Commercial Space Industry Poised For Launch, Lifting Investors On A Ride To Success, Garriott Predicts; New Uses For Space Seen
NEW YORK — Private commercial space firms will be able to perform space missions for a fraction of the money that NASA requires to perform the same work, Richard Garriott, the space tourist, said.
And NASA could perform its missions with far less funding, if it worked as private firms do, Garriott added.
His comments, in an interview with Space & Missile Defense Report, stand at odds with those who argue that NASA is given too little financial support to perform the missions that Congress assigned it. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, separate story in this issue; Friday, May 22, 2009; Monday, April 20, 2009; Monday, April 6, 2009.)
President Obama has proposed a NASA funding plan for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010, that would flat line at less than $19 billion annually in later years. Critics say that is inadequate to finance the Constellation Program producing the next generation U.S. spaceship system, Orion-Ares, even with money freed up by halting space shuttle flights next year.
But Garriott said if NASA operated with the same efficiencies as private space firms, it could perform its missions on $9 billion to $11 billion a year.
For example, he said he received a photo of a simple task performed at NASA, and saw roughly 30 personnel wearing “bunny suits,” meaning clean-room clothing. At a private firm, a tiny fraction of that many people would have the work completed, he said.
Another example: he said he once was visiting Elon Musk, founder and leader of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. Musk showed Garriott a large, roughly six-foot-diameter, metal component, a docking plate for a spacecraft. Obtained through the usual NASA procurement procedures from a major space contractor, the plate cost more than $1 million, Garriott related.
But, Garriott continued, an identical plate obtained directly from a subcontractor cost just $60,000.
Given time, Garriott predicted, Musk and other private entrepreneurs will bring down the cost to achieve orbit in space by “a factor of two to 10.”
NASA, however, might respond that it had to begin the space race against the Soviet Union with nothing in the 1960s, and invent the technology needed to achieve space flight at enormous costs, technology that today is taken for granted and used by all, including private firms. Further, NASA has high safety standards, which it must maintain if the public is to continue supporting the space program. And NASA is a large organization, a size vital to its ability to accomplish missions.
Garriott is an investor in Space Adventures Ltd. and became its vice chairman. That is the company that arranged for his space flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle. His father Owen Garriott, a former NASA astronaut, is on the Space Adventures advisory board. Richard Garriott, however, found his poor eyesight would bar him forever from becoming a NASA astronaut, meaning his only chance to travel to space lay in becoming a space tourist.
The younger Garriott reportedly paid some $30 million for his October flight to the International Space Station, which he financed partly out of the fortune he has earned — twice — as an inventor of video games.
Other funding, millions of dollars, came from companies that wished to have Garriott perform research work while he was on the space station, in its effectively zero-gravity environment. The younger Garriott thus became the first second-generation American space traveler.
He predicted space travel for non-astronauts will become far more affordable.
Asked how low the price of a ticket to space might go, he estimated it will tumble to “the single digits of millions,” or less than $10 million, and said ultimately, space fare prices will plunge to “the lower half of single digits,” or less than $5 million a trip.
In other words, space travel costs soon may be one-sixth of $30 million.
He spoke in an interview with Space & Missile Defense Report at the Space Business Forum New York 2009 presented by The Space Foundation at the Hilton New York Hotel.
Later, Garriott appeared before the Forum audience as part of a panel presentation.
By offering to perform experiments and similar work in space, Garriott said he raised a major sum. “I generated millions of dollars of revenue which — while it did not pay for my flight — clearly offset a good chunk of my flight,” Garriott said.
This is crucial, he said: as the price of a ticket to space tumbles, it eventually will fall low enough to cover the entire price of a ride to the heavens. As the price of access to space continues declining, “when the price of [space travels] comes down low enough, to where” it intersects the amount money to be raised by performing work in space, trips aloft will become open to many.
When that happens, space travel won’t be restricted just to those with immense personal wealth, and demand for space flights will skyrocket, he predicted. “A very large amount of new [space travel] business … will become apparent,” he said.
Another crucial point, he said, is that at this point, the immense potential for work in microgravity has yet to be comprehended. Just as the true value of computer chips and their applications, or the value of the Global Positioning System, weren’t immediately apparent when they first were invented, so too the potential applications of microgravity have yet to be discerned, he said.
“Who would have predicted that every one of … our cell phones has the capability of doing a GPS” function? he asked.
Similarly, “there is work to be done in space,” such as “space based solar power,” he said. There, a solar array or other device could collect energy from the sun and beam it down to Earth, meaning that energy-poor areas could have non-polluting energy with zero carbon emissions. Or, he said, medical research and drug development can be performed in space that couldn’t be performed in the gravitational environment on Earth.
He estimated the initial potential here as “millions of dollars worth of work, not billions of dollars worth of work.” But as the timeline extends into the future, those would be the first steps, followed by much more work as the potential of operations in space microgravity are comprehended by corporate leaders, he said. As that occurs, in concert with plummeting costs of traveling to orbit, “only then will we actually uncover the true value of space,” he said.
A day will come when would-be space travelers won’t have to shell out their life savings for a trip to the cosmos, he promised. Then space travel will be democratized, with large numbers of people heading aloft, he predicted.
A stupendous number of people worldwide are enthralled by space, and wish to make the journey to orbit, Garriott said, terming space tourism “a permanent business.” As the price of a trip to space declines, the number of people making the trip will soar, he said. Viewing companies such as Space Adventures, XCOR Aerospace Inc. and SpaceX, he predicted that “many of these ventures are going to be not just slightly successful, but extraordinarily successful.”
For any investor wishing to get in on the ground floor of this new space age, he said the first stop should be a meeting with The Personal Space Flight Federation, which soon shall be called the Commercial Space Flight Federation. This group includes not only the makers of rockets and spacecraft, but also operators of that hardware, and builders and operators of launch sites.
The emergent success of these “new space” firms, which some view as brash upstarts, will not be thwarted or denied, Garriott said.
“Old space,” the decades-old space establishment that until now has defined travel to the final frontier, has a choice to make in its relations with new space, Garriott said: either elect to support it (which will not only accelerate it but mean the newcomers are space participants), or ignore it/go against it, which would clearly slow the progress of new space, “but will not stop it.” The emergence of new space “is inevitable,” Garriott predicted.
He related that his motivation in investing in private space-travel companies was because he wanted to fly to orbit. His investment adventures included plowing money into 10 companies that all failed. Commercial space travel might still be a dream without the incentive of the X-Prize Foundation effort led by Peter Diamandis, Garriott indicated. The $10 million Ansari X-Prize was offered for the first private-sector manned space flight.
Now, Garriott spends much of his time traversing the world, traveling every week, speaking to conferences such as Space Business Forum New York 2009, preaching the gospel and spreading the faith in the future of private commercial space, a vast new industry that he says will not be denied.