Dr. Alan Stern
Alan Stern
Southwest Research Institute
“New Space Economy of the Late 2020’s”
Overview
- More pessimistic about commercial space – “If you’re waiting for Godot, Godot is not comingâ€
- Why? Put up a picture of Congress in session
- Too many cooks in the kitchen, too many other priorities
- Every other November, my job is at stake…my job is to protect my constituents
- Must think more about how to do commercial space without the government’s involvement
Space Circa 2025
Suborbital
- 2nd gen suborbital – $30K per seat, 10-20 flights per day, 60-200 seats per day, $.7-$2.2 billion/year
- First generation point-to-point suborbital in testing
- Very difficult to have first generation vehicles online – Virgin Galactic predicted commercial spaceflight in 2007, they’re still not flying
Orbital
- Flights once a week in LEO taxis…
- Garriott: Made $9 million on his $35 million flight – Garriott said when prices drop to $9 million, then can fly whenever he wants
Beyond LEO
- 1-2 commercial lunar flybys, 2-4 seats/year, $400 million year
Total Commercial Market Size in 2025
- HSF @ $2025: $10 billion/year
- Current Industries:
- $10 billion: launch
- $100 billion: comsats
- $500 billion: airline industry
What Could Drive Commercial Space Forward
- Lean, high volume transport that fulfills an economic need
- Investors with breakthrough apps
- Innovative near-space access for “European vacation†prices
- High altitude balloon all day for the family
- Near-space hotel
- Exploration and entertainment applications in human spaceflight
- Money from businesses surrounding spaceports
- Monetizing space science
- NASA spends $5 billion/year on space science research
- Commercial companies are not in that space
- Eschew government entanglements
- Win on volume
- Think about “mom and pop†space businesses
- Not every business in space has to have its own spacecraft and launchers
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* Near-space hotel
That sounds intriguing. I imagine a high-altitude chalet like a ski resort, but for space divers. I could see the initial construction lifted and held up there by balloon, but later a tether could be attached going up to higher orbit (anybody want to do the calculation on how high the counter weight has to be?) as a proto-space-elevator to send space divers higher up the bean stalk to go after new space-diving records.
> Eschew government entanglements
I disagree. SpaceX owes a lot to NASA funding. NASAs COTS funding has helped tremendously and its commitment to purchasing future flights provides other customers with a level of assurance that SpaceX is going to be around.
NASA as a purchaser for commercial services which it helped facilitate is the model which should repeated. The same sort of thing should be done for cis-lunar and lunar-surface sustainable space development with the goal of achieving lunar-derived, propellant-quantity deliveries of oxygen (maybe hydrogen) to LEO. If this can be achieved, then everyone can start playing in space.