After decades of stagnation and decreasing government funding following the Cold War, the U.S. space industry has found new legs in recent years due to massive private financing and an increased interest from the Trump administration.
On Feb. 6, SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy booster rocket, the world’s most powerful rocket, using the same spaceport as NASA’s Apollo missions. The Falcon Heavy demonstrated that it could carry more payload at less expense than its competitors. With the ability to deliver 140,660 pounds (64 metric tons) to low Earth orbit, the Falcon Heavy could carry almost three times the payload of its closest competitor, the Delta IV Heavy built by the United Launch Alliance, according to SpaceX data. To top it off, the three first-stage boosters of the Falcon Heavy are designed to be recoverable and reusable.
The real game-changer is cost. SpaceX advertises that the Falcon Heavy flights cost $90 million per launch, which is a fraction of the $300 million to $500 million per launch charged by United Launch Alliance for the Delta IV Heavy.
The fact that SpaceX is able to support this research and make the technology commercially viable—as a privately funded company—is no small feat.
In the decades following the launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik I in 1957, early innovations in space were sponsored by governments of the United States and Soviet Union. Funding slowed during the years following the end of the Cold War, while the spaceflight industry was dominated by agencies such as NASA, its counterparts in other countries, and defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Private capital from these billionaires, along with increased investment by incumbent aerospace contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed and countries such as China and Russia, have ushered in a second space age.
Beyond Falcon Heavy
Musk told reporters in Cape Canaveral, Florida, that the “Falcon Heavy opens up a new class of payload … it can launch things right to Pluto and beyond, no stop needed,” according to Space.com.Musk predicts the next launch of the Falcon Heavy to be in the next three to six months, depending on how quickly the company can produce the airframe of the center core. To anyone who follows Musk’s other company, Tesla, this can sound concerning, especially given that the center core of the Feb. 6 launch was lost.
Beyond the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX plans to deliver NASA astronauts aboard its Dragon spacecraft on the smaller Falcon 9 rocket. So far, all of the Falcon 9 flights have been cargo-only.
The BFR is a giant booster rocket with the ability to carry a large spaceship with potentially hundreds of people, to eventually send humans to the moon or Mars.
The New Space Race
Space is quickly becoming a focal point for governments and the private sector.“Rapidly falling costs are lowering the barrier to participate in the space economy, making new industries like space tourism, asteroid mining, and on-orbit manufacturing viable, and growing the existing flagship communications satellite services business while taking exploration deeper into space,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in an April 2017 research note titled “Space—the Next Investment Frontier.”
The key players in the space industry belong to three main groups: launch providers, satellite manufacturers, and operators. There are additionally emerging industries of space tourism, space militarization, and deep space mining.
Blue Origin last month successfully conducted a test fire of its BE-4 rocket engine expected to power its upcoming “New Glenn” rocket. The New Glenn rocket, which has a slightly smaller payload than the Falcon Heavy, is expected to launch in 2020.
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