Commercial Launch Industry Needs a Boost - April 2, 2005
The satellite industry now grosses over $90 billion per year, according to the Satellite Industry Association. That sounds like a healthy figure, but the prospects are in truth not so bright for the launch sector. In their 2004 forecast, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) predicts a flat market of about 18 launches per year to geosynchronous orbit from 2004 through 2013.
Under these conditions, there's just not much room for new competitors, and existing launch providers such as International Launch Services (ILS), Sea Launch, Arianspace, and others are all looking closely at their business plans, searching for ways to become more competitive. (An excellent article about the current state of the launch industry can be found at The Space Review.)
The launch industry needs a much-deserved boost. Will it come from NASA? Perhaps the space agency will begin farming out more launches, such as International Space Station (ISS) resupply, to commercial launch providers. After all, the President's 2004 Space Commission urged NASA to outsource as many tasks as possible to private industry - and the NASA culture does seem on the face of it to have embraced the President's Vision for Space Exploration.
In the meantime, relative newcomers like Elon Musk and his launch company SpaceX have their work cut out for them. In the near term, they may be able to carve a niche in the smallsat launch sector, for example - there is always room there for a new reliable, low-cost provider. But the days of explosive growth for the launch industry, such as were seen in the late 1990's, appear to be over.
That there are difficult days ahead for the launch industry is unfortunate - especially since the coming doldrums could be prevented, and in fact reversed, by appropriate Congressional action. Now that the satellite market is becoming saturated, exponential growth in the launch industry could be reignited if a replacement incentive came online. What could that incentive be? The construction of the space infrastructure that will be needed to return to the Moon, infrastructure that will be needed as well by the space-based businesses of the future.
In 1998, NASA sponsored a New Space Industries Workshop to peer into the future of space development. The final report of the workshop, titled New Space Industries for the Next Millennium, evaluated future space businesses such as tourism, space manufacturing, satellite services, space solar power, and more. The report makes fascinating reading. Today, though - seven years later - most of these businesses still do not exist, even in nascent form - in large part because the startup costs for building the necessary space infrastructure are simply prohibitive.
The Space Settlement Institute has already proposed a plan that would create a new space race, this time a commercial one, using the prospect of billions of dollars worth of lunar real estate as the incentive for the first private consortium to establish a permanent Moon base and regular space line. The race to be the first group to build a permanent Moon base would create unprecedented demand for launch services and for the construction of supportive space infrastructure. What is needed now is support in Congress for the legislation that would make it happen.
Without a multi-billion dollar incentive of some kind, the ascension of commercial enterprise into space will be long, slow, and painful - and may never reach its full potential. Meanwhile, the companies in the commercial launch industry will for the next decade on out find themselves embroiled in a dog-eat-dog competition just to keep their efforts in the black, when instead they should be reaping the mega-profits of the next frontier.
For information about the lunar land claims recognition concept, see the Space Settlement Initiative, including the Questions & Answers section on that website. A summary is also available on the Institute's LCR Abstract page. Draft legislation, ready for consideration by Congress, is also posted online.