When President John F. Kennedy told Congress in 1961 that he wanted to send Americans to the moon, he freely admitted doing so would leave lawmakers with a costly bill.
Nearly six decades later, another White House’s plan to return to Earth’s best-known satellite before continuing to Mars relies less on Congress and more on private enterprise, opening up lucrative new revenue opportunities in a global industry valued at $335 billion in 2015.
It’s too soon to estimate how much President Trump’s plan to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military, a Space Force, would expand the sector but his related push to streamline the process for companies seeking to do business off-planet is already benefiting firms from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin to private ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“The space market and the space environment, from a business perspective, is the best since the 1960s,” said Frank Slazer, vice president for space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, an Arlington, Va.- based trade group. “It’s a much more mature market with a broader range of activities.”
While much of the 1960s space race focused on the Apollo program, which met Kennedy’s challenge to land on the moon by the end of the decade with Neil Armstrong’s now-famous lunar walk, today’s endeavors range from satellite launches to the U.S. government’s Orion spacecraft, SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle and research programs aboard the International Space Station.
“Investment in the 1960s was almost exclusively the U.S. and other governments,” Slazer said, while today’s market includes funding from venture capital firms, banks and foreign investors, a diversity that ensures “if one sector goes down a little bit, it doesn’t mean the whole enterprise goes.”
The White House’s effort to woo such private investment is reflected in the creation of what Secretary Wilbur Ross refers to as a “one-stop shop” for the industry within the Department of Commerce. A space administration inside Ross’s office will offer a streamlined, central interface to handle everything from remote sensing to export controls, trade promotion and space traffic management, he said.
Among its priorities is easing the licensing process for commercial activities in space so that companies like SpaceX can obtain blanket permits for operations such as in-flight photography and video-recording that would otherwise require separate applications for each trip.
The agency is employing state-of-the-art space traffic-monitoring technology and improved government services to “incentivize more companies to launch under the U.S. flag,” Ross explained at a June meeting of the National Space Council, a group that Trump revived during his first year in office. “Nontraditional activities like space tourism, asteroid mining, space manufacturing and lunar habitation will soon become a reality.”
Indeed, Trump has emphasized that returning to the moon is a pivotal step in his vision for American space exploration.
“This time, we will do more than plant our flag and leave our footprints: We will establish a long-term presence, expand our economy and build the foundation for the eventual mission to Mars,” the president said. “Legions of welders and metalworkers, scientists and engineers stand ready to build a powerful new rocket and gleaming new spaceships.”
In the meantime, more prosaic businesses such as Earth-orbiting satellites for commercial and defense purposes are driving growth at companies like Chicago-based Boeing, where sales in the defense, space and security division grew 13 percent at the start of the year to $5.76 billion.
“We’re going to continue to invest in our satellite business,” Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg said at an Alliance Bernstein conference. “We continue to see an almost insatiable demand for commercial bandwidth, communications bandwidth and, in many cases, those are complimentary with defense capabilities.”
Earlier this year, Boeing delivered its first intertank hardware for NASA’s new Space Launch System, a vehicle powerful enough to carry the Orion spacecraft capable of exploring beyond Earth’s orbit. The intertank, situated between two mammoth propellant tanks, houses the rocket’s avionics, the computer systems that serve as its brains.
Lockheed, NASA’s primary contractor for Orion, is “making great progress” on a test vehicle, and a subsequent iteration that would actually carry astronauts should be ready for trials in the mid-2020s, said CEO Marillyn Hewson.
The craft’s eventual operations will be smoothed by an executive order the president signed last week to improve the monitoring of debris in Earth’s orbit, where some 600,000 pieces move at thousands of miles per hour, posing a threat to both ships and satellites.
“As we continue to thrive in space, we also have more people launching to orbit, and an increasingly complex universe of satellites overhead,” said Jim Bridenstine, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Establishing guidelines and mechanisms for navigating that environment will help stabilize a “burgeoning space economy,” he said.
Strong, continuous financial support of NASA’s initiatives “is really important to our country,” noted Boeing’s Muilenburg. “That sustained funding and support that we’re seeing from the administration is very encouraging.”
In commercial space travel, meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic completed in April the first supersonic, rocket-powered flight of its VSS Unity spaceplane, a craft build on the data and lessons of its predecessor vehicle, Enterprise, which broke up during a rocket-powered flight over California in 2014.
Following an investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board said the vehicle’s copilot, who was killed in the crash, had activated a so-called feather system intended to smooth reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, too soon. The pilot suffered serious injuries.
Unity’s successful flight nearly four years later marks the beginning of the last phase of its flight-test program, which includes full-duration rocket burns, the company said.
As Virgin Galactic’s trials move forward, the U.S Transportation Department is working with both the Air Force and NASA to streamline commercial space launches as much as possible without hurting national security, said Secretary Elaine Chao.
Such actions “send a very clear message to companies around the world,” she said. “If you want to license a commercial space operation, America is the place to do it.”
