G. Scott Hubbard says that entrepreneurial space is becoming very real:

Building a new space industry requires three things: demand, access to space and a platform. In the Stanford study, where we deliberately limited the investor horizon to 5-8 years, the only truly new business case that clearly closes for profitability is suborbital tourism. In this arena, the technology has proven itself available, private funding is adequate to build the vehicles, and more than enough wealthy individuals are willing to pay $100,000 or more for a short excursion to the edge of space. Space tourism is coming.

"So what," some say. They point out that even with generous assumptions about flight rate, the business generated by suborbital companies would still be at best a tiny blip in the estimated $180-billion global space market dominated communications satellites and traditional government missions. So why do we care? The answer lies in the huge future potential for space-based goods and services.

As Boeing's Shaw, a former astronaut, pointed out, human space travel is such a powerful personal experience that, "the more people who go, the more will want to go." Once space becomes accessible to tourists on a regular basis, practical industries will certainly follow. If early aviation is any guide, we can say for sure that the demand is as woefully underestimated as the development costs. Still, clever advertising companies and marketers already are exploiting space connections to capture attention, and their strategies appear to be working.

I think that he's mistaken here, though, continuing to buy into the ongoing myth of weightless research:

My own speculation about the location of space's version of "Sutter's gold," as Walker called it, is with biological experimentation in microgravity. Every living organism that we know of evolved in 1g. Science never has been able to fully examine gravity as a variable. From experiments of a few days to a few weeks in space, there are tantalizing hints of radically different gene expression, unusual lignin (a compound vital to connective tissue) growth in plants, and changed rates of disease infectivity. If one assumes extraordinary new breakthrough discoveries will occur, then advanced biotechnologies and future products will arise. It's very sad that given our current set of U.S. space priorities, only the European and Japanese programs will be able to exploit the full potential of the ISS. However, for the right entrepreneur, setting up a biology lab on the ISS – or somewhere else in orbit – is not out of the question. They could find gold in "them thar orbits."

It may be that there will be some discoveries of useful things that can be done in orbit, once we build an affordable research facility for routine research (something that ISS is not, and will never be). But I don't think that it will ever be a significant market, in either total dollars or in terms of driving transportation requirements. For the foreseeable future, that will be people going into space for their own ends, of which this kind of research will be only one, and a minor one. It's Sutter's fools gold.

Scott never called us either. Our first two Orbital Recovery contracts are worth more than the entire orbital tourism industry over its lifetime. To equal our gross revenue the suborbital guys will have to have 70,000 customers.

I do think that tourism is great but it ain't the only ballgame in town.

Dennis

Correct me if I am wrong, but 70000 passengers paying 200000$ each for a suborbital trip would give you 14 billion USD in gross revenue.

I really can't see orbital recovery having that much revenue over a decade. But 70000 suborbital passengers over a decade does not sound too far fetched.

By the way: when is the first orbital recovery craft going to launch?

cheers

Rüdiger

Rudiger

Yea, too early when I posted this. I know nothing until the first coffee cup.

It should have been 700-1000, depending on how we do our deals.

We are in the process of a redesign right now, looking at late 09. Our delay has been principally due to issues related to our former Chairman of the Board.

> To equal our gross revenue the suborbital guys will have to have 70,000 customers.

And that is impossible/ would be a bad thing because _______________?

The point to be made here is that the space economy cannot be a one trick horse. Ed Wright used to call that the Highlander syndrome and he was right. It is a mix of business that will drive enough demand to justify the development of low cost, high sortie rate earth to orbit transportation systems.

Dennis

> It is a mix of business that will drive enough demand to justify the development of low cost, high sortie
> rate earth to orbit transportation systems.

That's valid as far as it goes, Dennis. It's the next step where you typically go off the rails.

If we grant your premise that there's not enough demand to justify the development of a low-cost, high sortie-rate transportation system, it does not automatically follow that you can justify the development of a high cost, low sortie-rate system.

Quite the opposite. As often pointed out, the things that make a vehicle capable of low-cost, high sortie-rate operations are also things that reduce development costs. This is not a new revelation. In the 1960's, General Dynamics did a study comparing the development of the X-15 and the Atlas A, two systems with similar performance and characteristics. They found that the reusable vehicle was more complex but 40% cheaper to develop. Similar results are supported by a long history of aircraft development.

So, if there isn't enough demand to justify the development of a low-cost reusable vehicle, there probably isn't enough demand to justify the development of a new expendable, either. That's true whether they are Shuttle-derived, EELV-derived, or something else.