COLORADO SPRINGS — Sometime in the past decade, the idea of launching private rockets into space for cheap became reality.
Just in the past two years, space newcomers SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have launched more than a dozen rockets. Some . Others .
Last week, at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, commercial companies talked about how the race to bring down the cost even more is gaining momentum, at least in theory.
In his keynote at the symposium, Jeff Bezos for his company, Blue Origin. The Amazon.com founder, like others, is pursuing reusable rockets and suborbital space travel.
“I think the best way for us at Blue Origin to help other space entrepreneurs is to solve that problem of getting payloads into orbit at incredibly low cost because that would unlock the power of thousands of entrepreneurs. That’s what we are focused on,” Bezos said.
“It’s why we are doing the suborbital tourism mission. It’s why our BE-3 engine is liquid hydrogen because we know we need liquid hydrogen for our upper-stage and in-space missions later,” he said. “It’s why we are using liquid natural gas because our goal is to make spaceflight so cheap that the cost of the fuel actually matters.”
Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed its New Shepard rocket at least three times since November. It’s unknown how many attempts were made in the past — or the cost. The company declined to comment.
Getting costs down is a mission for even more traditional space companies such as United Launch Alliance, the Centennial-based joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing that develops rocket launchers. When Tory Bruno in August 2014, he pledged to .
A single rocket launch’s average cost by , according to the company.
Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., markets its rockets on its site like an online store. Need the Falcon 9 to send cargo to space? . Add-ons such as crew transportation services to send up astronauts are extra. The only thing missing is a ” button.
Last to launch sensitive satellites. The only other company that can do that, ULA, ended up to send Pentagon satellites to space, leaving just SpaceX.
“There’s no question that on pricing, ULA is going to be playing catch-up with SpaceX — even before their ,” said Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies for Teal Group Corp. “But the good news is they don’t have to catch up all the way. They just have to catch up some, so that the option of going with a ULA vehicle for the Air Force would not be prohibitively unattractive.”
Commercial space companies got the ago to pursue opportunities closer to Earth — or in low-Earth orbit — while NASA focused on deep-space missions such as getting to Mars.
“We’re counting on the commercial, the private folks,” said Dava Newman, NASA’s deputy administrator. “Everyone that succeeds, every company that succeeds, everyone that we could help get started, … we hope there’s a commercial market in low-Earth orbit because we’re not planning not to be in low-Earth orbit after 2024. We keep doing our exploration around the moon and get to Mars.
“NASA is on a mission of exploration.”
At last week’s symposium, which was sponsored by The Space Foundation, nearly every booth was occupied by a commercial company except for NASA’s. The organization has seen so much new interest that it started the last year, said Kevin Cook, the foundation’s vice president of marketing.
“Frankly, if you look at things historically, NASA has never built anything. They’ve done the research and focused the mission, but in the end, it was Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. They built everything,” Cook said. “The small distinction today is SpaceX and Blue Origin are looking at their own market-driven business. … We’re seeing a new generation of companies that are going to take this into the next stage of space exploration. They won’t do it in tandem but in league with legacy companies.”
Indeed. ULA to help build new rocket engines. Last week, Bigelow Aerospace, which started in 1999 after Congress cut space station habitat investments, to develop and deploy expandable pods into space as early as 2019.
Investors are also starting to take notice. According to the Tauri Group, investment into space ventures hit a record last year, reaching $2.3 billion. More venture capital was invested in space last year than the prior 15 years combined, .
“In the past, it was difficult for small companies to receive private investment because the revenue wasn’t guaranteed and policy could be unpredictable, as shown in the cases of the cancellation of the Shuttle and Constellation programs,” said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a trade group.
“Now we’re in this new era of private companies taking the reins in LEO (low-Earth orbit) and cislunar space (between Earth and the moon). Powerful entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have used their own money to advance the role of commercial space. It has taken years to get to this point where investors see the return on investment from satellite data and research projects, but now it’s becoming the status quo and much more predictable.”
Sentiment is that there is room for many more companies to do business in space.
“There can be many winners, even hundreds and thousands of companies in a truly great industry,” Bezos said during his keynote. “I think that’s what we are headed toward here. From my point of view, the more, the merrier. I want Virgin Galactic to succeed. I want SpaceX to succeed. I want United Launch Alliance to succeed. I want Arianespace to succeed. And, of course, I want Blue Origin to succeed. And I think they all can.”
Tamara Chuang: tchuang@denverpost.com or visit
