Space gets nearer

Space gets nearer

I haven't commented much on the recent activity in the private spaceflight sector. The highlights of the space.com article are SpaceShip One's latest flight, XCOR's recent launch license, and Mojave Airport's growing status as a spaceport.

Meanwhile, Armadillo Aerospace has been continuously improving their engines, and the DaVinci Project and the Canadian Arrow will be doing test launches in a few months. A few other entries may yet prove to beat Scaled Composites to the Ansari X prize.

But the Ansari X Prize is not the market, it is merely an incentive. XCOR, for example, is not in the competition, but is taking the longer view, possibly towards orbital vehicles. SpaceX is following another route with their Falcon V model to be comparable in capability to current heavy lifting vehicles at a fraction of the cost.

It looks like the Ansari X Prize will be won this year, along with a $10 million US purse(if it isn't won by the end of the year the prize still exists but the purse does not). The key is what happens after the prize is won.

Those companies which have learned from the business failures of private space companies in the past will have a plan for beyond the prize, win or lose. The chief feature of the Ansari X prize is the amount of prestige associated with it; a more important benefit is the credibility among the investment community after the prize is won by somebody - anybody.

Mojave isn't the only place that would become a spaceport - any team that can accomplish an X prize victory can do the same thing on a regular basis. Many of them will after the prize is won, catering to the high-disposable-income-thrill-seeker market.

It is a toehold, a foot in the door for private industry in space flight. With Kindersley, Saskatchewan being named as the site of the da Vinci launch, and the current regulatory activity at the Isle of Man, the trend is that numerous sites around the world will become de facto spaceports.

Given the expected high number of launches and the various strategies employed by the different teams, meaningful baseline safety statistics will be accumulated over the next couple of years. The launch rate will be far higher than for the US or Russian or Chinese government test programs, if not quite as ambitious in energy. A lower failure rate should be a feature of the private sector effort, due to the strategy of incremental improvement.

If the Ansari X prize should be won this year, then I expect to see the orbital equivalent achieved before the end of 2006.