Andrew James May - The space business : from hotels in orbit to mining the moon : how private enterprise is transforming space

A vision of asteroid mining from the December 1935 issue of Amazing Stories.

(Public domain image)

Sixty years after the first humans were launched into orbit, we still havent quite achieved Arthur C. Clarkes vision of a thriving, self-sustaining space business but were getting there. Although communication satellites have been around since the 1960s, its only in recent years that theyve been built, launched and operated entirely by private companies and in a big way, too. Just think of Elon Musks SpaceX and its vast constellation of Starlink satellites, which aim to bring broadband internet to remote locations all over the world.

Similarly, were now seeing the birth of the first privately operated space tourism companies, such as Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, with their modest offering of brief suborbital hops. Far more ambitious plans including orbiting hotels and trips around the Moon are in advanced stages of preparation. Other companies are working on the technology needed to extract minerals from asteroids, or to operate robotic mining equipment on the Moon.

All these topics space tourism, private satellite constellations, asteroid mining and more will be discussed in detail in the chapters to come. First, however, we need to address one very obvious question. Why is the space business taking so long to get up and running?

You may have heard the phrase space is hard, because its become something of a clich. Richard Branson said it in the wake of the fatal crash of Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo spaceplane during a test flight in October 2014. The following June, the phrase was used by astronaut Scott Kelly on board the International Space Station (ISS), after a SpaceX cargo craft was destroyed en route to the station. And Peter Diamandis, the founder of the Lunar X Prize for the first private company to put a robotic lander on the Moon, said the same thing when the most promising contender, Israels Beresheet, crashed onto the lunar surface in April 2019.

The fact that the phrase gets used so often, and under circumstances like these, more or less proves that its true. Space really is hard, for a variety of reasons. It involves highly complex and often new and untested technology, hence the frequent mishaps and accidents. Its an immensely expensive business, particularly in the developmental stages, so even wealthy companies can struggle to get the necessary funding together. Hardest of all, it involves doing things that evolution just hasnt prepared humans for, such as ascending for hundreds of kilometres against the pull of Earths gravity, or surviving in the vacuum of outer space.

Up to a certain point, theres no fundamental physics preventing us reaching higher and higher altitudes. Both helium balloons and jet aircraft, if theyre specially designed for the task, can climb to 30 kilometres or a little beyond that. But thats when the problems start, because the higher you get, the less atmosphere there is to support you. At 40 km the air density is only a 300th of its value at sea level, and at twice that height it is 200 times smaller still.