The Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky famously wrote in a letter in 1911 that “a planet is the cradle of mind (usually cited as ‘humanity’) but one cannot live in a cradle forever”. A hundred years on, we are now witnessing dramatic advances in space. The sector, so long the preserve of governments and national agencies, is opening up to widespread competition.

The first decades of this century are witnessing a new space race, one that is being buoyed by technological revolutions both in orbit and down here on Earth—and this time it is being driven by commerce. It is businesses that are intent on developing practical and profitable applications that will benefit many of us here on Earth. The chapters in this book examine the opportunities and challenges we will face in developing a space-faring business sector as we look ahead to the rest of the twenty-first century.

Space Race

In the beginning, there seemed little room for business in space. During the Cold War , space was the pre-eminent theatre for the ideological struggle between the USSR and the US , with the USSR scoring a series of historic firsts.

The Space Age proper dates from 1957, the year the USSR launched the R-7, the intercontinental ballistic missile that would become the basis for a series of civilian rocket launchers still used today. It stunned the globe by putting the world’s first satellite , Sputnik, into orbit that October and sent a dog, Laika, into space a month later. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, while two years later Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in orbit . In 1964, the USSR carried out the first multi-man spaceflight, while in 1965 Alexei Leonov pioneered spacewalking.

Yet by the time the Russians, again, beat NASA to put the Luna 10 spacecraft into orbit around the Moon in 1966, the baton in the race to be the first to land on the lunar surface had irrevocably passed to the US . With greater economic resources to pour into its Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, it would be American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin who planted a flag on the Sea of Tranquillity in July 1969, rather than any Soviet cosmonauts.

As the US went on to develop the Space Shuttle, the USSR turned away from the Moon and towards long-term human spaceflights. The Soviet space programme was designed to work out how humans could live and work in orbit , and throughout the 1970s and 1980s its cosmonauts led the way in a series of Salyut, and later the Mir, space stations.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War and the passing of the USSR itself, national space agencies moved to international collaboration as a way of pooling their resources and expertise—as well as sharing costs. The fruits of this can be seen to this day in the International Space Station (ISS); a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, Canada and others.

Commercial Revolution

Throughout this tumultuous struggle for the ‘high ground of space’ business took a back seat, for it was governments that paid for and sustained the space effort. True, the world’s first commercial satellite spacewalking Intelsat 1, or Early Bird—was launched in 1965, but until recently the commercial development of space was largely limited to big telecommunications satellites. Costing several hundred million dollars apiece and weighing several tonnes, these spacecraft are designed to last up to 15 years, so investors can recoup the expense of building them in the first place.

But a revolution has been taking place, overturning traditional models and methods of operating in space. A host of firms are now promising cheaper access to space, via cutting edge technology , renewable rockets and horizontal launch systems. At the same time, satellites are shrinking in size and becoming cheaper to build—CubeSats can be the size of a shoe box and weigh only a few kilograms.

A flood of data and imagery is flowing down from space and a host of new firms are processing , interpreting and marketing this information. And with access to orbit becoming cheaper, we are rethinking and revolutionizing the way we use space.

Investment is pouring into the sector, and the majority of big venture funds have all made investments in the space sector now, says Mark Boggett, the CEO of Seraphim Capital—one of the few venture capital funds to specialize in funding space start-ups.

In 2016, the global space economy totalled US$329 billion worldwide, up from US$323 billion in 2015.Footnote 1 Three-quarters of that is coming from commercial activity, according to the influential non-profit group, the Space Foundation. By 2040, the space industry will be worth more than US$1.1 trillion, estimates Morgan Stanley.Footnote 2

Not surprisingly, the number of satellites is growing at an exponential rate. In mid-2017, there were 1,738 operational satellites orbiting the Earth, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA ). The year 2017 also saw a record number of satellites being launched —about 50 percent more than any previous year. In the ten years to 2015, about 1,500 satellites were launched. In the ten years to 2025, we are likely to see about 9,000 satellites launched , estimates the analysts group, Euroconsult.Footnote 3

Downstream Applications

While developments in rockets and satellites, the hardware of space, often grab the headlines, it is the downstream end—what we use space for here on Earth—that is seeing the biggest changes. Users of satellite images already include insurance companies, shipping firms, hedge funds , university researchers, farmers, oil and gas firms, and mining companies.

Space imagery can warn us about problems with soil conditions that could help governments prepare for poor harvests ; microwave reflections from a forest can tell us if it is under stress, while monitoring ocean temperatures helps work out where fish shoals are likely to be.

With increasingly accurate resolutions, thanks to improved GPS such as Europe’s Galileo satellite system , new possibilities for location-based technologies will open up. These will include autonomous cars, connected devices and smart city services. It will be possible to track individual trees as they are logged for timber—a check on deforestation—or to enable us to internally navigate our way around a building with our smart phones.

Much of this will come from mega constellations of small satellites from operators such as San Francisco’s Planet Labs—and over the next few years, OneWeb and SpaceX. Putting these craft into low-Earth orbit (LEO ) means they can use smaller cameras than satellites in higher orbits, and still get decent image resolutions—thus bringing the weight and cost down to a fraction of that of traditional Earth observation spacecraft.

Their small size and relatively low cost mean that new designs can quickly be tested and built. In 2017, for instance, Planet Labs sent 88 CubeSats into orbit on an Indian rocket —the largest number of satellites ever launched at once. With about 200 satellites in orbit , it means the company can now photograph every point on the planet every day.

While the resolution of cameras aboard commercial CubeSats is still at about 3–5 metres per pixel, this is improving; and some firms are now offering sub-pixel analysis, such as the UK’s Terrabotics. Chief executive Gareth Morgan says: “There is rich information between pixels that is captured but that is not obvious”.Footnote 4 The firm then processes this into commercially available 3D data sets. Alongside the CubeSat operators, there is US manufacturer DigitalGlobe whose two-tonne WorldView satellites offer resolutions of up to 25 centimetres. Until 2014, the US only allowed images this detailed to be sold to the American military, but since then it has allowed them be sold commercially.

Launcher Options

When it comes to challenging nationally-funded agencies and traditional manufacturers, entrepreneur -led start-ups have already carved out a sizeable niche in the launcher market . SpaceX is using its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules to supply the ISS, while Blue Origin is developing its family of sub-orbital and orbital New Shepard and New Glenn launchers. Both firms have demonstrated revolutionary first stages that can land vertically—a significant step in the drive for reusable rockets. Blue Origin is also working with the United Launch Alliance on an engine for the US’s planned Vulcan heavy-payload launch vehicle , which is being funded through a public–private partnership with the US government.

Others like Virgin Galactic are working on air-launching satellites—alongside its proposals for sub-orbital tourist flights . In the UK , Reaction Engines is pushing ahead with its single stage to orbit (SSTO) Skylon spaceplane— SSTO being the ‘Holy Grail’ for rocketeers. At its heart is the hybrid air-breathing rocket engine, Sabre, which works using a revolutionary precooler that will take in air at 1,000 degrees Celsius— Skylon accelerates to Mach 5 climbing to orbit —and chill it to minus 150 Celsius in just a hundredth of a second for use in the engine. In 2017, the firm took a significant step nearer its goal by announcing it would build a ground test facility at Westcott, near London, the home of British rocket research since the end of the Second World War.

In New Zealand there is Rocket Lab , so far the only rocket firm in the world with its own privately owned launch complex; its Electron rocket is targeted at lofting CubeSats into LEO . The firm says once operational its launch costs will be around US$5 million and this will be as frequent as once a week. It is a bold claim , but Rocket Labs says that by 3D printing its engines, production and thus launch cycles can be dramatically speeded up.

At the moment, small satellite makers often hitch rides on existing launches that have a big satellite as main cargo but still have room enough to take smaller craft. The problem for owners of constellations of small satellites is that such launches are not frequent enough for them. It is this gap in the market that Rocket Lab is planning to fill.

Beyond Earth

Business is also driving innovations beyond Earth’s orbit , spurred on by competitions such as the Ansari XPRIZE for a reusable crewed sub-orbital spacecraft, and now the US$20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE. This is for the first team to land a robot craft on the Moon , get it to travel 500 metres on the lunar surface and beam back images to Earth.

There are five teams: SpaceIL, from Israel; Moon Express, from the US ; Synergy Moon , an international effort; TeamIndus, from India; and Hakuto, from Japan. While getting a rover to the Moon may not have an immediate commercial payoff, Rahul Narayan of Team Indus in Bangalore argues that if successful, it will be “a quantum step for every private space company to go out there and do more stuff in the future”.

Another organization with its eye on the Moon is the US firm , Shackleton Energy Corporation, which aims to mine the lunar water and deliver it to a fuel station orbiting Earth. Shackleton says that working from the Moon , with its lighter gravity, it is possible to reduce the costs of getting materials to Earth orbit by a factor of 20 compared to bringing them up from Earth itself, where even getting payload to LEO means 85 percent of a rocket’s mass is fuel.

Bringing lunar oxygen into LEO would be a major breakthrough—potentially allowing space missions on a much larger scale than we have seen so far. Cheap lunar rocket fuel would mean that missions to colonize Mars or to mine nearby asteroids would become far cheaper and more practicable.

Challenges

Yet this latest space race also presents its own practical, ethical and legal issues. The sheer volume of space imagery and data means that the current AI systems being used to automatically analyse it need to be speeded up if they are to cope in the long term.

More information may generally be a good thing, but because we are all now potentially being photographed from space, who should have access to this? As facial-recognition technology gets better and the speed of distributing images improves closer to real time, there’s an increasing potential for invasive uses of satellite images. As private satellites proliferate and the big data revolution advances, critics argue we need to debate public and private roles in space. Regulation is currently nationally-based—but eventually we will need to set international standards on regulating who gets to buy high-resolution data.

Then there is space debris; it is a problem that can no longer be ignored as thousands of new satellites inevitably mean more space debris. In 2017, the European Space Agency’s Earth observation satellite Sentinel-1A was hit by debris no more than a few millimetres in size . ESA estimates there are now 750,000 objects larger than 1 centimetre orbiting the Earth. Among the biggest of these is the imaging satellite Envisat, which stopped working in 2012 and is the size of a school bus. The Agency is now committed to leading European efforts to combat the dangers of space debris. The year 2018 sees the launch of Surrey Space Centre’s RemoveDEBRIS mission , which is testing different methods of cleaning up space junk—but all space operators are going to have to grapple with this issue.

Mid-century and Beyond

Growing up in the Apollo era, it was impossible not to be swept up by the promethean promise of it all: humanity’s future belonged in space and we would soon follow in the Moonwalkers’ footsteps to Mars and beyond. The stars themselves would be humankind’s destiny. Of course, the immediate post-Apollo period was somewhat different and quotidian; witness the fact that I am not writing this on some micro-g Lagrange space colony somewhere between the Earth and Moon.

It’s always difficult to make predictions, as they say, especially about the future.

Yet as a business journalist for more than 30 years, I have been lucky to report on the real growth of the commercial space sector, a sector which is transforming all of our lives here on Earth. In his autobiography, Magnificent Desolation (2009) Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin wrote: “I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I am convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies”.Footnote 5 It is a statement that will resonate with many in the sector today. As the twenty-first century unfolds, it will be businesses that will be at the forefront of the human development of space.