Space Race is Hotting Up Due To Private Players

Dream of Settling In Space : The Race Has Just Started 

Recently, I wrote about Business Moghul Richard Branson’s foray into outer space and his space  adventure to feel the thrill of outer space. Clearly, in the race,  he left behind Jeff Bezos who has the similar capabilities. I am sure Jeff will soon do the similar or a better act. 

Branson and Bezos didn’t just pay for a ticket to be in outer space —they paid for the spaceships ! Individuals, if they’re wealthy enough, are no longer beholden to government craft when they want to leave the planet for a little while.

The private  voyages have generated an awful lot of takes. Some have celebrated the engineering and persistence required to fly a bunch of humans into space and bring them back safely, or the wonder of pushing the boundaries of space possibility. But the game plan is much much bigger : colonise planets to shift people elsewhere in the space.

Around the turn of the century, when the three men’s respective space companies were just getting started, they were treated as evidence that these business leaders were dreaming too big. Now, notwithstanding some legitimate arguments about effective tax rates and who makes public policy, it’s the critics who are thinking too small. There is a need not to treat space flights as joyrides of billionaire.

The fact remains that after decades of false starts, Earth’s orbit and points beyond are already being commercialized at incredible speed by dozens of private companies. Branson’s and Bezos’s willingness to go up in their own spacecraft amounts to little more than an endorsement that their space crafts  are safe enough for them to try, and, more pointedly, that space is open for business. Even if Bezos decides to back out before his flight on July 20, other people will keep going into space, possibly by the thousands, along with tens of thousands of machines designed to further commodify the heavens. What happens up above us will be one of the most important economic and technological stories of the next decade, whether or not Musk ever settles Mars.

I look these private space visits as beginning of a new era of space travel. It may prove something like  telecom Revolution witnessed during past twenty years. Mobile phones of 2000 were very costly with limited functionality thereof at that point of time. Look at today’s mobile phones 100 times more fast and efficient. 

Here are just a few of the less remarked-on recent stories out of the private space industry. First was the stock market debut of a company called Astra Space, which, backed by venture capitalists, built a viable orbital rocket in just a few years. Its goal is to fly satellites into orbit every single day. Shortly after Astra recently gone public at a value of $2.1 billion, satellite maker Planet Labs—which uses hundreds of eyes in the sky to photograph the Earth’s entire landmass daily—announced its plans to do the same, at a value of $2.8 billion. Firefly Aerospace has a rocket on a California pad awaiting clearance to launch. OneWeb and Musk’s SpaceX are both regularly launching satellites meant to blanket the planet in high-speed internet access. Rocket Lab, in the previously spacecraft-free country of New Zealand, is planning missions to the moon and Venus.

The SPAC frenzy has been particularly kind to the private space industry, including some of the companies named above. Easier access to public markets has helped draw billions of dollars from excited investors to an industry once dependent on governments with vague military objectives or expansive views of public works. Partly as a result, the number of satellites orbiting the Earth is projected to rise from about 3,400 to anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 in the next decade or so—and that’s even if these companies just fulfill the orders they’ve received so far.

Eveleth heard the rumors from his mentor Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in nuclear arms control who specializes in this kind of citizen recon, commonly known as open source intelligence. In May, Lewis asked the young man to see what he could find. Based on a previous discovery, Eveleth knew that the Chinese military had sometimes excavated a site to build silos, then covered them with inflatable structures similar to the small white domes used for indoor sports. (Lewis calls them “bouncy houses of death.”) Eveleth went looking for more domes. “I had to make a series of assumptions,” he says. “I assumed it would be in northern China because there’s been lots of activity there. I also assumed it would be on nice, flat areas with high-quality ground.”

The undergrad searched satellite images spanning thousands of miles of Chinese desert. Until very recently, hardly any such images would exist for this territory. Conventional imaging satellites are costly, and generally need to be pointed with precision at discrete areas of high interest. Planet Labs’ much smaller, cheaper models, aimed at global coverage, have now taken years’ worth of pictures of the area Eveleth wanted. He created a gridded map and worked through it for more than a month until he spotted a collection of about 120 domes in one spot. Then he sorted the images from that area by date to see a play-by-play of the site’s clearing and construction. “We knew that it was a big deal,” he says.

Early on June 27, Eveleth and Lewis asked Planet to take some higher-resolution photos of the site. The company’s engineers reoriented the relevant satellites using radio signals from earthbound stations, and barely 24 hours later, the pair could see much clearer shots of the domes, as well as trenches for communication cables leading out from what appeared to be underground operations facilities. In early July, Lewis took Eveleth’s discovery to the press. The U.S. Department of State called the news “concerning.” Chinese state media said the site was just a wind farm under construction, but images from another satellite startup, Capella Space, undermined that explanation. Capella’s systems, based on a special type of radar, appeared to show liquid runoff coming out of the domes, and a series of metallic structures typically used to house weapons. With inputs from Bloomberg