by Jeff Pollard
Right now, the official plan is for NASA to not launch any astronauts into space until they launch the second SLS rocket and third Orion spacecraft in 2021. That's right, their best case scenario is that they won't go to space for the next decade. That first flight, called EM-1 (for Exploration Mission 1) is supposed to send four astronauts on a trip around the Moon, merely replicating what NASA already accomplished in 1968 with Apollo 8's circling of the Moon. Well, you have to start somewhere. So what's next? Two Moon landings a year?
Nope. The plan is for EM-2 to follow in 2023. Followed by EM-3 in 2024 or 2025. EM-2 is slated to send four astronauts to an Earth-Moon Lagrange Point. It'll be the furthest into deep space humans have been, farther out than the orbit of the Moon, but there's not really anything of interest to do there. EM-3 might send four astronauts out to a near-Earth asteroid. Which sounds cool, but don't go picturing astronauts walking around on an asteroid, it'll have no discernible gravity and they will merely spacewalk around it, grab some samples, and head home. The current plan is for us to reach 2030, twenty years from now, having flown the Orion/SLS maybe six or seven times. And none of those are going to be Missions to Mars, they don't have the budget for that.
What on Earth is NASA doing?
Have we ceded space to Russia and China?
Flip on a news program and you will hear the death knell of the American space program. China and Russia are in a race to the Moon, a stepping stone on the way to a mission to Mars. Will the first martian footstep belong to Yuri or to Ping? You can be sure it won't be Joe.
But for all their mourning, the media has missed this one badly.
America isn't out of the business of going to space. No! Just NASA! And that's a good thing. In a week, Virgin Galactic will carry passengers into space. This will be the first private company to send humans into space. They'll be taking off from Spaceport America, near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Don't get too excited though, SpaceShipTwo, which has seen multiple delays since its supposed first launch in late 2009, won't be reaching orbit or visiting the ISS. SpaceShipTwo is sub-orbital. What goes up must come down. While Virgin Galactic might be getting the big headlines, the real news is coming out of Hawthorne, California.
SpacEx has now sent up their second Griffin space capsule, and launched their Eagle 9 successfully four times. Eagle 9-1 delivered a pair of satellites. Eagle 9-2 placed Bigelow Aerospace's prototype inflatable space-station into orbit. Bigelow hopes to create a space hotel using this balloon like technology licensed from NASA. Eagle 9-3 put up the first Griffin capsule, unmanned of course. She made a few maneuvers, and re-entered, surviving the heat of re-entry to a perfect splashdown off the coast of California. Eagle 9-4 placed the second Griffin capsule into orbit yesterday. The unmanned Griffin 2 will perform some orbital maneuvers to prove she is space-worthy. Once NASA is comfortable with the Griffin's performance, Griffin 2 will rendezvous and dock with the ISS. With that demonstration of the Griffin, SpacEx will have proven that they can deliver cargo to the ISS, being the first company to accomplish this feat.
But they are not alone.
Orbital Sciences, with their Antares rocket using refurbished Soviet rocket engines, is slated to launch their Cygnus cargo spacecraft into orbit in the coming months.
The United Launch Alliance's CST-100 is also slated for a first launch later this year, but has missed several milestones and may not fly on time.
The Cygnus is designed from the ground up to be a cargo spacecraft, not capable of surviving re-entry nor taking people up to space. But that's not a bad thing. Since the Cygnus spacecraft doesn't need to survive re-entry, it doesn't need to be made in a conical shape like Apollo or Orion, instead it's a large cylinder with 19 cubic meters of internal volume (and they plan for future Cygni to be elongated to encompass 27 cubic meters), far more than the roughly 10 cubic meters of the Griffin and CST-100. This also makes it much cheaper to produce since it doesn't require life support systems or complicated triple-redundancies or any of those things that come along with man-rating a space vehicle. The cheap spacecraft and refurbished rockets hold promise of providing cheap access for space cargo.
ULA has gone in the opposite direction, as they work on man-rating their already well proven Atlas V rocket, and developing the CST-100 capsule which is capable of being a cargo craft but is well over-engineered for such a mission with it's glass cockpit and redundant systems. ULA aims for the CST-100 to become the shuttle for NASA astronauts and nobody doubts they will be able to pull this off, the question is the price.
So without SpacEx in the picture, it would seem simple enough to use Antares/Cygnus to launch cargo inexpensively, and the Atlas V/CST-100 to shuttle crews to the ISS for perhaps 250 million a mission.
But when you factor in Kingsley's SpacEx, the picture gets much more complicated. The Griffin isn't merely designed to carry crew, its heat shield is designed to survive a re-entry from a Mars-return velocity. It's designed for powered landings, something even the CST-100 and Orion won't do, instead using just parachutes. Yet with all this engineering, the Griffin isn't slated to be super expensive. Rather, SpacEx has claimed they can launch manned Griffin for only 120 million dollars. At first glance, that seems impossible. But when you factor in the simplicity of their production methods and their plans for re-using rockets to drastically rein in costs...they just might be able to pull it off.
And before you hand the prize to SpacEx, you have to remember Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane. This re-usable shuttle can glide back from space to a runway landing, and unlike the Space Shuttle, this spaceplane ought to actually be easily and cheaply reusable, while at the same time providing ample space for up to seven crew to ride out a much gentler re-entry than any capsule can provide, hitting a max of only 1.5 Gs. However, Sierra Nevada doesn't make a rocket capable of putting the Dream Chaser into space, and so they must rely on another company to supply the rocket. They are currently working with ULA, but there have been delays and some industry insiders suspect ULA is simply finding an excuse to continually delay and block Dream Chaser from flying to prevent it from becoming an alternative to their CST-100. With these launch uncertainties, investor enthusiasm has dried up and Dream Chaser seems to be in danger.
There are plenty of other competitors still out there. Blue Origins, the brainchild of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is working on an single-stage-to-orbit design. SSTO has long been a unicorn, an unreachable goal of rocket engineers. Maybe Blue Origins could make it work. Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser may still fly yet. Bigelow Aerospace might be opening a space hotel near you. Virgin Galactic is developing a rocket that can be carried to 50,000 feet by a carrier airplane and launched from there.
NASA is no longer in charge of routine spaceflight. Resupply missions and soon even crew missions to the space station will be taken over by private corporations. There are some things the free market really can do better. SpacEx might not meet their lofty goal of a low price, but even if they are way off in their price estimates, they'll still surely be cheaper and more efficient than NASA can manage. That's not NASA's fault per se, these private companies don't answer to a meddling congress.
While private corporations will handle the routine flights, NASA will only be flying the envelope-pushing missions, those to deep space. After all, NASA is the only body in the world that has ever sent humans beyond low-Earth-orbit. That's why their missions will cost a billion dollars. While it still seems that NASA's plans aren't nearly as efficient as they could be, at least NASA has recognized that they aren't the go-to experts on cheap spaceflight. They're learning.
The next space race is heating up, and no it's not between Russia and China. It's between American industries. No matter how you cut it, America is going to win this space race.
“Now that's some good press,” Hammersmith says as Kingsley finishes the article. “You notice how she quotes 'insiders' rather than quoting you directly on how stupid NASA is.”
“I've been doing enough editoriali
zing for them,” Kingsley replies, looking back to the monitor. “I also like that she doesn't fall all over herself congratulating Virgin Galactic for their sub-orbital crap.”
“There's more!” Hammersmith says. “I can't believe it, we've never gotten press like this.” Hammersmith shows Kingsley the next article:
A Spaceship Fit For a King
“Five, four, three...” At T-minus three seconds white flames rocket out of the 22-story machine. “Two, one. Liftoff.” The night sky turns into a show of light and fire as mankind harnesses the elemental power of fire to produce one-point-three million pounds of thrust. The machine, the size of a small building, speeds into the black sky, heading out to sea from Cape Canaveral. If all goes well, the Griffin capsule atop the rocket will fly over the launchpad in about two hours, at a speed of over 17,000 miles per hour, and above the top of the atmosphere, gliding effortlessly, yet faster than a speeding a bullet. Destination: Orbit.
The capsule carrying 6,000 pounds of cargo races toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station, itself traveling so fast it circles the Earth 15 times a day. “It proves that we didn’t just get lucky the first time around,” says the rocket’s chief designer, Kingsley Pretorius. “Next year we expect four to five launches, the year after that eight to ten.” At that rate Pretorius, a self-taught engineer and Internet whiz kid, will be launching more rockets than even China or Russia.
There are few things more difficult than achieving orbit. Go ahead try this at home. Build a tower full of pressurized rocket fuel, burn that fuel in a controlled explosion, harness the explosion into usable thrust to send that tower skyward on an accurate trajectory, up above the atmosphere where there won't be any air resistance to slow you down. Then it's just a matter of getting up to the required orbital speed, seventeen thousand miles per hour and change. Oh yeah, and try not to let it explode, lose control, succumb to a nasty little bug in the software, or fall victim to a failure in any of the thousands of parts that must work together and flawlessly. Go ahead, try that at home.
When you think of space travel, you think of the Space Shuttle, you think of the Saturn V, Neil Armstrong, the Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Russia, China, perhaps even the European Space Agency. What you don't think of, at least until now, is an Internet billionaire turned engineer in surfer shorts and a t-shirt overseeing dozens of brilliant twenty-somethings that look like they just came from a rock concert. A trip to their office and you might think you were at Pixar or a toy company. The dress code is below casual, it's what you would expect to find at a dorm: logo t-shirts, hats with slogans, shorts. The most expensive item you would find someone wearing would be the headphones that many engineers wear. A look through the open office will reveal dozens of nodding heads going along to the beat of their own tune. That's SpacEx.
When I visited, I found a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Justin Bieber looming large over one programmer's desk.
“When a build fails,” Kingsley says, referring to an error in the millions of lines of software code that underpin the dozens of systems and sub-systems that make a spacecraft work, “it fails loudly.” He's not kidding. On this particular day, Kingsley himself was in a simulator, flying a mission with the latest guidance software, when suddenly all of the guidance software crashed at once. “Yeah, if the software did that on a mission, we would all be dead,” Kingsley says. At SpacEx, when you break the build, a life-sized Justin Bieber becomes a permanent fixture in your workspace. That is, until someone else breaks the build.
“We find that 100% of software engineers hate being Bieberized,” Kingsley says.
But for all the antics, these guys aren't revolutionizing the world of video games. No. They're trying to unseat the United States and Russia as the undisputed kings of space travel. It usually takes youth to change the way the game is played. Oblivious to the history, blissfully unaware of all the industry rules, guidelines, axioms, caution that have been learned the hard way, it takes a bunch of kids who think outside the box, only because they didn't know the box existed in the first place, to come along and revolutionize everything.
That might be a nice story, but it's just not true. The twenty-somethings at SpacEx are well aware of the history. They grew up idolizing Neil Armstrong, John Young, and Gene Cernan in a way that the casual observer never would (do you know who John Young is?). The legacy of the Apollo program is stamped in their minds, despite the fact that these whiz kids weren't born until the Reagan, or even Bush years. They've embraced the do-anything attitude of Kennedy, while shunning the Nixonian Shuttle as a half-measure.
The Griffin’s first flight was historic: the first privately designed, built, and launched spaceship to reach orbit and return. Human beings could ride the Griffin, though it is not yet man-rated. And yesterday, Griffin 2 launched, bound for the International Space Station. Or, put another way, since the retirement of the Space Shuttle, a small start-up company’s rocket and space capsule, which cost roughly one-tenth of the price tag of a shuttle launch, has become the United States’ sole means of reaching the $100 billion space station. “Our first order of business,” says Pretorius, sitting in his office in Hawthorne, California, “is to defeat the incumbent, old school rocket makers. Lockheed. Boeing. Russia. China. They're all bringing knives to a gun fight.”
Pretorius wants to fundamentally change the way we travel, the energy we consume and our legacy as earthbound human beings. Listening to the self-confident and boyish yet nearly 40-year-old wearing blue jeans and a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, he sounds ridiculous: he talks about nuclear fusion and colonizing Mars and rockets that take off and land vertically. You want to laugh at him, dismiss him as some fast-talking punk with a pipe-dream, which is what the aerospace industry did when he first announced plans to disrupt an industry so technically difficult and capital intensive that it has belonged to the world’s richest governments.
“That's it, I'm crashing the first stage into his house,” Kingsley says.
“K, relax.”
“He said pipe-dream,” Kingsley replies.
“He said you want to dismiss you as a punk with a pipe-dream, not that you are, just keep reading.”
“I'm not boyish,” K replies simply. “Am I?”
Kingsley looked skyward and said he could build a rocket that would put cargo and humans into orbit cheaper and more reliably than any nation or corporation had ever done before, and that he could do it faster than any other private company. Today he is CEO and chief designer at SpacEx. The company has sent five rockets into orbit, has $600 million in contracts on order (at $60 million a piece) and employs 2,000 people designing and building more rocket engines than any other company on Earth.
When he’s not launching rockets, Pretorius is a serious thorn in the side of car makers everywhere. While industry giants like GM and Nissan and Toyota were experimenting with electric-gasoline hybrids, this upstart kid said he would design and manufacture an all-electric car that would travel hundreds of miles on a single charge. The Tezla Roadster hit the streets in 2008 with a range of 200 miles, and the far more functional Model S, starting at $57,000, was introduced in June. The high-end model travels 300 miles on a single charge, leaps from zero to 60 in 5.5 seconds, slows from 60 to a dead stop in 105 feet, can seat up to five, handles like a race car and its battery comes with an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty.
As if space and cars weren’t enough to tackle, Pretorius is simultaneously trying to revolutionize the energy industry as well. He is the biggest investor and chairman of the board of SolCity, one of the largest suppliers of solar energy technology and a key piece of his aim to change not just energy consumption, but energy production.
Kingsley also has hinted at revolutionizing public transportation. “You could get in a vehicle in LA, and be in San Francisco in 20 minutes. And no, I'm not talking about a bullet train. I call it the Hyperloop.” Speculation about his so-called Hyperloop is that it would work much like a bullet train, with cars hovering over
magnetic rails, and accelerated using the same magnets, to very high speed. The difference here is that the whole “rail” is inside of a vacuum tube. That way there not only wouldn't be friction from rails, but also no air resistance. You'd be traveling in something more like a particle accelerator than a train. With such a system, you could hop in and go whenever you were ready, no departure times; the small cars would only hold a few people at a time anyway. But once you started going, there would be literally nothing to slow you down as you reached speeds in the thousands of miles per hour range. It might sound like a science fiction dream, but such a system could be powered simply by covering the vacuum tube in solar panels, and would have virtually no wear-and-tear. These are the things that Kingsley Pretorius dreams up everyday, and he has the capital to make them happen.
“Why does everyone think it's a vacuum tube?” K says, looking up from the article. “I never said vacuum tube.”
This is no Internet fantasy, no plan, no raw idea, but a reality where hundreds of smart, young engineers have been unleashed by Pretorius, a guy who dropped out of a graduate program in applied physics at Stanford in to create a company which he sold for $300 million.
Pretorius walked away with enough wealth to play bocce on the deck of a yacht for the rest of his life. Except that Pretorius, put simply, isn't normal. “Most people, when they make a lot of money don’t want to risk it,” he says. “For me it was never about money, but solving problems for the future of humanity,” he says without a hint of irony.
As a child growing up in South Africa, his parents were alarmed by his hearing problems. After several surgeries, the hearing issues went away, but the psychological impact didn't. “We called Kingsley ‘genius boy,’” said Pretorius's uncle, Oskar Pretorius. “His brain was just ahead of everyone else’s and we thought he was deaf, so we took him to the doctor. But he was just in his own world.” According to Kingsley, or “K” as his close friends call him, “They took my adenoids out, but it didn’t change anything. It’s just when I’m concentrating on something I tune everything else out.” He was bullied by other kids. He hated going to school. He was obsessed with facts and reading. “If someone said the Moon is, like, a million miles away,” says Oskar, “he’d say, ‘No, it’s on average 238,855 miles from the Earth.’ Kids would just go ‘Huh?’ He’s just curious about everything and never stops reading and remembers everything he reads. He’s not in la-la land; he just sees everything as a problem that can be fixed.”
