Democratizing Space, One Billionaire at a Time: The Return of Space Tourism
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Democratization has a set of fundamental elements to it. It involves giving the people the power to choose their leaders. It means making a political system accountable to those people. It’s creating a government and culture that respect the freedoms laid out in the First Amendment: speech, assembly, religion, press and the right to peacefully petition the government for change. It’s not just changing how the government operates, but how the society functions.
The last thing I ever expected democratization to include are joy rides into space by millionaires and billionaires. But, that’s what NewSpace spinmeisters would have us believe as space tourism returns this year after a 12-year hiatus. They really should stop.
Their argument is that access to space will no longer be limited to highly qualified, competitively selected astronauts pushing back the frontiers of space on behalf of the people, but anyone who can get there.
Well, not exactly anyone. You have to be at least a millionaire to afford even a several minutes in space. Virgin Galactic is charging its 600 or so customers $200,000 or $250,000 for tickets on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle. The company raised seat prices by $50,000 in 2013 as founder Richard Branson was predicting commercial flights by the end of that year. Eight years later, they still haven’t begun.
Virgin Galactic is raising ticket prices for the next group of customers to put down reservations. Branson had previously mentioned $300,000, but there has been no official announcement. Virgin Galactic also plans to introduce even more expensive premium prices for extra special flights.
You can’t really blame the company for raising prices. Virgin Galactic’s original plan in 2004 was to spend $108 million to build five SpaceShipTwo vehicles and two WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. Commercial flights were to begin in 2007. Today, space tourism flights are scheduled for early 2022, and the company’s expenses are well north of $1 billion.
Virgin Galactic says that once they finally start flying tourists, the company will be able to lower ticket prices to a mere $50,000. That would allow the company to tap into a much larger market for its brief trips to the edge of space.
Virgin Galactic says a lot of things. The company has blown through every schedule and budget it ever had. There’s no operating experience with SpaceShipTwo. How often can it fly? How reliable will it be? Nobody knows. Any significant reduction in ticket prices could be years away.
Meanwhile, the competition is preparing to invalidate Virgin Galactic’s claim to be the world’s first “spaceline.”
Blue Origin Makes its Move
Earlier this week, rival Blue Origin announced it will auction off a seat on its first crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft scheduled for July 20. The bidding amounts promise to reach, forgive the pun, astronomical levels. Unless something changes, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company will inaugurate commercial service before Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
Blue Origin plans to conduct additional launches after the July flight that could carry 6 paying passengers each. The company hasn’t announced when seats will go on sale, or how much they will cost. Company officials have previously said that tickets will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Suborbital flights will open up space to a larger part of the population, but at the prices Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are charging, they will fall far short of democratizing access to it. The access is also rather fleeting, measured in minutes only, giving the participant time to float around or conduct an experiment in microgravity. And then it’s back to gravity.
A suborbital flight is the cosmic equivalent of taking a tourist boat around San Francisco Bay. It’s fun, you get to see the city, the Golden Gate, sail around Alcatraz while the boat’s loud speaker attributes a quote to Mark Twain that he never uttered. (“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”) But, two hours later you end up right back in the same place you started. You haven’t really gone anywhere. It’s not like you’ve taken a cruise up to Alaska or hopped on a flight to New York.
That’s not meant to be a harsh assessment of suborbital tourism. If you can do it safely and actually make money at it, neither of which are easy, then all power to you. Suborbital flights can also advance science and mature technologies in ways that you can’t on sounding rockets.
It’s simply that the economics of transportation — whether you are traveling to space, crossing the Atlantic or sending a Mother’s Day gift across the country — are driven by point-to-point service. The really valuable markets are in getting people and goods from one place to another. The massive container ships and oil tankers that sail through the Golden Gate are much more valuable than the small tourist boats they pass in the bay. So are the jetliners that soar overhead flying people and cargo to destinations all over the globe.
Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off to Orbit We Go
Suborbital flights take about 3 percent of the energy needed to get to Earth orbit. It’s why these suborbital flights are affordable for people who are only millionaires. Orbital tourism, on the other hand, is a whole other tier of the 1 percent.
The first space tourist, billionaire Dennis Tito, spent $12 million for a trip to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz transport back in April 2001. (I know the trip was advertised as costing $20 million, but it was actually $12 million.)
Six more tourists followed him on seven flights over the next eight years. (Charles Simonyi flew twice.) By the time Canadian Guy Laliberte ended the first era of space tourism in October 2009, the price had increased to $41,816,954 CAD ($33.1 million USD). That’s the equivalent of $40.85 USD today.
We know the exact cost of Laliberte’s trip because he tried to write it off on his taxes as a business trip. Canadian tax ruled that only 10 percent of the trip was for business purposes; Laliberte paid taxes on the remaining 90 percent.
After the end of America’s space shuttle program in 2011, Soyuz seats that would have been sold to tourists were taken by American astronauts. Russia used its monopoly power for nine years to get as much money as it could out of NASA.
In 2011, NASA purchased six Soyuz seats for $224.4 million, which averaged out to $37.7 million per seat. By 2018, the price had risen to $81 million per seat; two years later it soared to $90 million.
SpaceX, which began flying astronauts to the station last year, is charging $55 million per seat for Crew Dragon flights. That represents a significant per seat cost reduction for NASA. But, you still have to be a billionaire — or a very wealthy millionaire — to afford a ticket to space at that price. Or have a billionaire select you to fly with him to space. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)
Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission is a non-governmental flight to ISS scheduled for early next year. Led by former NASA astronaut turned Axiom executive Michael Lopez-Alegria, the mission includes three wealthy men from the United States, Canada and Israel who will fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The flight won’t be just the ultimate joy ride. NASA has insisted that visitors to the station not just be there on holiday. The agency wants them to do something useful. Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe, for example, is going on behalf of the Ilan Ramon Foundation, an educational organization which was establish to honor the Israeli astronaut who perished in the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.
Stibbe will be doing various experiments and STEM education activities, inspiring Israeli youth and making his country proud. It’s all good. But, it’s likely not the main reason he wants to go to ISS. He and other two paying passengers will be able to cross off Go to Space from their bucket lists. If they can do some useful things up there, all the better. They might be able to write part or all of the trip off their taxes.
In addition to the $55 million cost of a seat on Crew Dragon, there are expenses to pay on the station as well. NASA recently published an updated pricing policy to cover the costs the space agency will incur when commercial astronauts visit the space station. The policy is show in the table below.
Integration and basic services for a visiting vehicle will cost $4.8 million. Add in $5.2 million for the crew time and you end up with a cool $10 million.
It will cost a station visitor $2,000 per day just to eat. (It’s not clear whether visiting crews can avoid the feel by bringing their own food.) There’s a charge of up to $1,500 for basic provisions. ISS might be a technological wonder, but it’s an astronomically expensive hotel and restaurant.
If you bring up an experiment for return to Earth after you have left, it will cost $40,000 per kg (2.2 lbs) for room aboard a SpaceX Dragon vehicle or Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser shuttle.
The new pricing list covers many more items than one NASA published in June 2019.
ISS Resources Available for Private Astronaut Missions
(June 2019 — No Longer in Effect)
| Resources | Reimbursable Value | Annual ISS Resources | Maximum Allowed per Company per Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regenerative Life Support and Toilet | $11,250 per crew per day | Available as needed | — |
| Crew Supplies (food, air, crew provisions, supplies, medical kit, exercise equipment, etc.) | $22,500 per crew per day | Available as needed | — |
| Stowage | $105 per CTBE* per day | Available as needed | — |
| Power | $42 per kWh | Available as needed | — |
| Data Downlink | $50 per GB | Available as needed | — |
It’s not clear how many of the ISS services the Ax-1 crew will use during its visit. NASA and Axiom are conducting a media briefing on Monday to lay out the specifics of the upcoming flight.
UPDATE: The Ax-1 contract was signed before the new fees went into effect, so there is no impact on the mission.
Free Flying: The Inspiration4 Mission
Because it will not visit ISS, the Earth-orbiting Inspiration4 mission will avoid all those expensive fees. The modified Crew Dragon spacecraft will have one billionaire, Jared Isaacman, and three spaceflight participants aboard when it lifts off in September.
Isaacman, who is an experienced pilot rated to fly commercial and military jets, will serve as the flight’s commander. He is using the trip to promote his payment company, Shift4, and to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which treats cancer patients.
The rest of the crew will include: Hayley Arceneaux, a survivor of childhood cancer who works at St. Jude; Sian Proctor, an educator, entrepreneur and Shift4 customer who won a Shark Tank-style competition sponsored by Isaacman’s company; and Chris Sembroski, who entered a raffle by donating to St. Jude. (A friend of Sembroski actually won the raffle, but didn’t want to go on the trip.)
It’s a multi-racial crew with two men and two women that is representative of an increasingly diverse country. It also and mirrors NASA’s astronaut corps, which has come a long way since the early days when spaceflight was the exclusive realm of white male test pilots.
The mission opens space up to averagenauts, as The Simpsons famously dubbed them, who couldn’t afford to go to space on their own. As nice as all that is, it’s hard to see how a mission that depends upon a billionaire to fund it is really democratizing space. Such a flight remains out of reach for 99.99 percent of the citizenry (the “demo” in democracy).
The Airplane Analogy Augers In
One of the arguments made is that while space travel is hideously expensive today, it’s not unlike airline travel way back in the day. At first, airplanes were only for the rich dressed up in fancy clothes paying very high prices. As technology improved, air travel opened up to any slob in shorts, a t-shirt and flip flops. Space travel will follow the same path.
There is some truth in that. However, the analogy involves a fundamental misunderstanding of aviation history, and the history of transportation in general. When the first airplanes were built early in the 20th century, they weren’t really useful for much of anything. You couldn’t hop on the Wright Flyer in New York for a trip to see your retired parents in Savannah.
You could take a train or ship there, however. There were enormous existing markets for point-to-point transportation that were already served in a variety of ways. Steamships regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean during the early decades of the 20th century, carrying wealthy aristocrats and poor immigrants alike. Cargo ships plied the seas, and railroads crisscrossed the land carrying people and freight to places near and far. Automobiles became increasingly common as the decades passed.
Early airplane passenger travel was an expensive novelty that very few people used. For one, aircraft were not very safe and had limited range. Nor were there any federal safety regulations in the U.S. for commercial aviation. People had other travel options that were more mature and less costly.
As a result, aviation grew slowly during its first few decades, buoyed by the government-funded U.S. Air Mail Service and World War I. The legendary era of barn storming resulted from the U.S. government selling off surplus planes after the war for pennies on the dollar. Planes that had cost $5,000 were sold as little as $200. There was also a corps of military-trained pilots to fly them.
The federal government decided to privatize the U.S. Air Mail Service in 1925, leading to safety regulations for passenger service. With an assist from Charles Lindbergh two years later, the industry came into its own by the end of the decade. Pan Am’s flying boats crosses the Pacific in the 1930’s; the company began trans-Atlantic service in March 1939.
World War II was a major catalyst for aviation. There’s nothing like trying to obliterate each other to advance technology. After the war ended, there came the jet age, the Boeing 707, deregulation and Freddie Laker’s People Express, which opened travel to the t-shirt, shorts and flip flops crowd. By that point, we’re in the 1980’s, eight decades removed from the Wright brother first flight at Kitty Hawk. And thanks to strong regulations, air travel is the safest form of transportation today.
As aviation technology advanced through the 20th century, airplanes opened up new routes and supplanted steamships and trains on existing ones. Those older forms of transportation adapted to a changing market. Ocean liners gave way to cruise ships. Freighters were containerized. Passenger trains became faster. The only forms of transportation that disappeared from the Wright brothers’ time are horse-drawn wagons and Zeppelins.
Space, as they say, is harder. It’s a much harsher environment. Transportation is expensive. There are few places to go, and not many markets to serve. Destinations that do exist are severely limited in capacity. ISS has a full-time complement of seven astronauts and costs billions of dollars annually to maintain. The Chinese space station launched last month will have an initial complement of three astronauts, with later expansion to six.
Axiom Space plans to expand the space station by adding modules to ISS. As ISS is decommissioned later in the decade, Axiom will detach those modules to form the basis of a commercial facility. Whether the company’s private station will produce much of a net gain in the number of people in orbit on a full-time basis after the ISS’s demise remains to be seen.
NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program is aimed at helping to fund private commercial space stations in Earth orbit like the one planned by Axiom Space. Even as NASA decommissions ISS and sends astronauts to the moon, the space agency wants to continue to maintain a permanent presence of two crew members in Earth orbit to conduct scientific experiments and test new technologies. NASA wants to be one of many customers of private LEO stations.
It’s unclear how much of a demand there will be for human transportation to the moon. The orbiting lunar Gateway that NASA and its international partners are developing will be human-tended, which means it won’t be permanently occupied. A crewed base on the lunar surface will have limited occupancy, largely due to the cost of getting there and keeping the base supplied.
However, there is a wild card in the deck. And, as usual, it involves SpaceX.
Starship to the Rescue?
The only way to really open up space is to radically reduce the cost of getting there. We’re talking many orders of magnitude below what SpaceX has achieved with partially reusable Falcon 9 boosters. The market will stay constrained if tickets just to get to Earth orbit continue to cost in the $50 million range.
Elon Musk is determined to bring prices way down with the Super Heavy/Starship system. He has got a shot at it if the reusable rockets and spaceship can do everything he promises. Starship would carry 100 people or more into space, the cost of space access would fall significantly, large space stations would be orbited and supplied cheaply and routinely, and the way to the moon and Mars would be open at last. In other words, everything everyone has dreamed about regarding space exploration.
The landing of the Starship SN15 prototype on Wednesday was an encouraging sign. As was NASA’s $2.9 billion contract for SpaceX to adapt Starship to land astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.
There is, however, still a long way to go to prove the technology can work as advertised. SpaceX is trying to hit some very challenging reusability and reliability metrics. Time will tell whether the company succeeds. But, if it works, it will be a game changer.
De-democratizing Access to Space
Companies that are sending CubeSats into space and experiments to the the space station love to talk about how they are opening up space. Read what Nanoracks executive Veronica La Regina told Filling Space (whose motto is “Democratizing Engagement with Space”) in a post titled, How does Nanoracks go about democratizing access to space?
The current time is the best one I could imagine living in! The democratization of access to space is quickly becoming a reality. Traditionally, if you wanted to send something to space, you would need to talk to a government space agency. After a long while, if lucky, you got a ride. If not, your payload would remain on Earth. This must change. The freedom to access space should be a right for everyone. New business models and governance schemes should decrease the barriers to entering and operating in the space sector. Space agencies should take inspiration from agencies in other sectors (e.g. transport and communication) where free market competition is complemented by public investment in the huge costs associated with infrastructure development.
La Regina was right about democratization, but probably not in the way she intended. The reality is the American people heavily subsidized access to the station for commercial companies for years. NASA’s policy was more socialism than free market.
The space agency put an end to the subsidies two months ago. On Feb. 25, NASA quietly published a revised rate schedule that covered a portion of ISS resources that have been set aside for commercial applications. The table below show the rates originally set in June 2019 and those that went into effect in February 2021.
Pricing Policy for Commercial Activity Associated with NRA NNJ13ZBQ001N Focus Area 3
| Resources | Reimbursable Value (6/2019) | Reimbursable Value (2/2021) | Annual ISS Resources (6/2019) | Annual ISS Resources (2/2021) | Maximum Allowed per Company per Year (No Change) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upmass (passive) | $3,000/kg | $20,000/kg | 175 kg | 175 kg | 50 kg/single CTBE |
| Trash disposal (passive) | $3,000/kg | $20,000/kg | 175 kg | 175 kg | 50 kg |
| Downmass (passive) | $6,000/kg | $40,000/kg | 125 kg | 125 kg | 35 kg |
| Conditional cargo (roundtrip) | 13,500/kg | $90,000/kg | Not available at this tme | Based on NASA availability | — |
| Powered cargo (roundtrip) | $18,000/kg | $120,000/kg | Not available at this time | Based on NASA availability | — |
| Crew member time | $17,500/hr | $130,000/hr | 90 hrs | 90 hrs | 25 hrs |
Once subsidies were removed, the prices shot up massively. Sending 1 kg of cargo up to the station rose from $3,000 to $20,000, an increase of more than 600 percent. Powered cargo soared from $18,000 to $120,000 per kg. And crew time increased from $17,500 to $130,000 per hour.
One might call the price hikes de-democratization, in that the American people are no longer paying enormous subsidies that benefited private companies.
Whether the new policy is a sound one or not is an interesting question. There is an argument to be made that the subsidies are a relatively small price to pay to stimulate commercial activities on a station the U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on.
At some point, however, companies have to be able to do commercial activities in space on their own dime. The high prices at ISS could spur the development of private stations with much lower operating costs.
And in the End….
It is accurate to say that space travel is being commercialized. NASA has privatized the transport of crews and supplies to the space station by turning the job over to SpaceX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Sierra Nevada Corp. Although NASA provided the majority of the funding to develop these vehicles, the space agency is allowing the companies to maintain ownership of them so they can be used to support private missions.
It’s all good. But, democratization isn’t an accurate term to describe the era that we have entered. Space tourism is certainly opening up, but it remains the province of the very wealthy. It will stay that way until there are radical reductions in the cost of access to space and far more destinations to visit.
The closest thing there is to democratized transportation is a humble city bus. Anyone can ride one, fares are set low enough to make the service affordable to the vast majority of the population — the mass in mass transit. Most services have discounts for senior citizens, youth, low-income residents, and other groups so they can afford to ride.
Space travel is a very long way from that reality. It might never reach that point. The industry might get to airline levels of reliability and pricing at some time in the future. But, many obstacles remain. As they say, space is harder.
61 responses to “Democratizing Space, One Billionaire at a Time: The Return of Space Tourism”
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Billionaire gonna do what billionaires gonna do…
True. But what that “doing” turns out to be is usually dependent on the politics of any particular billionaire. Billionaires are hardly a uniform class.
Great article, Doug. Access to space is nowhere near the point where an average income earner can afford to save up and fly there. Reuse will help lower the price some but what it will take to really open up space is new propulsion that will allow longer trips in shorter time and greater upmass at lower cost. As long as it cost millions just to escape the gravity well, there won’t be a lot of human traffic to LEO and beyond.
In the last appropriations bill, NASA received $17 million of the $150 million requested for ISS commercial activity subsidies. Congress further stipulated that commercial activities involving advertising or entertainment were to be excluded from any subsidies. This is supposed to be billionaires pretending to do science and that’s it! Commercial activity on ISS must not involve actual commerce! I think this is what the new prices are all about. Tom Cruise has to pay his own way, and just to make sure, so does everyone else.
Oh, and thanks for not mentioning the 23rd Amendment. I know you never have, but just the possibility causes me anxiety.
After all that talk about phony “democratized transportation” and artificial public subsidies, …this?
Bwahahah!
https://www.cato.org/commen…
SLS delenda est
Many people who ride public transit are low income and have no other way to get around. Not exactly the main demographic of the billionaire-backed Cato Institute. The article you link to is a classic Cato piece: work backward from the solution you’re advocating (less government spending on ____), selectively choose facts to support said solution, throw in a bunch of figures that may or may not be accurate to demonstrate to the choir how much money could be saved, and fail to analyze the full impacts on society and the people most impacted, who your billionaire backers don’t really care about. Very shallow analysis.
No more so than all the centralized, top-down “solutions” advocated by left-wing think tanks – which are also heavily funded by billionaires. There are probably more left-wing billionaires than right-wing one these days anyway, though before this became true, left-wing think tanks figured out a way to redress the imbalance – use the fortunes left behind by dead right-wing billionaires. All that requires is getting lefties into the top administrative positions at the “charitable” foundations set up by said dead billionaires. This is even easier if the wife of the man who made the billions is survived by a widow with different politics (Ray Kroc) or no politics (John Heinz).
I wouldn’t have bothered following your link if Doug hadn’t trashed it. Y’all might as well down check me as well as I don’t think the case for government supplied mass transit is well made. Some subsidy might be called for under some limited conditions, though I think government mass transit has similar problems as government built rockets.
I think there are many unexplored solutions for low income transit that won’t get explored when competing against subsidy. Or in the face of opposition by those subsidized. Among them are bicycles and making inexpensive cars legal. And letting employers do without the employees that don’t earn enough to show up.
I’m glad I could waste some of your Sunday. You’re welcome.
My job is done here.
The pandemic, remote work and the exodus from urban areas is going to really shake up mass transit in the USA. It will be interesting to see what emerges from it. Hopefully it will be designed to better serve those who depend on it.
…Hopefully it will be designed to better serve those who depend on it…
I imagine it will be designed to better serve the unions who milk it.
Or one more resistant to the spread of disease, better isolation of the passengers, the crew, better air filtration, surfaces more resistant to viruses and bacteria. Useful upgrades to make riding on them more healthier.
Mass transit probably contributed to a significant degree to the explosive spread of COVID-19 in States like New York. Those packed subway cars…
https://nypost.com/wp-conte…
Yes it likely did, it’s the ideal environment for spreading disease. Before the pandemic some 5 million New Yorkers a day rode the transit system, and the state health department estimated by random sampling some 2.7 million in the state of New York had Covid-19 at some point during the first wave, most of whom were never tested for it which is why the official figures are only a fraction of that number.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/…
Up to 2.7 Million in New York May Have Been Infected, Antibody Study Finds
By Jennifer Millman
Published April 23, 2020
Updated on April 24, 2020 at 5:27 am
“Preliminary results from New York’s first coronavirus antibody study show nearly 14 percent tested positive, meaning they had the virus at some point and recovered, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. That equates to 2.7 million infections statewide — more than 10 times the state’s confirmed cases.”
“New York City had a higher rate of antibodies (21.2 percent) than anywhere else in the state and accounted for 43 percent of the total tested. “
an excellent piece
the big difference between aviation and spaceflight is that aviation (as you imply) did not have to create the places to go to, and keep them supplied. the airline/whatever duties end as soon as the passenger gets their luggage
this is not true in spaceflight.
but the key to it, is as you have mentioned, transportation cost (even more so then aviation) …but I doubt that even spaceX will drive them down “soon” to the level where “ordinary people” can afford them…what SpaceX is doing, is driving the cost down to where “ordinary corporations and other groups” can dream and scheme about projects in space.
and thats a force multiplier in the goal to reduce cost
Yes, and meanwhile it’s the billionaires and millionaires who are taking the risks on the first generation commercial human spaceflight vehicles. With families that have the money to sue if anything goes wrong.
They have the money to sue. But, good luck getting anything. While the passengers have lawyers, so do the billionaires who own these corporations. Some of those guys are extremely rich and have no trouble dragging people much lower on the list through the courts for years.
The informed consent regime protects providers except in cases of intentional harm or gross negligence. The former is highly unlikely — what company would set out to intentionally harm their millionaire/billionaire customers?
Gross negligence could be extremely hard to prove given there are no mandatory safety standards for any of these vehicles. The companies set their own safety standards. Set them low enough and do the bare minimum to meet them, and you’ll never lose a lawsuit no matter how many people are injured or killed.
In some cases, there might not be anyone left to sue. I can think of at least one company that would probably go under if it suffered a single accident. Well, I’m sorry your dad is dead, and the company was grossly negligent, but it just declared bankruptcy. Even if you win the case, there are 300 creditors ahead of you. Filing would be a waste of money.
In a few years, we may all look back wondering why we didn’t understand the moral hazards of giving billionaires and their powerful corporations such leeway to play with people’s lives like that.
People volunteer to take risks all the time…from mountain climbing to downhill skiing…etc…etc. Space flight is no different.
(Really enjoyed the article, by the way.)
Yes, you’re taking risks in both cases, but they are different risks.
Skiing is largely — but not entirely — dependent upon your own actions. You’re in control. You’re always aware you can pull a Bono and slam into a tree like Sonny did. Then it’s game over, man! Game over!
Get into a suborbital vehicle, and your fate is in the hands of corporations run by billionaires largely protected from lawsuits with no mandatory safety regulations to protect you. Unless you do something stupid like opening the hatch in space, you have little control over your fate.
Right. And everyone who steps through that hatch knows that. I suggest that if you’re worried about safety…or lawsuits…or billionaires…don’t do that.
Yes, and no. They signed a waiver. But, there are no limits to what the company can tell them when selling tickets or ticketholder events about safety. You wait 15 months or 15 years to fly, and the company has been telling you about how safety the trip will be, how truly informed are you? Especially flying vehicles with minimal flight times?
To give but one example: Virgin Galactic was advertising SpaceShipTwo has potentially being 1,000 times safer than any space vehicle that had ever flown right up to the second their website went dark following the loss of VSS Enterprise. Based on what?
VG has stopped saying that, at least on its website. I don’t know what they tell customers at their private gatherings and trips to see solar eclipses.
Years ago the AOPA had a waiver that pilots giving scenic flights could have their customers sign which supposedly held the pilots and their estates not liable in the case of an accident. The first time it was challenged in court after an actual accident, the waiver was ruled irrelevant. Just because someone signs a waiver doesn’t mean it is worth the paper it is written on. Any spaceflight waiver, no matter how supposedly “ironclad” is only one judge away from the same fate. If you believe otherwise, you are living in a dream world.
see my note to Doug. this is going to be played out in some of the warbird crashes
All that is true. But…bottom line…they start killing customers…they won’t have any customers.
that is of course the sinker
that is the key…they know there is substantial risk but place themselves “on the field of danger”
Depends on which state those high power lawyers go jury shopping in. But even if that is so with the private lawsuits the other risk is what you might call the Knute Rockne effect, namely the massive regulation of the industry from the death of someone rich and/or famous. I have long argued that this is the biggest danger of promoting space tourist flights.
Dad’s a lawyer and he and his firm have done some work for a corporation on this…I wont say which one. and Dad is well known at taking airlines and other groups to the cleaners…but he is also well known in terms of defending manufactors
his theory on this is that at least in the start…the odds of a successful negligence claim are very small, unless as he puts it “the negligence is obvious and ignored”
the doctrine in law for risk has a lot to do with “voluntarily placing yourself on the field of danger”…
you dont when you get into a commercial airliner. in all respects if you buy a ticket and get on an L1011 going from where ever it was to Dallas (this is the case where he got his big start 🙂 ) near zero risk is assumed.
On the other hand, you and your oldest daughter (or his granddaughter) who are amateur divers, good amateur divers but still amateurs buy an excursion to dive to the Brittanic ….you openly walk onto the fireld of danger” and the negligence that kills you has to have been “so great as to be obvious to all”
Just speaking hypothetically. one thing that is probably slowing VG down a bit. is that the error that killed the guy and lost the vehicle. probably would have met that test
Gee, I dunno. Not sure if aviation would ever have become as safe as it is without massive regulation. The loss of the Titanic made passenger liners a lot safer. The massive loss of life was the main reason, but consider that there were probably a couple of dozen Knute Rockne’s that went down with the ship. Wealthy aristocrats who didn’t make it into the boats.
Great article Doug, well researched especially the potted history of commercial air transport. I am not sure if I agree with (all) your conclusions though. In quite a few of your articles on commercial human spaceflight you do seem to blow hot-and-cold on the whole thing; whether it is worth it, who should be doing it and what level of risk is acceptable? This is understandable with a company like VG, but I detect a bit of quixotic thread running through your commentary sometimes. At least Billionaires are ponying up the cash to build and fly-on these vehicles. Burt Rutan wasn’t a billionaire and maybe he could have made a business case to do his own operation but he wanted to just stay as the designer/builder. XCor couldn’t get the necessary amount of funding and none of the traditional spacecraft builders seemed to be interested. So I think we are stuck with the whims of ‘eccentric’ billionaires who are at least trying various ways to get non-government persons flying into space and maybe a price one order of magnitude lower. I’m not going to criticise them a whole lot when as far as I can see, they are pretty much the only ones throwing their hats into the ring
I think what Oler said above is correct: SpaceX is bringing down costs so that wealthy corporations and individuals can travel to space, which is a force multiplier. It’s all good. I just don’t think that is in any way democratization.
I’m not convinced VG or Blue Origin will actually make money from their suborbital vehicles. Profitable years, yes. My guess is VG is well north of $1 billion, maybe approaching $2 billion. I’m not sure they will ever make that back; their flight and revenue estimates might well be pipe dreams. The vision Colglazier has for the company will require an enormous investment to build vehicles. The technology is not scalable. The experience would be useful for supersonic aircraft, but I’m not entirely sure how much. That project would be a money sink for years if they are serious about pursuing it and can raise the funds.
Blue Origin….I don’t know what they’ve spent on New Shepard. I doubt we’ll ever know. Whether Bezos sees that as a profitable business long term…I don’t know. I think the technology has been useful for New Glenn. But, that experience and knowledge only goes so far in a vehicle that require 97% more power.
All good points. I suppose my point was really that we’re in the lap of the billionaires, of varying competence between Branson, Bezos and Musk. No-one else seems to be stepping up to the plate when there a quite a few businesses/organisations that could have. I can’t see an easy way out of having to accept, however imperfect, the differing visions these trailblazers have of “democratising” space. Agree that “Democratising” is not really the word that should be used, or is what they are doing! At best it’s really only just starting to step away from government-only operations.
I still wish Burt Rutan had stuck with it or gotten the go-ahead from Paul Allen – for the amount of money and time VG have spent I am sure even a fraction of that could have gotten an SS1 V2.0 with a lot of the kinks worked out
Commercializing. Privatization. More accurate words.
I see what you’re saying. And I think that’s right.
In some parallel reality, Burt and Paul did exactly that. But, not in this one. The reason is Paul was a software developer at heart; something goes wrong, you debug the code. The close calls in the SS1 flight test program were enough for him. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone dying. Having seen SS2 go down, I don’t blame him.
Branson thrives on dare devil stunts. His latest book has an entire appendix with 75 close calls he had over the years. Branson also came into SS1 at the very end. He wasn’t there for all the near misses the program experienced. His understanding of the risks involved came only after people started dying.
Guess you’re right, you have been a lot closer to it all than most. I read the book about Branson’s balloon record attempts and the professional pilot of the balloon said that Branson hardly bothered doing any training (too busy) and pretty much just turned up on the day! If he had realised a bit (a lot) earlier on that not everyone has the same appetite for risk he might have paid a bit more attention to VG’s development over the years. Still, wish them well if they ever get there
Burt Rutan was a great aircraft designer. He was worse than terrible as a spacecraft designer. No amount of money or time would have fixed that.
thanks
thinking about it…there are two key differences in Aviation and Space flight
the first is the one I mentioned (you dont have to build the cities on earth or care for the passengers once you get them there) but the second is equally true…transportation was not the only force driver, but it was the key one
the driver in space “lift” has been either flags and footprints or mythic heroes in space…or its been sending machines into space which do unique things and “more or less” never return.
most of the things “in space” are either uncrewed, on a one way trip or when they return do so destructively.
the tough part for “wagons to the stars” is that 1) keeping humans alive in space is far harder then keeping our machines…it takes machines there to do everything…and 2) what humans do to make that financially justifiable is well never been found. we have been there 60 years and some weeks…and really no one knows what humans do in space that can make them money
except carry (putting on my Sanders hat) “Millionares and billionaires”
circling around all of this is that in terms of humans in space NASA has been content to just send its astronauts…and give lip service to the rest. so cost have stayed high
MUSK almost single handidly has started to challenge this. primarily because he wants to put more machines into orbit 🙂 but that has lowered cost enough so that the FIRST threshold of “people other then governmen” has been reached.
we have 40 years until humanity (I Might make it) celebrates 100 years of human spaceflight.
OK what does that look like with NASA? I think I can predict it
What does that look like with Musk? its harder. if Starship works then three things will be obvious and these are all good
first the government funnel for human spaceflight will be broken, second the technology development will have moved to a for profit basis to private industry and three…none of us have any idea where that goes..
I share you’re pessimism about VG and New shepard…but…its unclear to me that either you or I can be for sure. this might end up being the hottest thing since sliced bread in terms of “vacations”
Even if suborbital flights do become popular the VG technology has no where to go, while the New Shepard already served its function as a path finder for New Glenn. So although there might be some hype, until one crashes and things get ugly, there is little upside and a lot of downside to it in terms of the future of human space flights.
In terms of how the road leads to space settlement it will be an iterative process with humans first going to the Moon to support the robotic systems (like the Hubble repair) and then deciding to live there for their own reasons once habitats become comfortable enough to do so. As for their reasons, it will be the usual frontier cross-section from wanting to get away from the craziness of Earth to the lure of adventure.
Tom in my view its really hard to say what happens if Starship works…or what the future is UNLESS the only course ahead is another redux of the shuttle/station program…where hundreds of billions go out the door…and really nothing changes
I think most space fans (not mentioning anyone in particular and this is not referenced to you) overstate and over dramatize a space future for humans right now. Space is not a place right now for humans, our bodies dont do well there, there are endless issues for them…and worse…the robot equation works a lot better
Robots are improving on a massive scale and at a level far faster then humans in space are…and robots need far fewer machines to keep them alive. and I think we will find that humans need a LOT OF TOOLS to do anything useful in space particualrly outside the confines of a pressure vessel…so I suspect that the vaunted “human dexterity” will be not that useful
what I suspect we are headed for is a space world like oil rigs…where humans more or less run machines from a control room
the lever is always going to be with machines…they simply reqquire less infrastructure to work in space. the only saving grace is probably the time delay of radio…so that will put humans closer to them…which might mean people there…but…doing what that makes money
the only thing one can hope is that somehow Starship changes this…access becomes more routine, cheaper and well eventually humans find some niche they play in space in something that makes money…its hard to see what where that is, but its a hope at least with Starship
as for VG and NS. they might be the closest that the vast majority of humans get to space in the next 40-100 years. it may just be all people really want…I hope I am wrong but until technology gets a LOT LOT better…I just dont see millions of people in space in the next 100 years. we will be lucky to get over 100 in the next 40
Robert, We are not that far apart. It will be slower than m any advocates believe even if Starship is successful.
The first humans on the Moon will be there in very small numbers, living under heavy shielding for 6 to 12 month tours of duty. They will both operate and support the machines that do the actually work, a combination of science and early business ventures. For example providing robotic rovers on a pay per hour basis to researchers, with the rovers being converted in an underground pressurized garage for the clients. Others will operate observatories on a similar rental arrangement.
Gradually, as economics permit. it will expand as demand for those services increase and as uses are found for lunar materials. The first uses aren’t likely to be ones most space advocates believe, but will be in the form of luxury products for sale on Earth. That million dollar bottle of wine is a good example. Luxury goods always work best for making profits when transportation is expensive and limited. The current era of global trade was based on the global shipping of luxury goods in the 1500’s when costs relative to purchasing power was similar. It was only later that those luxury goods became commodities as price fell and demand increased as western nations become more wealthy.
Eventually folks will want to live for longer periods on the Moon and the first 1G settlements will be built. They won’t be as hard to build as many people think being just a circular tunnel underground with prefabricated modules in it. Starship has enough capability to build the first one capable of housing a thousand settlers with only about 500 flights based on research I am doing. It will be a hundred times easily to build 1G settlements on the Moon than in open space, at least until the Moon is industrialized.
Mars by contrast is a very different story. It will be mostly science missions funded by private consortium or governments due to the distance and cost even with Starship. An economic model for settlement will be a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult until you get a good industrial base on the Moon first.
In terms of just getting humans to space, a suborbital version of Starship would put VG and New Shepard out of business, especially as you wouldn’t need the Super Booster to reach space. If you are able to seat 250 passengers in it for $2.5 million a flight you get the ticket price down to around $10,000 each. But it would just be a side show to the real value of Starship.
Tom. I am sort of prepared to say I dont know how lunar settlements “take off” or happen. but thats ok because I dont think anyone knows this
what I do know is that with a nasa centric space program 40 years from nonw we will be doing exactly what we are doing now…so no real change
starship if it works offers some sort of “change” possible. my guess for what its worth is that (sadly in my view) we are going to see more massive constellations of satellites doing a lot of things (a lot of them military) that starship will make possible (Falcon almost has already)…
and from that we might start to see things like zero g applications like drug/materials research…but again they will be mostly robots controlled by humans and repaired/modified by those there
maybe even solar power plants in orbit…who knows
and I think that non NASA lunar operations will open up at some point as you discuss
where I see the billionare thing useful is that its a profit center for these efforts
Robert, If it was only NASA than it would be the dead end as NASA has few needs for astronauts in space other than for PR. What starship does is opens up opportunities for folks to experiment. Only then will there be an opportunity to see what types of lunar business models work.
The Internet is a good example, created in August 1969, it was mostly used by the government for its first twenty years and few knew it even existed. I remember getting my first email address in 1983 at NMSU for economic research I was doing (it made down loading government economic data easier) and folks wondered just what this email was when I told them about it. In 1989 there were only about 2500 sites listed on Gopher Net. Then the NSF loosen up on regulations and AOL came along, followed by lots of experimentation when it was fully opened to commercialization on New Year’s Day 1993.
40 years on, NASA will be doing mostly science and R&D but may not be all that significant a factor even there. 95+% of space activity will, by then, be private sector initiatives and operations. Most of the rest will be USSF.
As always, we disagree fundamentally about the economics of space settlement. Exotic exports to Earth will never be more than a tiny sideline compared with production intended to be used/consumed locally. Space will be a place both to visit and to live. The permanent residents – as was the case during the American settlement of the West – will be those who come looking for, and find, a better life for themselves in space than they could look forward to on Earth.
I’ll take a side show! Do you know how high/far a suborbital (sans booster) Starship is capable of going? – it sounds like a neat idea, although Musk is pretty good at discarding any idea that doesn’t directly contribute to getting to Mars
I heard in theory, without any payload, it could just make orbit so I guess it would still outperform SpaceshipTwo with 10 to 20 times as many “spaceflight participants” on board. But as you mention it would add nothing to Elon Musk’s goals of Mars and could even have a negative impact if there was an accident.
Thing is, anything SpaceX can straightforwardly do that makes money will contribute to getting to Mars and making a go of things once there. Hence Starlink. Suborbital and orbital space tourism on a mass scale could easily be two more such things.
There will be hundreds of thousands of humans in space within 40 years. Machines, including actual robots, will be important, but will also need a lot of maintenance and much of it will not be able to be done by other machines. The per capita expense of supporting humans off-world will fall dramatically as total human presence increases due to economies of scale.
Settling space will be more directly analogous to settling the American West than to the rise of airlines. Most settlers heading west weren’t going to any particular pre-existing city as there were few of those and all were small. The settlers mostly built their own towns and cities as part of the settlement process.
Settling space will involve a lot of in situ hard work and that isn’t going to be done by millionaires and billionaires. The normative Old West settler was a farmer. The normative space settler will be a skilled blue-collar worker. There’s your “democratization” of spaceflight.
The space hardhats will be almost immediately followed by providers of in situ personal services to the space hardhats. As in the settlement of the American West, this service cadre will be heavy with gamblers, publicans and prostitutes. Boom towns will be boom towns, even in space.
I am not the one who cares for the democratization of spaceflight. I dont think short term (the next 20 years) its that important.
if people are going to leave earth and go to space like the old west there will have to be massive improvements in living conditions and life style there…
If starship works I have no real idea to predict the next 40 years and that is good…but the hundreds of thousands and space as the old west…would surprise me a lot.
There should be a pretty good indication of who’s got the better side of this argument within our remaining lifespans – I hope. Even a decade hence there may be enough early returns in to make a decent call.
How much it would cost to keep a machine “alive” in any particular place in space – or on other planetary surfaces – is not a fixed quantity but depends crucially on the size and sophistication of said machine. I think a decent case can be made that keeping humans alive in space is cheaper than keeping high-function robots “alive.” That is likely to prove even more the case on planetary surfaces.
We are probably no more than a handful of years away from seeing a reasonably decisive answer to this question as SpaceX begins non-trivial industrialization of both the Moon and Mars. Personally, I’m betting hardhats and their camp followers turn out to be cheaper to “operate,” long-term, than fancy robots. There will certainly be places for fancy robots, but not people-free places.
that would be a first. wherever robots have replaced people they have without a doubt ended up being far cheaper and longer lived
when we start serious lunar work the death rate among humans will be something that this country has not seen in a long time
Exactly right. But I don’t think that profit was ever the prime motivation for either Branson of Bezos.
For Branson it was mostly a self-aggrandizing pet project that would make him look super cool.
For Bezos it was a small stepping stone to orbital colonies and lunar bases.
Neither of them has come close to putting their fortunes on the line in the way that Musk has.
Which is why neither has advanced as fast. Fear of failure and losing an investment that is a large percentage of your wealth is a great motive for the creativity needed to move technology forward.
Wonderful article. A point often lost in these discussions is that successful mass transit is almost always subsidized by taxes to provide infrastructure.
NASA’s latest rates for upmass and services reflect the current prices and the obsolescence of the ISS, and tell us: “Build something better!”
Good point. Mass transit is as much part of basic transportation infrastructure as streets and highways and international airports. All of those things are to varying degrees publicly funded and/or subsidized.
That not everybody uses mass transit doesn’t negate its value. I can’t imagine a large city like Los Angeles or Paris or Tokyo or Washington DC — all of which I have visited — without it. Without bus service, people without cars would have a hard time getting out of Mojave.
The fact that the Cato Institute doesn’t like mass transit is just more evidence of its value. Those guys would happily cut subsidies, then use the decline in ridership as prices increased and services were reduced as evidence the system was failing.
“Those guys would happily cut subsidies, then use the decline in ridership as prices increased and services were reduced as evidence the system was failing.”
The majority of the fanboys commenting here are Ayn-Rand-in-space libertarians and completely disagree with anything being “publicly funded and/or subsidized.”
In fact, what you just described, along with lying, bribery, and cronyism, are all just good business practices in the amoral world of Neoliberalism. The only “good” is profit because money is the god of their world. Deception is a form of prayer to them and any redistribution of wealth is blasphemy. Truth.
They are the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Their toxic ideology has done profound and unrealized damage to the public’s view of space exploration. Anyone that dares to criticize or present a different view is harassed and trolled into oblivion. This is true, but, like the big lie the Trump cult continues to beat democracy over the head with, it is being allowed and so the damage continues to accumulate. You allow trolls like sejones, dugeagle, and snarkyanswer to cyberstalk me to the point that I cannot comment on your forum without being grossly harassed- and this is a microcosm of what has happened on all space forums over the last decade.
The NewSpace Mob has hijacked all of them. You are fine with that Doug?
I keep banning you from here, and then you find a way to keep coming back. Why? I don’t want you here, I’ve made that clear many many times, but you don’t listen.
Even in NYC, the vast majority of mass transit riders are low-income. Simply giving every low-income American a free electric bicycle would be far cheaper than subsidizing construction and operation of mass transit systems. It would also result in far greater convenience, shorter trip times and the same 24/7/365 availability of rides enjoyed by auto owners.
But, of course, it would also eliminate all the customary graft attendant upon infrastructure construction as well as lots of featherbed union jobs which is why we’ll never see such an alternative implemented in any city run by the Crooked Party.
The NewSpace hustle….strip mining Earth orbit to beam cat videos down to people with no money to pay for them which will pay for shiny starships transporting the rich to their Martian retirement condos in Musktown. And tourists too!
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Hey, it pays the bills which is what matters on the frontier.
Hey, thanks for being honest. Unlike you, admitting you are a con man is not going to land the great one in jail though.