in the time it takes to go around the Sun, and so,
the close approaches, when any one asteroid is close to Earth
happen every 2 years, every 5 years, every 10 years or 20 years,
depending upon each asteroid and its orbit.
We've found about 10,000 of these, and we find about 1,000 more every year,
but the estimate is there are 2 million near Earth asteroids out there.
And the reason we're excited about this is that they can provide resources
to make working and living in space much more affordable.
The kinds of things that we want to do with these asteroids
were we replace things that are launched from Earth.
Even with the new launch services,
it's still very expensive to get anything into space,
about 17 million dollars per tonne.
That backyard swimming pool, if it were in geosynchronous orbit,
would be worth almost a billion dollars.
That gives you some sense of how expensive it is to get anything,
even water, up to that altitude and available for use.
So if we can turn to asteroids instead, we can get propellant from asteroids
to refuel communication satellites, for example.
They are launched with all the fuel they'll ever have,
when the fuel runs out in 10 or 15 years, they become useless.
If we can use space resources to tank them up again,
each of those communication satellites will generate
another 100 million dollars of revenue for their owners, per satellite.
That same propellant can be used to send expeditions onto the Moon and Mars
at much less cost than launching the propellant from the ground.
We also can serve space habitats;
they need propellant to maintain their orbit,
the crews will need water for life support,
and eventually, as we are processing all these volatile and metals,
the left over stuff we concentrated in precious metals like gold and platinum
eventually can be exported down to Earth.
So what we have now in space, our only outpost in space,
is the International Space Station.
It took the combined budgets
of the United States, Russia, Europe, and Japan to make it happen
It's finally been completed after a decade and a half of construction,
and now that they're turning their attention
to doing things there instead of just building them,
they're coming up with some pretty amazing discoveries
on what you can learn by operating in zero gravity.
A lot of it to do with medical research.
They have found, for example, that human genome and plant genomes,
when exposed to micro-gravity will express portions of their DNA
that are not expressed on the ground.
You will find almost instant evolution
in the change in what that plant or that organism does.
So what we've been able to do at great effort
is start proving there are great things to learn and produce in space,
but if that it takes
a block of four of the world's richest nations to get it done,
it's going to be a slow progress.
The great thing that's going to happen next,
in actually selling space,
is that we're going to have private enterprise there.
Oops, too excited.
The guy in the center is Bob Bigelow, he's a billionaire in Los Angeles,
who actually has two sub-scale private habitats in orbit right now.
And he's got an agreement with NASA
to test one of his giant inflatables on the Space Station,
and then build his own private space stations.
And so we're going to transition
from something that requires an enormous level of effort
to something that a real-estate mogul in Las Vegas can pull off by himself.
That's the kind of future that we're moving into:
with lower cost launch,
with resources that we get in space instead of launching from the ground,
and with the settlement of space being done
on a commercial basis and a sustainable basis.
This is going to finally get us to the expanse of big future in space
that we were all promised, and now it's actually going to come true.
Thanks very much for your attention.
(Applause)