Beyond: Our Future in Space (21 page)

The commercial space business is already a ubiquitous and mundane part of everyday life. Every time you use a phone to navigate to an unfamiliar location or watch a movie with the dish outside your house, you’re using commercial space technology. It all started with a satellite the size of a beach ball, weighing no more than an average teenager. Telstar was launched in 1962 by NASA, but it was funded by AT&T, Bell Labs, the British Post Office, and the French Telecom Company. It’s goal was to relay TV signals, phone calls, and fax images across the Atlantic. This was the birth of a global telecommunications industry.

GPS is the perfect example of the space industry in your pocket. We depend on our phones to give us the time and our location in any kind of weather and anywhere on the planet. This requires an unobstructed line of sight to four or more satellites in the Global Positioning System. GPS was developed in the 1960s by the US Department of Defense and was originally operated with twenty-four satellites. The military resisted giving civilians access to the system, fearing it would be used by smugglers, terrorists, or forces hostile to the United States. But in 1996 President Bill Clinton approved an upgrade to the current system of thirty-one satellites and committed to providing GPS technology worldwide and free of charge. A 2011 study showed that GPS technology sustains three million jobs in the United States and provides $100 billion each year in economic benefits.
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Launching satellites has become big business. In 2010, the FAA released a report on the economic impact of commercial space transportation: In the first decade of this century, it expanded from $64 billion to $190 billion, with a growth in jobs from half a million to a million. (For comparison, travel and tourism is three times larger and commercial aviation is six times larger.) It’s now an international activity; fewer than half of the satellites launched for commercial use are built in the United States (
Figure 34
).
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The economic viability of space tourism is difficult to extrapolate—its capabilities aren’t very impressive and its eventual size and long-term future are unclear. A few wealthy individuals have ponied up $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station, and it’s the belief of space visionaries that as the price comes down, the demand will increase. But there are wild cards, such as the risk tolerance of people indulging in a recreation that could lead to a grisly end. The best market study done so far is by the Futron Corporation, an aerospace consulting firm with no skin in the space-tourism game. For orbital trips, they assume that the $20 million price tag will come down to $5 million after twenty years. Revenues would be $300 million at the end of that time frame. For suborbital trips, they assume a price of $100,000, declining to $50,000 after twenty years, when revenue would be a billion dollars a year.
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Surveys of the general public are consistent among industrialized countries; the lure of space knows no borders. If a brief trip to low Earth orbit cost only $10,000, about one million people would go, generating revenue of $10 billion per year. Interestingly, this is the same as the annual box-office revenues from movies in the United States. That’s not bad, but those are still small potatoes when compared with $1.4 trillion spent on more mundane forms of tourism in 2013 (
Figure 35
).

The numbers get much bigger but also much more uncertain when we consider the mining of asteroids.
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Terrestrial reserves are finite and there is growing exploitation of many elements that are critical for modern industry, such as antimony, cobalt, gallium, gold, indium, manganese, nickel, molybdenum, platinum, and tungsten. Many of these strategic assets could be exhausted from accessible regions of the Earth in as little as fifty years. These ingredients were added to the Earth by a rain of asteroids 4.5 billion years ago, just after the crust cooled; if we want more of them, we’ll have to go out and lasso more asteroids.

Space mining is in its infancy and it’s very expensive. OSIRIS-REx is an asteroid study and sample return mission, funded by NASA and operated by the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. It’s due to launch in 2016 and bring back as much as two kilograms of asteroid 101955 Bennu (named after a mythological Egyptian bird) in 2023. At $800 million, that’s a bit expensive as a mining proposition, but the goal of this mission is to learn about the formation of the Solar System by retrieving pristine material from 4.5 billion years ago, when the Sun and all the planets formed.
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As we’ve seen, NASA has a new plan to bring an asteroid the size of a large living room from deep space to an orbit around the Moon. That mission (with a price tag of nearly $3 billion) has been getting pushback from Congress, so it may not happen.

These concepts are small precursors to any viable mining operation. Despite the costs, however, the potential returns are eye-popping, according to plausible economic models.
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In 1997, scientists estimated that a metallic asteroid a mile across contains $20 trillion of precious and industrial metals. Peter Diamandis, the X Prize guru who founded the extraterrestrial mining company Planetary Resources in 2012, has estimated that even a tiny, 100-foot-long asteroid holds as much as $50 billion worth of platinum alone. By 2020, he wants to build a fuel depot in space using water from asteroids to make liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for rocket fuel.

Experts remain skeptical. There’s a huge difference between the market value of a space resource and the actual value after doing the hard work of mining the ore and bringing home the prize. As speculators have learned the hard way, cornering the market on a commodity can cause the floor on the price to collapse.

9

Our Next Home

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Stepping Stone

Moon, Mars, and Beyond. The Moon is a hop, Mars is a skip, and the rest of the Solar System and the realm of the stars is a jump beyond. If we’re to establish a permanent presence beyond the Earth, the best place to start is the Moon.

Almost forgotten in the more than forty years since we set foot on the Moon is the fact that NASA then had an aggressive plan for lunar exploration that would have culminated in a Moon base by 1980. Over the course of six Apollo landings, the time spent on the surface was extended from one to three days, the spacesuits were upgraded to allow moonwalks of up to seven hours, and the electric-powered rover was added to the mix. In 1968, as NASA prepared for its first piloted Apollo flight, it formed a working group to study the idea of a lunar station. After three exploratory missions to different landing sites, NASA would have sent six or more missions to a single site as preparation for a permanent base.
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The working group began its report by declaring that a twelve-astronaut International Scientific Lunar Observatory should be a major goal for the agency (
Figure 36
).

The working group’s recommended option was to develop new hardware to form the nucleus of a future base. A new Lunar Payload Module with a descent stage but no ascent stage would carry 7,000 pounds to the surface. Its heaviest item of cargo would be a one-ton shelter capable of housing two people for two weeks. It would also deposit two snazzy personal jet packs for ranging over the surface and a rover or Moon buggy that could be driven by an astronaut or by flight controllers in Houston. The payload would also have included a solar furnace to test the extraction of useful ingredients from the soil, a one-foot telescope, a bioscience package, and various pieces of lab equipment. NASA’s advisory group estimated that doing the groundwork for a lunar base would add a billion dollars to the projected cost of the Apollo program.

It was a great idea but it ran into the buzz saw of political reality.

NASA’s budget peaked in 1965, during the white heat of development for the Moon landings, at $5.25 billion, or 5 percent of the federal budget. President Lyndon Johnson was a staunch NASA supporter, but the cost of the Vietnam War soared to $25 billion in 1967 and Congress was looking to cut costs. After the euphoria of Neil Armstrong’s historic step, public interest waned and NASA’s budget went into sharp reverse.

In 2009, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) produced an estimate of the cost of a lunar base. They assume that a heavy-lift rocket will exist, and since at least three countries are likely to have such a capability, it’s a fairly safe assumption. They project development costs of $35 billion, which is much cheaper than the $110 billion price of the ISS and, if spread over a decade, is no more than the costs of flying the Space Shuttle. Base operating costs are estimated at $7.4 billion per year. Half of the operating costs come from assuming that no local resources would be available, so four tons of supplies per person per year would have to be shipped from the Earth to the Moon. Basic requirements per day per astronaut (assuming water is efficiently recycled) would be 2.5 liters (or 2.5 kg) of water for drinking and adding to food, 0.8 kg of oxygen, and 1.8 kg of dried food. The other central requirement is energy in the form of solar power.
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Clearly, a lunar base would be more attainable if it could be as self-sufficient as possible. The Moon was always thought of as a sterile, arid, meteor-blasted rock, so there was much excitement when orbiters sent back evidence of water in the mid-1990s. In 2010, an Indian satellite found ice in the permanently shadowed regions of craters near the Moon’s North Pole. This led to research showing that the Moon contains 600 million tons of ice in nearly pure sheets several meters thick.
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The other key ingredient for a lunar base is oxygen to breathe. The lunar soil or regolith is 40 to 45 percent oxygen by mass; it’s fairly simple chemistry to heat it to 2500 Kelvin using solar power and unlock it from minerals to generate 100 grams of breathable oxygen for every kilogram of soil. Water could also be split into oxygen and hydrogen, the main components of rocket fuel.

Even the material for a habitat could be created locally. Lunar soil is a unique blend of silica and iron-bearing minerals that can be fused into a glasslike solid using microwaves. Fairly simple technology can turn the dirt into hard ceramic bricks (
Figure 37
). The European Space Agency is developing a 3-D printer that can create wall blocks at three meters per hour, fast enough to build a whole habitat in a week.
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