by If the 20th century’s space race was about political power, this century’s race will be about money. But for those who dream of sending people back to the moon and maybe Mars, it’s an exciting time to be alive whether it’s presidents or billionaires paying the price.
Spaceflight is having a renaissance moment, bringing a fresh energy not seen since the days of the Apollo program and, for the first time, with private companies rather than governments leading the charge.
A series of recent milestone missions, most notably the increasingly successful test flights of the largest rocket ever made and the first privately built probe to land on the lunar surface, have fueled a growing idea that people are entering a space called the “third space. age”.
“To say we are in a new era is fair,” said Greg Sadlier, a space economist and co-founder of the know.space consultancy. “We are in the age of competition, or the age of commerce. The barriers to entry are lower, the costs have come down, which has opened the doors to a much larger pool of nations,” he said. “It’s the democratization of space, if you will.”
Today, more than 70 countries have space programs, but for a long time the only major players were the United States and the Soviet Union.
Mankind’s first space explorer, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, orbited the globe in April 1961. A year later, the President of the United States, John F Kennedy, gave his famous speech “we choose to go to to the moon” speech, promising to put an American man on the scene. lunar surface by the end of the decade before the “hostile banner of conquest”.
“To be sure, all of this cost us all a lot of money,” Kennedy admitted, but the cold war inspired him to spend the equivalent of today’s hundreds of billions in US taxpayer money for the space race. to win.
The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a brief moment of global hope, ushering in a more cooperative second space age. The International Space Station was built over 13 years and, since 2000, people of many nationalities have continued to live in space, working together on experiments in the orbiting laboratory.
However, this second era also saw a decline in efforts to send humans further into space, symbolized largely by NASA’s space shuttle program which never sent humans beyond Earth orbit and was eventually disbanded in 2011. because the US government didn’t want to do that. keep the high costs of rolling banks. After that, Washington had to rely on Moscow’s Soyuz rockets to send its astronauts into space.
But those high costs are now being driven by private firms entering the scene, often as government contractors. In recent years, some of these companies have started making money, although not for headline reasons related to space tourism but mainly for launching communication satellites, especially broadband internet. Many estimates suggest that the global space industry could generate revenues of more than $1tn within the next two decades.
In an article published last year by the strategy and influence management consultancy McKinsey & Company, global managing partner Bob Sternfels and his colleagues wrote to CEOs: “If space isn’t part of your strategy, it needs to be.”
They added: “Only recently have we seen a significant acceleration down the cost curve: launch costs have fallen by 95% (and are expected to drop further in the coming years) due to reuse, improved engineering, and increased volumes .”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX was at the forefront of this movement, shipping 96 hours last year with its reusable rockets. The company’s largest system, called Starship and still in development, has been marketed as an interplanetary probe. Musk says he built the 120-meter rocket so that humans can colonize Mars. Previously, NASA contracted SpaceX to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon for the past decade.
As a business venture, it could make money long before that by serving as the equivalent of a flying cargo ship. The starship has a payload of up to 150 metric tons, five times the load that the space shuttle could carry.
Global politics continues to play a role in space but with more players. China has overtaken Russia as the US’s main national competitor, with its own space station in the works, probes on the moon and a rover on Mars. On Friday, Beijing is to send a robotic spacecraft to the far side of the moon.
The south pole of the moon, in particular, is seen as a “golden zone” for lunar exploration because it contains water ice, which could be used as drinking water and even broken down to make rocket fuel.
Scientists are nervous about the politics and commercialization of space, especially when they talk about future “mining” operations on the pristine moon. Proponents of space exploration, however, point to the progress that has been made so far. The CT scan, a critical medical device capable of identifying tumors, traces its origins to pre-Apollo mission research; astronauts on the space station are using the unique microgravity environment to better understand diseases like Alzheimer’s.
For economists such as Sadlier, the third space age creates an unprecedented situation – one that could undermine the foundations of the market system. “In economics, we assume that resources are limited; limited land; natural resources are limited,” he said. “With space, it allows us to change that.”
