Commercial space travel can no longer be conceived of
as the stuff of mere fantasy. By as soon as 2008, when Richard
Branson’s first SpaceShipTwo Flight is scheduled
to fly out of California's Mojave Airport, it becomes reality.
Branson’s suborbital space flights, which will take
six passengers for a 15-minute joyride going out 100km or
so (until passengers can see the horizon of Earth in space)
comes at a price of $200,000. Not cheap, but so far, more
than 150 reservations and $13.1 million in deposits have
been made, many enthusiasts paying the whole sum up front.
The demand proves it: private citizens want to go into space,
moreover, they are willing to pay a lot of money for it.
This is only the beginning of space tourism. Market studies
conducted by NASA and many other organizations show that
not only is the market for this fledgling industry already
out there now, but that it will continue to grow rapidly
as the cost of sending people into space decreases. Consider,
after all, how air-flight travel began as something only
afforded by the very rich, until competition and innovation
inevitably dropped prices to a level that allowed more and
more people to participate.
Space tourism is expected to follow this same path, especially
as the amount of private investment being spent on research
and development increases. In fact, the most exciting developments
are not those which involve big governments and mega-funded
projects. Space tourism is becoming a fast-impending reality
because of the projects undertaken by private enterprises
to make spaceflight a money-making venture.
The spacecraft that Virgin will use, for example, is a modification of SpaceShipOne,
the rocket that came to notoriety in 2004 when it won the $10 million Ansari
X prize. The top prize in this privately-funded competition was awarded to
the first private organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into
space. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, was the big backer of SpaceShipOne,
investing $25m into the project.
Since 1998, private-sector spending on space applications
has begun to exceed government spending on it. A group of
influential entrepreneurs, including Branson, Amazon.com
founder Jeff Bezos, Paypal founder Elon Musk, Paul Allen,
the co-founder of Microsoft, and John Carmack, the creator
of Doom, to name a few, have been backing space-related ventures
since the mid-90’s. Most of these ventures, including
suborbital space tourism, space hotels and solar satellites,
don’t exist yet. Yet all have the potential to generate
a lot of money over the next few decades.
Governments aren’t just sitting on these ventures either.
At $50 billion a year, worldwide government spending on space
has increased 25% since 2000. The US in particular, has set
some serious objectives over the next 25 years – including
setting up a base on the Moon by 2020, supplying a round-trip
voyage to Mars a few years later, and landing humans on Mars
by around 2030.
In the nearer future, the US government is already set to begin
contracts with the private sector to deliver cargo into space. This
echoes a similar progression from a century ago, when cargo delivered
via airmail created a market for civilian spaceflights.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is also currently
reviewing proposals from New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas to secure “hubs” for
private space travel – the long-term economic benefits of which
are considered to be substantial. Some of these proposals could be
approved this year, with space tourists being able to secure flights
within the next few years. In Texas, the FAA is considering two proposed
spaceports, one of which would be a private spaceport on 165,000
acres of ranch land bought by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. From
here Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, will begin suborbital flight
tests within the next few years.
With the possibility of bringing people to space comes the lure of
creating new markets. To this respct, visionary ideas and innovative
technology appear to be in no shortage. Consider space hotels, for
example. This is closer to reality than we may think. Bob Bigelow,
founder of the Budget Hotel Chain, founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999
and has reportedly spent $500 million of his fortune into the venture.
His company is working on developing inflatable hotel suites that will
be set out in Earth’s orbit, and Bigelow is offering $50m in
a competition to the first team to build a vehicle that can transport
passengers to his space hotel complexes. Space Island Group is another
company working on the concept of building hotels in space – the
market size of which is predicted to be about $5 billion a year by
2015.
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