Space tourism boosts research agenda

07.11.2016

The space race was at fever pitch. Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around earth was a distant memory, milestones came and went in the blink of an eye and mankind was less than a year away from walking on the moon. Little wonder that when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the big screens in 1968, the prospect of holiday makers checking into an orbiting Hilton hotel seemed less far-fetched than it would to modern movie goers.

The space race was at fever pitch. Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around earth was a distant memory, milestones came and went in the blink of an eye and mankind was less than a year away from walking on the moon. Little wonder that when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the big screens in 1968, the prospect of holiday makers checking into an orbiting Hilton hotel seemed less far-fetched than it would to modern movie goers.



While the shifting political landscape saw these early dreams stutter to a halt, the scramble for space is now back on again. Advanced instruments and powerful telescopes give us new and compelling scientific reasons to head for the stars, while emerging superpowers China and India are keen to make symbolic statements redolent of those earlier markers put down in the 1960s. Although President Barack Obama has taken a step back from the ambitious timelines of the Bush administration, the US still harbours strong ambitions to put man back on the moon sooner rather than later.

However, there is another potentially more potent force driving the development of space technology. One with a huge budget, an imagination unbridled by political red tape and the desire to fulfil a lifelong ambition whatever the cost: the space tourist. Space tourism, or private space exploration, is still an exceptionally new industry. Its nascent moment came in 2001 when US multi-millionaire Dennis Tito paid fledgling space tourism company Space Adventures around $20m (£12m) to be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Five other millionaires have followed in his footsteps, most recently UK-born video-game developer Richard Garriot, who spent 10 days aboard the ISS at a reported cost of $30m.

Considering the huge sums flying about, it is tempting to wonder what relevance these voyages could have to the rest of us. However, many believe that the dreams of this handful of millionaires have paved the way for a new generation of space technology that could put not just tourists but a host of scientific payloads into orbit at a fraction of today’s costs.

Tom Shelley, vice-president of marketing with Space Adventures, regards Tito as a pioneer: ‘He was the first one who put up the money and really proved to a lot of people out there that there is money in private space, that there are people who are prepared to pay for themselves to go up into space and it’s not just the governments who need to pay for space flight.’

As the ‘final frontier’s’ equivalent of Thomas Cook, Shelley’s gaze is fixed on the tens of thousands of people he thinks would pay good money to visit space. However, as the demand for space tourism drives down the launch costs, he believes that the industry will create other opportunities. ‘In general, it’s accepted that the cost of delivery of 1kg of payload into orbit is approximately $10,000,’ said Shelley. ‘That is very, very expensive and it’s one of the biggest hurdles we have to the long-term exploration of space. Private space flight will bring the volume that is required to reduce those launch costs.’

Several companies are now working away on the launcher and spaceship technology that could make this a reality and it is all being driven along by an eclectic cast of entrepreneurs from outside the traditional space industry: people such as PayPal founder Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Virgin’s Richard Branson, who has become a figurehead for the industry.

Based on current claims, it looks as though Branson’s Virgin Galactic will be the first of these so-called ‘new space’ companies to take paying customers into space. While it has not set a date for first flights, the company is already taking bookings for $200,000 flights aboard its six-passenger spacecraft SpaceshipTwo and is expected to unveil the vehicle for the first time later this year. This is all the more remarkable considering that three engineers working on the project were killed during an explosion in 2007.

Based on the design of Burt Rutan’s X-prize-winning SpaceshipOne, the vehicle will be launched from a mothership — WhiteKnightTwo — which is currently undergoing rigorous, high-altitude test flights. Both have been constructed in the Mojave desert in New Mexico by The Spaceship Company (TSC), a manufacturing enterprise established by Virgin and Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites.

Employing the same principle as Rutan’s SpaceshipOne, it will be carried by a launch vehicle up to around 50,000ft (15,240m) before its single hybrid rocket motor propels it up to 110km above sea level at a speed of 2,600mph (4,180km/h).

As with other projects, SpaceshipTwo will not reach the velocity required to reach orbit, so after about six minutes of weightlessness it will begin its return to the ground. For this reason, it will be known as a sub-orbital space flight.


While SpaceshipTwo’s first passengers will almost certainly be tourists, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn believes that scientists and industry will quickly embrace the technology to carry out high-altitude, zero-gravity experiments as well as launch payloads such as satellites into orbit. ‘We’ve built 17 tonnes lift of more than 50,000ft capacity into WhiteKnightTwo,’ he said. ‘That will allow us to get an unmanned vehicle to launch a 200kg satellite to low earth orbit.’ While WhiteKnightTwo is currently only certified as a space launch system, Whitehorn claims that it could also represent a vision for future aircraft design. ‘This vehicle is a technology showcase for what the manufacturers of the future can be doing with composites,’ he said. ‘It could also be a vision for Airbus and Boeing in the future in trying to build aircraft that, instead of being 20 per cent more efficient than they are today with a bit of composite in them, are 60 per cent more efficient — as WhiteKnight is against the equivalent aluminium vehicle.’

Activity on the ground is also gathering pace. Construction is now under way in New Mexico on Spaceport America, from where Virgin Galactic will launch its flights. Looking further into the future, a number of other locations around the world are being offered up as possible spaceport sites. Whitehorn believes that Sweden and the Middle East may soon develop sites, while here in the UK a lobby group known as the Spaceport Scotland Support Group is talking up the potential of using the Lossiemouth airbase in Moray.

Whitehorn backs this idea but warned that the UK could fail to exploit the potential of the technology without appropriate legislation. He said: ‘One thing [the US] has that nobody else has is legislation to allow this system to be built and operated — that is a vision the US fulfilled in the commercialisation of the Space Amendment Act and a vision that this country is failing to fulfil at the moment. [The UK] should be a natural place to come. In the north of Scotland, we have the cleared airspace and a great view of the edge of Europe and Lossiemouth would be an ideal place to do polar interjection orbits. However, we have no legislation to allow it to happen.

‘We’ve got the world’s most private-sector-orientated satellite construction industry in Britain and we have no legislation to allow a system capable of exploiting the new technologies that can be taken into space. It’s time to have our own commercialisation of the Space Amendment Act,’ added Whitehorn.

Back in the Mojave desert, Xcor, Virgin Galactic’s neighbour, is working on a slightly different spacecraft concept: a one-stage spaceplane known as the Lynx that will take off from a runway and carry its pilot and passenger 65km above sea level.


Although lower than the commonly accepted boundary for space (100km), passengers will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth.

While the final design for the craft has not yet been finalised, the company has developed and demonstrated a series of testbed rocket planes, which, according to chief operating officer Andrew Nelson, account for more than half of the manned rocket flights carried out this century.

Xcor hopes to be able fly the Lynx into space several times a day, so much of its work has focused on the development of rocket engines that can be repeatedly and safely switched on and off. Nelson said that one of the keys to this capability is the use of piston pumps, which are much simpler than the turbo pumps used on the space shuttle.

He is also keen to talk up the alternative applications of the Lynx spaceplane and believes that a satellite launch could be a huge market for the company. ‘We can put a 10kg to 15kg satellite into low earth orbit at a price point well below $500,000 with about two days’ notice,’ said Nelson. ‘Today, if you have small piggyback payload, you wait about two years and pay a very high price and then maybe you might get your flight.’

Given the bold claims being made for the technology, it seems reasonable to ask why the likes of NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA) — the ‘old space’ community — are not turning to similar models? Well, in fact, they are. In one particularly notable example of old space recognising the value of new space, NASA recently awarded SpaceX — a company founded by PayPal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk — a $1.6bn contract to develop its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and spacecraft to resupply the ISS after the space shuttle retires. Space Adventures’ Shelley believes that the SpaceX contract — which includes 12 flights between 2010 and 2015 — mounts a hugely compelling case for new space.

‘For around $35bn, NASA will be developing a new rocket and a new Orion capsule,’ he said. ‘The ESA ATV cost about $2bn to develop and $600m to build each one. For $1.6bn, NASA will get 12 launches with capsules and rockets of the SpaceX Falcon 9 — the magnitude of difference is extraordinary.’

Old space also harbours its own ambitions to get directly in on the act, courtesy of the EADS Astrium spaceplane: a concept spacecraft that, as with Xcor’s Lynx, will take off and land from a standard airport. Unlike the Lynx, Astrium’s design uses jet engines for take-off and then fires the rocket engines once the craft reaches an altitude of 12km to push it on to 100km. When it reaches this height, the propulsion system will shut down and the four passengers and one pilot will experience around three minutes of weightlessness.

Although it will travel at a higher altitude than the Xcor plane, the EADS spaceplane is also perhaps the furthest from production of today’s commercial spacecraft. The pre-project phase is complete and the company is now looking for private investment to take to the vehicle to the next level. If and when this happens, Hugues Laporte-Weywada, deputy chief technical officer at EADS Astrium, believes that the technology required to make the spaceplane fly has already been developed through EADS’s numerous other space projects. ‘We reignite satellite engines once a day for 15 years without interruption and we reignite the Ariane upper-stage reignitable engine for ATV missions for launching probes — we have propulsion technology, we have aeronautic technology and re-entry technology,’ he said.

It is easy to understand why some are irritated by the space tourism business, driven as it is by the whims of unimaginably wealthy individuals and the force of personality of maverick entrepreneurs. However, there is also plenty to admire. The technology is impressive and the industry has more than a whiff of Howard Hughes and the early years of aviation about it.

And as it sets about developing the systems that will slash the cost of sending humans into space, it might also just be edging us — a little later than some predicted — a step closer to Stanley Kubrick’s orbiting Hilton.