ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Mega-rich entrepreneurs are seizing lucrative opportunities to boldly go where only government agencies with hefty budgets have gone before … and beyond. Hartley Milner explores the burgeoning commercial space industry, its trailblazers, triumphs and troughs.

As dawn breaks over California’s Mojave airport, White Knight, a jet-powered carrier plane, takes to the skies with a curious, cigar-shaped ‘parasite’ aircraft clamped to its belly. Whoops and cheers go up from among the thousands of aeronautics enthusiasts who have turned out to watch an historic moment unfold.

Excitement mounts as White Knight spirals ever higher before vanishing into the blue, its progress betrayed only by a wispy vapour trail. At an altitude of 14 kilometres (47,000 ft), the mothership releases its payload, SpaceShipOne … and the mission is on.

After gliding for a few tense seconds, SpaceShipOne fires up its twin hybrid rockets, thrusting it at a speed of 3,581 kph (2,225 mph) to 100.12 km (62.21 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Pilot Mike Melvill reaches into his pocket and takes out some M&Ms and releases them in the cockpit. “They just spun around like little sparkling things in front of my eyes,” he said later. “I was so blown away, I got another handful and threw them out as well.”

SpaceShipOne had crossed the Kármán line, the internationally accepted point of entry to space. The suborbital test flight on June 21 2004, and two others later in the year, won the rocket craft’s developers, Scaled Composites, the $10 million (€9.20 million) Ansari X Prize for the first repeated crewed flights in a non-government, reusable spaceship.

The breakthrough marked a major turning point in commercial space exploration by opening up the industry to new entrants who brought with them new ideas and expertise from other industries, such as aerospace engineering, manufacturing and software development. The sector received a further boost from national space agencies pulling back from funding their programmes wholly with taxpayers’ money in favour of striking public-private partnerships within a competitive space economy.

Competition has forced down costs dramatically in recent times, by as much as 95 per cent for some satellite launches to low-Earth orbit. But space programmes have a habit of consuming budgets with the voracity of a black hole, so investors will need deep pockets for a good deal longer.

Deep pockets

And pockets come no deeper than Elon Musk’s. His company, SpaceX, dominates space at the moment, launching 138 orbital missions from its Starbase site in Texas last year … more than half the global total. It also remains the only private company to have successfully launched, orbited and recovered a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, and taken astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Last September, SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission included the first ever spacewalk by a private individual. Billionaire adventurer Jared Isaacman is believed to have forked out $200 million (€184.70 million) for all four seats on Polaris.

But Musk has even loftier ambitions … settling humans on the moon and Mars. Musk is pinning his hopes on a fully reusable, super heavy-lift variant of his megarocket, Starship, the biggest and most powerful space craft ever built.

Musk posted that his first missions to the red planet – 225 million kilometres (140 million miles) from Earth – would take place from 2026. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” he said. “If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights will be in four years. Flight rates will grow exponentially, with the goal being a self-sustaining city on Mars in about 20 years.”

Moon landing

Meantime, SpaceX is contracted by NASA to prepare a lander modelled on Starship for the first crewed moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. The two astronauts will become the first female and first person of colour to set foot on the lunar surface. They will spend almost a week exploring the moon’s south pole region and performing a variety of scientific experiments, including sampling water-ice. The mission is scheduled for mid-2027.

However, Starship launch timelines were put in jeopardy earlier this year when two uncrewed missions ended in explosive failures due to fires breaking out in the engine compartment. The back-to-back setbacks occurred during early mission phases that SpaceX had easily completed previously. Starship vehicles have been launched eight times to date, but the most recent incidents brought the overall success rate down to 50 per cent.

Musk’s closest rival in space is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin company blasted its first rocket, New Glenn, into orbit in January. The flight, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, was a success, but the rocket failed to land on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean and was lost. When the malfunction is sorted, New Glenn will offer a more powerful alternative to SpaceX’s reusable workhorse craft, Falcon 9. Bezos wants to use it for his Project Kuiper programme to deploy 3,000 low-Earth satellites to provide broadband services.

Blue Origin was last year awarded a $3.40 billion (€3.13 billion) contract to build a lander to take two astronauts to the moon’s surface from NASA’s Lunar Gateway moon-orbiting space station, which is currently under construction. Gateway will help the agency and its partners research and develop what is required for a sustained human presence in deep space, as well as chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.

Flying the flag for Britain, but not looking to plant it on a celestial body just yet, business magnate Sir Richard Branson is focusing instead on offering ‘low-cost’ space tourism. Since its first successful commercial flight in June 2023, his California-based Virgin Galactic company has completed a dozen more trips and plans to have its six-person, third generation Delta class spaceship ready to launch next year. Tickets for a truly out-of-this-world experience will be a snip at around $600,000 (€552,000) per seat. But hurry, space geeks … Virgin is understood to have taken 700 bookings already.

This February, Californian startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft to a small asteroid named 2022 OB5 in the first private mission of its kind. The quest was to collect data about the space rock towards eventually mining minerals in space to replenish Earth’s rapidly depleting critical resources. But mission control had difficulty sustaining communications with the probe, leaving it to tumble aimlessly through space. AstroForge is planning to launch a more ambitious attempt to land on the asteroid within the next few years.

European agency

Not to be eclipsed, the European Space Agency (ESA) has also made the commercialisation of space a strategic priority. The Germany-based agency sees involving the private sector as critical to its ambitions for a green and digital Europe, and to boost the continent’s profile in a global space economy projected to be worth €1.80 trillion by 2035.

In March, ESA’s new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6 – built by a consortium of European companies – carried out its first commercial mission, deploying a French military reconnaissance satellite into orbit. This means Europe can now independently launch satellites for the first time since Russia pulled its heavy Soyuz rockets after invading Ukraine.

Also this year, the agency’s Space Rider reusable robotic laboratory is due to make its maiden flight, with the aim of providing commercial customers with “affordable and independent” access to space for the benefit of humankind. The uncrewed lab will spend two months carrying out experiments using microgravity to advance research in areas such as pharmaceutics, biomedicine, biology and physical science.

Earthly benefits

No vertical orbital rocket has ever blasted off from western Europe, with all launches being from overseas sites. However, a handful of companies are hoping to change that with help from ESA, which funds rocket launch companies through its Boost! programme. In 2024, it awarded €44.22 million to Isar Aerospace, Orbex, RFA and HyImpulse in the hope that one or more of them will soon begin regular flight missions from two potential sites: Andøya in Norway and the Shetland Islands north of the UK.

Space exploration has produced a plethora of down-to-Earth benefits, from solar panels, implantable heart monitors and cancer therapies to lightweight materials, water-purification technologies, improved computing systems and global search-and-rescue systems. Some of the latest spinoffs from NASA projects include:

• Facilities on the International Space Station for commercial companies to perform science, including culturing higher-quality human heart tissue and knee cartilage and pharmaceutical crystals that can be grown on Earth to provide new medical treatments

• Antigravity treadmills to help people with mobility conditions to walk or run, first developed to maintain the fitness of astronauts in weightless environments

• Nutritional supplements originally formulated to keep space crews fit and mitigate the health hazards of long stays in space

• Technology for the 3D printing of buildings on the moon now being used by its developers to print large structures here on Earth. More bizarrely, another group of researchers has plans to build homes on Earth from a concept it developed to grow lunar buildings from fungus.

Said Dan Lockney, technology transfer executive at NASA: “I’ve learned it’s almost impossible to predict where space technology will find an application in the commercial market.”