Mission to Mars (9 page)

Artist’s concept: two Bigelow Aerospace expandable space habitats docking with other spacecraft

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Illustration Credit 3.3
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The testing of expandable habitats in Earth orbit is central to providing generic space structures for use as habitats, adding room to my cycler designs, depots, storage warehouse facilities, and giant laboratories, too.

For the last few years, Bigelow Aerospace has been establishing an international consortium of what the group terms “sovereign clients” along with hammering out the financial and legal structures for such partnerships to blossom in low Earth orbit.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Bigelow Aerospace agreed last year to conduct a joint marketing effort focused on international customers. The two companies will offer rides on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, using the Falcon 9 launch vehicle to carry passengers to future Bigelow habitats orbiting Earth. Additionally, Bigelow is teamed with Boeing on the CST-100 (Crew Space Transportation) capsule under NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability Program. The CST-100’s primary mission would be to transport crew to the International Space Station and to private Bigelow space facilities. The CST-100 capsule is compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9.

NASA has taken notice of Bigelow’s work. Discussions between the two have centered on the space agency possibly acquiring a Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, called BEAM for short, to enhance use of the International Space Station. If the green light is given, BEAM would be a subscale demonstration of the company’s expandable technology at a human space complex.

Inside Bigelow’s BA 330, operable as an independent or a modular space station

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Illustration Credit 3.4
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Space is big, and so too are Bigelow’s ideas. Expandable habitats offering 2,100 cubic meters of volume—that’s nearly twice the capacity available on the International Space Station—have been drawn up, while another plan sketches out use of a super-jumbo structure providing 3,240 cubic meters of volume. The company has also blueprinted a quick-deploy moon base capable of housing up to 18 astronauts in inflatable modules on the lunar surface. Bigelow and his team are sketching out architectures that place their expandable structures in the Earth-moon Lagrangian point L1 and position them as depots for outbound expeditions to Mars.

Prototype expandable crew habitats dot the factory floor at Bigelow Aerospace
.

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Illustration Credit 3.5
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Derek Webber, Executive Director of Spaceport Associates, has a parallel long-term view, making the case for a new destination for space tourists in geosynchronous Earth orbit, or at the Earth-moon Lagrangian point L1. Lagrangian points are locations in space where gravitational forces and the orbital motion of a body balance each other. A spacecraft positioned there has to use modest rocket firings or other means to stay put. Orbits around these points are called “halo orbits.”

Webber advocates that spot as the next step beyond suborbital flight and low Earth orbit, calling it “Spaceport Earth”—a
combined hotel/space station at the rim of Earth’s gravity well. Webber argues that NASA can use Spaceport Earth as the starting and finishing point for journeys to and from Mars and beyond. Tourists going up and down between low Earth orbit and Spaceport Earth in its earliest form effectively open up—and pay for—this new part of the orbital infrastructure.

But first things first.

I am an admirer of my fellow adventurer Sir Richard Branson, who is backing and bankrolling his spaceliner operation, Virgin Galactic. I have personally taken part in a number of Virgin Galactic milestone-met activities out in southern New Mexico’s Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport.

That groundbreaking facility—roughly 45 miles north of Las Cruces—is taking shape, and the desert scenery is sprinkled with Spaceport America structures. The gateway to space covers 18,000 acres of land. It is expected to be not only an outbound and incoming hub for tourists who ascend to and return from the suborbital heights, but also a high-tech haven for experimental craft that push new ways to access space.

Spaceport America is being built for $209 million and is financed so far entirely by state taxpayer money. But public funds subsidizing the New Mexico spaceport will end by December 2013, moving it from a state-funded enterprise to a self-sustained enterprise.

A visitor to the sprawling complex can see a tomorrowland-looking terminal hangar facility and an ultralong runway that is to be utilized by Virgin Galactic. Operations by the company at Spaceport America make use of the passenger-carrying WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo suborbital launch system.

The WhiteKnightTwo mother ship aircraft hauls the six-passenger/two-flight-crew spaceship up to 50,000 feet altitude, where it releases the sleek craft that then powers its occupants out of Earth’s atmosphere. Those on board will travel in a matter of seconds at almost 2,500 miles an hour, over three times the speed of sound, and soar upward to 68 miles, some 359,000 feet
in altitude. That’s enough elevation to earn astronaut wings. The duration of the suborbital hop, from runway takeoff to landing, will be approximately two and a half hours, with customers experiencing a few minutes of that time in free fall. Then SpaceShipTwo wings its way back to Earth, gliding homeward to a tarmac touchdown.

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, carrying SpaceShipTwo, flies over New Mexico’s Spaceport America
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Illustration Credit 3.6
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That pay-per-view seat price is $200,000. Hundreds of customers have already signed on the dotted line to get their chance to rubberneck out SpaceShipTwo windows, to see for themselves the curvature of planet Earth and the deep blackness of space. Commercial suborbital passenger flight could start in the 2013–2014 time frame—if shakeout testing of the rocket plane proceeds without a hitch at its Scaled Composites building site, the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California.

Branson has often stated that, as his suborbital spaceline business gains financial momentum, seat prices can be lowered. In the interim, rocketing off into space has made its way onto a 2011 Virtuoso “Travel Dreams” survey of Top 10 Trips of a Lifetime, competing with setting sail for a world cruise, calling on all seven continents, renting a castle on the French Riviera, or lounging around on a rented private island.

In July 2012 the Tauri Group released
Suborbital Reusable Vehicles: A 10-Year Forecast of Market Demand
, a study jointly funded by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and Space Florida.

The central message of the report is that suborbital reusable vehicles (SRVs) are creating a new spaceflight industry. Nine SRVs by six companies are currently in active planning, development, or operation, the study observes. SRVs are commercially developed reusable space vehicles that may carry humans or cargo.

If projected high flight rates and relatively low costs per flight emerge, SRVs can service distinct markets—commercial human spaceflight, basic and applied research, technology demonstration, media and public relations to promote products, education, satellite deployment—as well as spur point-to-point transportation of cargo or humans at faster speeds than now available around the globe.

The Tauri Group report points out that the dominant SRV market is commercial human spaceflight, generating 80 percent of SRV demand. Their analysis indicates that about 8,000 high-net-worth individuals (with net worth exceeding $5 million) from across the globe are sufficiently interested and have spending patterns likely to result in the purchase of a suborbital flight at current prices. Roughly one-third of these consumers are from the United States. About 925 individuals currently have reservations on SRVs, the report says.

Tauri’s study estimates that about 40 percent of the interested, high-net-worth population—3,600 individuals—will fly within the ten-year forecast period. Also, space enthusiasts outside the high-net-worth population are expected to generate modest additional demand (about 5 percent more).

Work is ongoing in the private sector to build suborbital and orbital craft capable of flying cargo and/or passengers into space. Several spaceship designs and commercial firms that I’m keeping an eye on include the following: