Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo Or Spirit of Solyndra?

MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."

Comments

Re:SpaceX rocks!

[geckipede]

SpaceX have had only a single successful commercial flight, and even then that was somebody being willing to take a risk on putting their payload onboard a testing flight. I'm happy to be hopeful, and I see no reason why they can't in time develop into a company with a record for reliability, but it's premature to say that they deliver stuff that works.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[Teancum]

Iridium is able to make a small profit after admittedly a financial disaster over the previous decade. The next generation satellites look like they will finally have some real bandwidth as well.... being flown up into space on Falcon 9 rockets no less, so it looks like Elon Musk has that market cornered as well.

Really, commercial spaceflight currently falls into the following categories:

• Telecommunications - including GEO orbits and stuff like Iridium. If anything this is a growth industry, and the stuff going into space has even become larger over time where it is definitely a growth market for heavy lift. It is also a pretty saturated market, however, with most of the players in this market segment very well known to each other. Another Ted Turner type could emerge here, but not likely. It is a multi-billion dollar industry though and something not to ignore.
• Orbital reconnaissance - while government customers are painfully obvious, there are numerous commercial customers as well. Some of them are famous and can be found with Google Earth, but there are other commercial groups that have specialized remote sensing applications including agriculture and mining industries which aggressively use satellite data and will pay billions (collectively) for the data that these satellites produce. If mining leases come up, you had better believe that satellite views with different sequences of color filters (including multiple UV and IR filters) have been applied on potential plots to help identify potential mineral deposits. Included with this is weather observation data that has a similar kind of value... and isn't strictly GEO either.
• Remote sensing sort of a combination of the two previous areas but with the need to have something on the ground. Basically this is sending data from very remote areas to be collected in a systematic fashion and sent to a central data warehouse. Some of this is now being done over fiber optic lines, but satellite transmission of data still serves the needs in many areas. Some surprising "customers" including Wal-Mart and other retailers, but it is a mainstay for mining and petroleum extraction. It certainly wouldn't be out of the question for a dedicated satellite being used to handle very sensitive information from remote sensing equipment, and having companies being willing to pay for the launch of a multi-million dollar satellite for the value of that information.
• Navigation - obviously the governments of the world are heavily invested into this area of space economic activity, but the fact that there are huge economic benefits to nations that have space-based navigation systems is certainly a market that can arguably be called "commercial" as well. There is no possible way I could ever imagine the U.S. Congress ever cutting funding to the GPS constellation, although if that ever were to happen I would expect a commercial replacement to happen in a very short period of time. It certainly fits on a list of commercial enterprises directly related to space and utterly depend upon space-based assets. It is also a market for launchers as well.

To add to these areas, two other very likely and emergent areas of commercial spaceflight can be summed up in the two following areas:

• Hypersonic Courier Services - if you have a package that absolutely positively has to get somewhere by yesterday (literally a possibility across the international date line), a very high speed courier service can be very beneficial. There are most definitely companies who would be willing to pay for a courier service that has the current rough price point per kilogram that spaceflight has at the moment (about $10k per kg).... if only it was dependable and regular between destinations. The trick here is to get a regular flight service going where you can be certain as to when something launches to within an hour or so rather than the current rough prediction of the neighborhood of several months of rel