Reusable rockets are realistic.

Before today I couldn’t say that sentence with any real confidence. I could say that rockets (I’m saying rockets, I mean the first stage of a multistage rocket but that doesn’t sound as good as rocket) could be landed after flying an orbital mission. I could have said that it was possible to glide an orbiter that had just delivered a space telescope to orbit back to earth on a runway. I could sit here and rattle off all the great achievements in the pursuit of returning things to earth that have previously been to space. These are all worthy achievements but today something decidedly more advanced happened. SpaceX (A private rocket company) reused a rocket that they had previously launched around a year earlier. The other equally important bit of information is that the cost of the launch was 10%[1] less than a standard launch.

This is the first baby step towards rockets acting more like areoplanes and less like rockets. Imagine how expensive a flight on a Boeing 747-8 would be if rather than being able to reuse the plane across thousands of flights it would only be good enough for a single flight. Actually don’t imagine it, just let me indulge in some back of the envelope calculations: A 747-8 costs $386.8million[2] and has 362[3] seats which means that the cost per person would be:

386,800,000 / 362 = 1,068,508.29

There are obviously lots of other costs to consider like fuel, aircrew wages and airport costs but this gives us a clue of the magnitude of the problem. If planes were single use only you’d need to be a millionaire to fly. Hopefully you now understand how important today’s news is, with the proper context now firmly embedded I want to repeat what I said at the start:

Reusable rockets are realistic.

Today all the (space) headlines might be about SpaceX but this isn’t their day, sure they are the pioneers and deserve credit but today is about a future that is becoming clearer by the second. Cheap spaceflight seems like an oxymoron; space is hard, and dangerous and above all else, expensive. But while the former 2 points are true, the latter will become less true as time goes on. The positive PR that SpaceX will get from all this excitement by the science and space blogs (yes, I’m guilty here) will enable them to secure future deals with satellite companies and potentially disrupt the status quo by taking customers away from established players like ULA and Arianespace. Hopefully, if capitalism does its job this increased competition will spur on these old companies to create reusable rockets of their own. If a healthy marketplace of reusable rockets is created then each company will innovate a new way to reuse faster and bring the costs down lower, just like what happened with low budget airlines.

The early days of air travel were restricted to the rich and took time before the masses could afford to fly as well. Now space travel looks like it’s following a similar trajectory. This doesn’t mean I expect cheap space tourism in the next few years or even the next decade but I do expect it to happen in my lifetime (maybe right at the end of it). So with cheap spaceflight as the norm, Let’s explore things that are currently out of reach for space travel that could become the norm:

Space Tourism

This isn’t a new concept, in 2001 Dennis Tito became the first space tourist[4], staying in the luxurious International Space Station for a week at a bargain basement price of $20,000,000. A future where this price is slashed by several orders of magnitude could enable someone on an average salary to save up for a once in a lifetime trip. A honeymoon could have a whole different meaning if the moon itself was a realistic holiday destination. In fact it may already be happening, about a month ago SpaceX revealed that 2 private customers had put down a “substantial” deposit for a fly by of the moon in 2018[5]. Sub orbital flights like those soon to be offered by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are explicitly designed to carry space tourists and both these rockets are designed to be reusable. As inequality raises in the world one positive thing to take away is that the 1% will help pay a future where people will complain about how annoying all the checking in process for spaceflight is rather than marvel at it, much like it is with planes today.

Asteroid Mining

Asteroid mining is still seen as a far off goal. A company would need to invest millions, maybe billions to send expensive and heavy mining equipment (that could work in the vacuum of space) to an asteroid for a potential pay off years down the road. It’s just too expensive with too high risk to be financially viable at the moment, but as reusable rockets lower the cost of entry to space and importantly, lower the cost of per Kg to orbit then the risk is reduced. Unlike space tourism where several orders of magnitude will be necessary for mass adoption, asteroid mining could well become the next gold rush in just one or two orders of magnitude reduction in Kg to orbit cost.

So is it really worth mining an asteroid? What useful materials could you get? Platinum. Loads of platinum. I mean like a ridiculous, ungodly amount of platinum. So much in fact that an asteroid mining company would need to consider how the extra supply of platinum on earth would reduce the value of it and figure that into their cost analyses. Let’s take asteroid 2011 UW158, which has as estimated 90,000,000 Kg[6] of platinum which, not accounting for the depreciation caused by flooding the market, would be: £2,235,382,200,000 (yep, 2.2 Trillion, not a typo). Not only would asteroid mining companies become some of the richest companies in the world but also the reduced cost of platinum (and other elements) could enable technology currently seen as too expensive to become mainstream.

Science

From the start of the space race until the current day, one of the main benefiters of the endeavor has been science. We’ve learnt so much about the universe and our planet but everything we’ve learnt has only led to more questions, big expensive questions. NASA is currently developing the SLS (Space Launch System) with one of the first destinations being the moon. At the same time that this is happening SpaceX is developing the Falcon Heavy (the heavy lift version of the Falcon9) that, as was discussed in the tourism paragraph, will also be going to moon. Although the stated mission goals are very different, the rockets and spacecraft are not. In fact the most obvious difference at least to an American tax paying layman is the funding for both rockets. The SLS total cost is $18 Billion over the next 5 years[7] and will be paid for publicly. The Falcon Heavy’s total costs are unknown (although most speculate it will be lower) and will be paid for privately. It’s going to be a hard sell to tax payers for NASA to develop rockets of their own when private companies can do it cheaper.

So there might be casualties along the way with NASA potentially making fewer or no rockets in the future, earth based platinum mining becoming less economically feasible and terrestrial tourism being seen as very down to earth compared with the high flying space adventures of future tourists. Despite these casualties the future looks brighter today than it ever has been for cheap spaceflight. If you’ll excuse me while I get overly poetic I’d like to finish on a quote:

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and reality of tomorrow. – Robert Goddard

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/01/17/ses-10-telecom-satellite-in-florida-for-launch-on-reused-spacex-rocket/

[2] http://www.boeing.com/company/about-bca/index.page%23/prices

[3] http://magazin.lufthansa.com/xx/en/boeing-747-8-en

[4] http://www.space.com/11492-space-tourism-pioneer-dennis-tito.html

[5] http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year

[6] https://www.rt.com/news/310170-platinum-asteroid-2011-uw-158/

[7] http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/new-nasa-crew-transportation-system-to-cost-18-billion-through-2017