This is prediction of the future of humans in space based on real forces: economic, political, market, technological breakthroughs, ...

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The story so far

X Prize and Bush's moon plan -> Driving new efforts, changing the way NASA funds stuff

The X Prize was conceived by Peter Diamandis and founded in 1995 with the purpose of encouraging a return to space, and for Diamandis, with the added reason that he wanted to go there someday.¹ The prize gave US$10 million to the first non-government spacecraft to go to space twice in two weeks.

The prize was won on October 4, 2004 when Scaled Composites' suborbital spaceship, SpaceShipOne, flew to space twice in two weeks. Scaled Composites was legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan's company and SpaceShipOne was a project of his before he'd even heard of the X Prize. This was only a suborbital flight, a brief hop up to above 62 miles (100 kilometers) and back down again. But it was done by a small private company and had duplicated what it took the giant NASA to do in 1962 with the Mercury program. It showed NASA just what private industry was capable of doing for relatively little money. Prior to this NASA would hire private enterprise as contractors, paying them for the work ahead of time with a cost plus arrangement. NASA's new approach after this point was to treat private enterprise more as service providers, and pay them only on successful completion of the work, not specifying how the work was to be done.

Photo courtesy: Scaled Composites, LLC

Also in 2004, Presdident Bush directed NASA to return to the moon. To focus on such a gargantuan task, NASA realized it would have to hand off some of the near-Earth work to others so it could focus on the harder stuff, and with its new understanding of what space entrepeneurs could do, it began to do just that.

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Near term developments for humans in space (2011 - 2015)

Cancellation of the US space shuttle program -> Private launchers

The termination of the US space shuttle program for economic and political reasons has opened up an opportunity for private investment in new launchers and crew capsules for getting from the Earth to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Five such private companies are Space Explorations Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, SpaceDev Inc. and Orbital Sciences Corp.

Inflatable habitat technology -> Bigelow Orbital Complex

In 1992, under the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), NASA began working on plans for a manned Mars mission. In order to satisfy the requirements for a low mass, yet large living space for the astronauts they researched the idea of an inflatable habitat, called a Transit Habitat or TransHab. For budgetary and political reasons the SEI was abandoned. In 1997 the TransHab idea was revitalized as a possible module for the ISS, up to the point where an actual full scale module was built and tested in a vacuum chamber. Due to cost overruns, this too was cancelled in 2000.

Source: NASA

In the late 1990's Bigelow Aerospace was formed and licensed the TransHab technology from NASA. In 2006 Bigelow launched their first small scale test habitat, Genesis I, into orbit, followed by Generis II in 2007. Rather than continue to launch further intermediate sized test habitats, it was decided that the next would be a set of full sized habitats in the form of the Bigelow Orbital Complex.

Bigelow's plan is to lease the use of the habitats to companies and nations. However, before this can be done a means of safely sending people up and returning them back down is needed. For this Bigelow is awaiting the completion of a suitable spacecraft such as Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon. As such, the Orbital Complex is not expected to be launched until 2014 with first commercial use as early as 2015, and in fact there is an entry in SpaceX's launch manifest published online for Bigelow with a target date of 2014, the Falcon 9 as the launch vehicle and Cape Canaveral as the launch site.

Visionary millionaires

Besides political/budgetary/technological side effects from NASA some of this new movement into manned space flight is due to visionary millionaires and billionaires.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in March 2002. But before SpaceX, he was the co-founder of the massive internet success, PayPal, which was sold to eBay in October 2002. In April 2004 he co-founded Tesla Motors, a company whose purpose is to eventually sell afforable electric vehicles to the mass market. He has stated that one of his goals is to make life multiplanetary with a focus on colonizing Mars. After a realization that a big stumbling block is the cost of the rockets, he founded SpaceX. The Falcon 9 is intended to be the first fully reusable orbital rocket, significantly reducing costs.

Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1998 with much of the funding coming from his fortune amassed from his Budget Suites of America hotel chain. Robert Bigelow had dreamed of establishing a permanent human presence in space since a young age but knew he had to make money to do it. And so he did, in the form of his hotel chain. When NASA cancelled TransHab in 2000, Bigelow bought the rights to it and the rest will be history.²

Space tourism

The market for space tourism is another driving force that exists and will grow. Bigelow Aerospace is targeting corporations and governments as customers for their Orbital Space Complex, but not tourists. However, the ISS will continue to be a tourist destination and there will possibly be other space stations in Earth orbit for this purpose. The space tourism company, Space Adventures, has an agreement with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation and Rocket Space Corporation Energia for three more tourists who will use the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to visit the ISS beginning in 2013.

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Robotic moon resource exploration (2013- )

Google Lunar X Prize -> Robotic explorers on the moon

In September 2007, the X Prize Foundation announced the Google Lunar X Prize. Sponsored by Google, it's a $20 million prize for a privately funded spaceflight to the moon, including successfully landing, travelling 500 meters (1,640 feet) and transmitting back high definition images and movies.

On February 6, 2011, Astrobotic Technology announced that it's booked space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The latest reports are that launch could be as early as July 2014, but more likely January 2015. Their robot is named Red Rover. The original plan was to send it to the Apollo 11 landing site but in July 2011, NASA set a 75-meter keep-out zone around the site and so Astrobotic decided to not go there. Taken alone, this is not significant to the future colonization of space but they plan to follow with further expeditions every year thereafter. Their second one, slated for July 2015, will consist of a mining rover which will use a bucket-wheel to scoop up lunar soil into a bin. It'll roam the moon's south pole in search of rich concentrations of water ice, methane and other volatiles.

Credit: Astrobotic Technology

Astrobotic plans to make money by selling lunar data gathered on their expeditions, selling payload space, selling services rendered with its vision systems and manipulators, producing and selling media and through sponsors. Companies that wish to do prospecting for mining opportunities, for example, can use Astrobotic's services to do so.

Astrobotic Technology is just one upcoming example of a provider of these types of services. Others may also arise. The result will be a relatively low cost and low risk way of understanding lunar resources and techniques for exploiting those resources. From this, companies and governments can then progress to the next stage, actual exploitation of lunar resources using moonbases, robotics and humans.

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Long term developments for humans in space (2016- )

A moonbase built of inflatable modules

Robert Bigelow has said that the ultimate aim of his investment in Bigelow Aerospace is to get to the moon. The plan would be to send the individual components of the base to L1, a location between the Earth and the moon where the Earth's and moon's gravities balance out, to assemble the components into a moonbase, and then to move it all on to the moon.3 At the Bigelow facility in Las Vegas is a model showing what such a moonbase would look like using what appear to be Bigelow's BA 330 inflatable modules. It consists of three inflatable modules, four propulsion buses, connecting nodes and landing pads (see diagram below.) The big question is why would any corporations or governments would pay Bigelow in order to lease space in a moonbase. Governments would do it for research purposes and to find opportunities for future economic gain. Corporations would do it to supply moon resources to governments and corporations who need those resources either on the moon or in space around the Earth-moon system, but that presupposes that such an economy in space exists.

Lagrange points in space

Assembly of Bigelow moonbase (from US patent 7,469,864)

Assembling moonbase in space.

Landing on the moon.

Moonbase in place on the moon.

And before any customers can journey to the moon on a regular basis, a transportation system for doing so must exist. Doing so using one-off Saturn V sized rockets, the ones used to send men to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is simply not sustainable.

Business opportunities in space

So thus far:

• SpaceX has found a business opportunity in flying people and cargo to low Earth orbit and
• Bigelow Aerospace has a business opportunity in leasing space to corporations and governments in their Orbital Complex and possibly a moonbase and
• Astrobotic Technology may have business opportunities in doing lunar robotic exploration for corporations and governments.

What additional business opportunities would there be that will get an Earth-moon system economy going?

1. Transportation between Earth orbit and moon - If destinations exist at the Lagrange points and on the moon, possibly in the form of Bigelow habitats, then a means would be needed to get there - a bus/trucking company so to speak. This would be a spacecraft that remains in space at all times. Passengers and cargo would fly from Earth to an orbital space station using a Falcon 9/Dragon spacecraft (for example.) In addition, the bus/trucking company would also fly up supplies and propellant as needed by the same means. The bus/truck would then transport the passengers and cargo from Earth orbit to their destination and back for a fee. This is also the stage at which tourists can start visiting the moon.

Once propellant and other resources become available from the moon and space stations then this transportation system would be used to move those around too. As well, propellant for the transportation itself would no longer need to be shipped up from Earth.

2. Selling moon water as propellant, water, air - On October 9, 2009 NASA's LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission proved that there is water in permanently shadowed areas of the moon and that some of it is in the form of mostly pure ice crystals. At the same time it was found that there are also useful volatiles such as methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. It also found relatively large quantities of light metals such as sodium, mercury and maybe silver. Missions prior to LCROSS had already found by measuring neutron emmisions that there is abundent hydrogen at the moons poles.

The hydrogen, ammonia and methane are useful for making rocket propellant. Oxygen for breathing can be gathered by heating lunar soil. And of course, lunar ice can be melted down to produce water. All of these are marketable products for use off-Earth.

3. Moon satellite services - There would be a market for satellite services on the moon and throughout space. This is the same situation we have with satellites serving Earth. Services needed include communications (including telerobotics), location finding akin to GPS, health monitoring, mapping and resource location, and so on. The customers for these services would be the users on the moon, in space and on Earth. NASA has already done some planning on using commercial services for just this purpose⁴.

4. Mining moon resources for use in Earth-moon space - As already stated above, there are many metals in lunar soil. The following table is taken from the Lunar Resources Utilization for Space Construction study done for NASA by General Dynamics Convair in 1979. Note that abundant water is a recent discovery on the moon and so the figure for hydrogen is no longer correct. It does illustrate that the moon has similar composition and material availablity to Earth and so it should be possible to supply most raw materials needed for a sustainable space-based economy.

5. Earth satellite maintenance, orbital debris clean-up/salvage - An internationally agreed upon mandated fee could be put in place for satellites that reach their end of life and have no means of being deorbitted. The fee would be paid by the satellite owners to the organization that oversees the management of the program, with the bulk of the fee going to orbital companies that remove the satellite from orbit. Of course services would also include satellite maintenance and even refueling.

Others - The above are only a few ideas. Others include growing and selling food, making solar panels from lunar silicon, and more. After a time, the amount of supplies shipped up from Earth could be decreased by producing much of what is needed in space stations and moonbases. Eventually a sustainable space-to-space economy would develop, even if only as a side effect of decreasing the costs of space efforts in support of Earth.

New rocket technology - VASIMR

Of course all of the above would be aided by any new technology that might come along. A promising new rocket is the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) being developed by the Ad Astra Rocket Company. This new rocket fills a middle ground between high thrust, low-specific impulse systems and low thrust, high-specific impulse systems. The former are chemical rockets which can move large masses very quickly but burn for only a short period of time. The latter are ones such as ion thrusters which accelerate a mass slowly over a long period of time, as is useful for deep space non-manned science missions. The VASIMR capabilities lie between these two. A test of the VASIMR rocket is planned for moving the ISS by late 2012, but in the context of this subject it is planned for eventual use in carrying cargo from low Earth orbit to low moon orbit, each journey taking months but using less fuel than chemical rockets. This could serve as the cargo truck spoken of above, though in this form is not suitable for people due to the long travel time.

Source: NASA

The long term use for the VASIMR rocket for manned space travel would be to scale it up to be able to make use of a nuclear power source for transporting people to Mars. Such a trip would take days instead of months and would permit the beginnings of a Earth-Mars system economy.

Possible new way of getting to orbit - Airship to orbit

JP Aerospace has been working since 1993 on a novel, two-stage approach to getting to Earth orbit using airships instead of rockets. The approach seems feasible and many of the components and systems have been tested and the work is ongoing with tests flights done every year since.

The components of the Airship to Orbit program.

References:
1. Rocketeers Michael Belfiore, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. ISBN 978-0-06-114903-0
2. Money Backing the Private Space Industry... Part 3--Robert Bigelow. The Space Monitor, February 11, 2007
3. Moon dreams - The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese. The Economist, February 18, 2010
4. Commercial Communications Satellites for the Moon. IEEE - Inside Technology Spectrum, by James Oberg, February 2009

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