The second space race is on.
And this time, it’s not about who can put a man on the moon.
It’s about who will dominate the economy of the final frontier. Already the space industry is
worth more than $400 billion dollars. By 2040, that’s expected to skyrocket…to 1 trillion.
Private taxis into space
Constellations of satellites encircling the earth
Space stations where businesses can do research, or film movies
This is the new space economy. And everyone wants a piece.
In this video we’ll look at the players.
“Once you started to see access to space to people other than
NASA astronauts and sovereign nation astronauts,
then that's going to open up, well, now that I can go to space, what can I do in space?”
And the many, many challenges:
“You have a real danger of some orbits becoming
unusable. Right? Like a river becomes too polluted. You cannot fish in it.”
And finally, the stakes:
“There's resources in space, there's capabilities in space that
we have to learn how to live and work in space
and Leo– low earth orbit–and develop systems that we can then take to go deeper into space.
Welcome to Business Beyond.
Space Billionaires
When you think of the space economy, you may think of these guys, the space billionaires:
Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and the Virgin Group’s Richard Branson.
For the past 20 years, they’ve made exploring space their passion project.
Let’s start with Elon Musk and his rocket company SpaceX.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX established itself as a leader in the new space
economy by doing what many thought was impossible: building a reusable rocket.
“Musk has a lot of global influence because of the successes that he has projected, right. So,
for example, we have been struggling with reusable rockets to Lower Earth Orbit for a very long time
and several of the scientists and engineers said this is never possible to bring down a
rocket again–the first-stage especially, and then to think about bringing back the
second stage. It's not possible. It can be theoretically possible but not applicable.”
Musk’s ultimate goal is to use–and reuse–those SpaceX rockets to colonize Mars.
But for now, SpaceX’s ambitions are closer to home.
Like rivals, it has been giving the ultra-wealthy rides to space.
Last year it flew the first all-civilian orbital mission, led by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman,
who secured his seat with a $125 million donation to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
On to our next billionaire….Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his rocket firm Blue Origin,
founded in 2000. Bezos sees space not as a futuristic lifeboat we can use to
escape a deteriorating planet, but as a way to preserve it.
“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space,
and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is."
In Bezos’s view, sending private citizens into space is a way to practice.
Last year Bezos himself rode in a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space–though
only for about 10 minutes. A seat on his flight was auctioned off for 28 million dollars.
Blue Origin allows you to sign up for flights on its website, though it doesn’t give the costs.
And then there is Sir Richard Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic in 2004.
The company had planned to start private space flights as early as 2007..but
repeatedly delayed and eventually shelved those plans after a fatal rocket crash.
It has, as of February 2022, reopened ticket sales–for $450,000 each.
The space billionaires have received a lot of criticism for spending their
wealth on businesses that are giving basically joyrides to other billionaires. But others say,
they’re laying the groundwork for an industry that will someday be more accessible someday.
“The goal is to get the price down, that this is a, you know, vacation destination right and and we
want people to actually live and work in space, we want there to be a broader customer base.
PART 2: Satellites
But flying the wealthy to space is just the tip of the iceberg for the new space economy.
“So the space tourism sector is not the major sector for contributing to the space economy
of 400 billion dollars I’m talking about. So the sector that actually contributes to it,
as we mentioned, is the communications sector, the telecommunication sector and also the new
constellations that companies like SpaceX and countries like China, India are talking about.”
They’re talking about satellites. Thousands of them, orbiting the earth.
Transmitting TV signals, phone calls, GPS locations, military information
and of course, the weather to those of us back here on earth.
“I don't think people realize that they actually depend on space for so many of their platforms
today. E-commerce is supported by space. Navigation is supported by space. You know
transactions, for example, ATM transactions are supported by satellite support systems.
So that's where the space economy is.”
But where exactly are those satellites? Mostly in 3 orbits. The closest to the
earth’s surface is low-earth orbit, or LEO. Next is medium Earth orbit,
or MEO. And farthest from earth’s surface is geosynchronous, or GEO, orbit.
LEO is THE hotspot right now for satellites.
The closer the satellite is to the earth’s surface, the faster it works.
The tradeoff is that it covers a smaller area. So you end up needing a lot more of them.
Elon Musk has launched around 2000 satellites into LEO under a project called Starlink.
He eventually aims to have 42,000 in space. And he won’t be alone.
UK government-backed OneWeb, Amazon’s project Kuiper and the Chinese government
all have plans for LEO constellations with hundreds if not thousands of satellites.
The goal is to provide cheap satellite internet connection to even the most remote areas.
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
By 2030, researchers expect there to be at least 50,000 active satellites in space.
“You cover instantaneously a lot of people.
Satellite spots can range from 500-300 kilometers in diameter to thousands and thousands,
whilst with fibre you have to go through every single home and connect that home.
The last mile is always a challenge. Even in developed countries like Germany, for example,
you still have single-digit percentage of homes that are not well-connected and they're not even
moving. They are just not connected because it's not economical to lay fiber to every single home.”
Part 3: Debris
As the number of satellites being launched into space each year swells,
it’s starting to get a bit crowded in some orbits.
Not just with new satellites, but also old ones no longer in use, or parts of old rockets.
Collisions between all of these objects in space are adding to the problem by creating
oceans of debris. Most of it is tiny, between a millimeter and a centimeter.
But moving at speeds of up to 30,000 kilometers per hour,
even the smallest piece of debris could cause huge damage to satellites or even space stations.
In order to avoid collisions among satellites and the resulting debris causing further harm
to commercial as well as institutional satellites,
it is of utmost importance to implement what we call a space traffic management.”
But wait…how is there no system in place regulating all of the traffic
up there? Sometimes they call space the wild west.
It’s not necessarily unregulated, but the regulations that are in place are patchy at best.
The base for the current rules of space is the Outer Space Treaty,
introduced over 50 years ago, before a man had ever set foot on the moon.
“The Outer Space Act from the United Nations, belongs to the
late sixties. It was not designed to deal with this traffic, all this”
The outer space treaty states that:
the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit
and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.
But in practice, space is not so democratic. The US, China and Russia–
countries with a history of well-funded space programs, or large private industries–account
for the majority of satellites in space.
“For example, low earth orbit is becoming very critical for the placement of satellites, but it's
actually first come, first serve. So if you have the capability to launch a satellite, and I don't,
you actually get that particular orbital slot. But that puts me in a disadvantage because I can get
there, but I don't have the capability today. What happens if I get the capability tomorrow?
Will you deny me that particular slot? According to the Outer Space Treaty, space is the common
province of mankind, but you have been there first and you have already claimed that orbital spot.”
The question of who can profit off of space will become even
more difficult as the economy grows more advanced.
“There is the possibility of mining resources on the moon, so the moon has resources that are
critical: titanium, helium 3, that is critical for nuclear fusion. If we ever get that technology,
iron ore. So in case a company mines that, the outer Space treaty makes it clear that there has
to be a way of sharing it with other countries, because space is the common province of mankind.”
But consensus among all the players is proving hard to find.
“A little bit like climate change, just the fact that it's becoming a pressing issue is putting
pressure on administrations like the American one, the European Community, the UK
and others to start talking to one another//It's going to be real tough to find common ground
between administrations and private companies and space agencies. But it has to be tried
and it has to be done.”
In some ways, the question of space traffic– figuring out what’s in space and how to manage
it–could end up being a test case for whether its possible to find common ground in space.
“If we can solve the LEO congestion issue, what we learned from solving that by regulation can
be applicable to the other orbits, it would be a good example of how to work together, government,
industry, to make sure that we preserve this common good.”
Space agencies and private companies are looking for creative solutions
for space junk. Or ways to prevent it altogether.
“What we would like to do in the long-term is to be able to reuse stuff that becomes space junk.
Once we've deployed and the system's done its primary mission, then we can actually use that
as way to continue driving, to point it and move it, we can put payloads up on top of it.
We can provide power and data to it, those types of things. So in other words, it's a way to keep
the vehicle operating. Other things that can be done is, it can be used as a base for going out,
collecting debris and deorbiting debris, for example, getting space junk, if you will.”
But at the end of the day,
some believe keeping space from becoming a littering ground is governments’ responsibility.
“If you put up a, you know, multi-billion dollar, a hundreds of millions of dollars satellite, it's
to everybody's interest to make sure we keep that safe. And that's where maybe governments come in
and help work to get the debris risk down that we have.”
But debris isn’t the only problem satellites are causing.
They’re also making it harder for telescopes to see space.
“So with a lot of the satellites that are being sent up, the way that they're powered is
through solar power. So they have these solar panels and even just the metal that
they're made out of, depending on how it's painted, what the reflectivity is, all of
that it's catching the sun's light at certain angles. And that light then is picked up by
these astronomical instruments that are observing the night sky. If you look at
the the images that are put out by the different modeling agencies, they are showing what almost
looks like a web or a net around the Earth caused by these satellites. And it's going
to be harder and harder for these telescopes to find holes in which they can observe.”
Part 4: Space Agencies
Earlier I called this the second space race. But it’s important to consider the differences.
The second space race is a lot focused on
which country can actually invest in the commercialization of space,
the economic development of space and the return of profits from that particular space investment.
So it's a very different kind of space race that we are seeing today in the post-cold war.
The goal is not to be in space–it’s to own it. And the players have changed too. It’s not NASA versus
the Soviet space program. This time, it’s private industry, being helped on by government money.
NASA is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Nanoracks..which
recently won a lucrative contract to build a private space station it’s calling StarLab.
“The first StarLab that we're building will be focused around science and research.
That's the big area that's being used right now in space. And I imagine it will be in the future,
but, um, you know, there'll be lots of other options and opportunities out there as well.
And we can retool that and use the Starlab for different purposes fairly easily.”
So why is NASA taking such a hands off approach?
“We want to drive down the cost so that the NASA budget can move on into exploration
and and where we really believe, you know, NASA's main goals are, is to move further out.
We've been in LEO a long time and it's time to turn this over, you know, to the private sector.”
While the US government remains by far the leader when it comes to space funding,
China is also becoming a major player.
US: 54.6 billion China 10.3 billion
Japan 4.2 billion France 4 billion
Russia 3.6 billion “If you talk about,
for example, a company that's developing private rockets, they need a launch site.
So what China has done is that it has offered the People's Liberation Army launch sites
for a very subsidised rate. So that helps in terms of the private sector being able
to meet some of the demands that come from their own government to launch. ”
The European Union–which some see as lagging behind–is
also getting on board. It recently announced plans for a satellite
constellation to compete with those coming from the UK, China or US.
"The 27 EU member states have agreed on the need to have an autonomous European constellation
guaranteeing high-speed internet access throughout the world. This is the real progress of these
meetings. For the first time, the 27 member states say there are already constellations,
very good, but we do not want to depend on these constellations. We want our own constellation."
Part 5:
The first space race was driven by a desire for scientific prestige.
This time, it’s a desire for sovereignty.
“Having capabilities that are not dependent on, for example, American companies
per se But I think it's more than that. It's just having their knowledge,
creating the jobs in Europe. Space is the ultimate knowledge economy, if you wish.
And security.
“I think there is a tendency to still see it from the Cold War perspective right.//But today,
when I listen to, for example, the speeches of President Xi Xinping or Prime Minister Modi,
or Japanese former leader Shinzo Abe, you see that they are focusing on talking about
space from two perspectives: one how space is critical for their internal economic development
and external capability, and second, in terms of national security architecture.”
And to be at the head of the table when the rules that define the space economy are set.
“Without having a presence it's much more difficult, you know, to be a leader in those
conversations, and I think those are going to be really important as we move forward,
you know, into defining what does low earth orbit look like when we have more than just a few people
operating there?”
Outer space was never meant to be a playground for the ultra wealthy, or a gold-mine for the
countries and companies that were able to get there first. It’s up to global leaders to
implement rules to uphold that original promise–to make space a true province for all mankind.
And that’s all for this episode of Business Beyond. If you liked
this video you can find more like it here. Thanks for watching and see you next time.