Much of recent spaceflight has focused on the highly successful achievements of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. They’ve had incredible breakthroughs in developing reusable rockets and spacecraft, dramatically lowering launch costs and pushing ahead with cargo flights to the ISS, followed by crewed flights, and now with ambitious, even outrageous, plans for sending people to Mars.
It’s therefore easy to forget that there are other private groups involved in space, trailing behind for years now, but with possible successes coming in just the next couple of weeks.
By the end of July both a Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic spaceship will have made their first operational flights – and their respective founders, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, intend to be astronauts aboard them. Meanwhile Bezos has made it clear where he wants Blue Origin company to go, and it’s not the same place as Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Virgin Galactic – July 11
It’s been a long, painful development road for Richard Branson’s baby to achieve his dream of regular, sub-orbital flight by a spaceplane. Way back in 2004, Burt Rutan’s craft SpaceShipOne, won the Ansari X-Prize for being the first reusable crewed spacecraft to fly to space twice within two weeks.
It was an amazing achievement and Branson immediately partnered with Rutan to build a passenger spaceplane that could do the same. At that point it seemed entirely possible that they’d get it done in just a few years, far ahead of any other private sector group. Mere scaling up being all that was required. Even today the latest craft, VSS Unity, looks startlingly similar to the original X-Prize winner.
However the development of the passenger craft became cursed with test failures, including rocket explosions that killed people and in 2014, the crash of the test vehicle, VSS Enterprise, that killed one of the test pilots.
More than a decade went by and at times people questioned whether it might be abandoned, even with a starry-eyed billionaire like Branson behind it.
But they seem to have finally made it, with the first commercial flight planned for July 11, and with the rather amazing news that Branson himself will be on board the first flight, “Unity 22.”, with four so-called “mission specialists” and the two pilots.
They’ll likely fly to an altitude of 90 kilometres at a speed of Mach 3 and experience about four minutes of weightlessness: a sub-orbital flight much like the X-15 tests in the 1960’s. Even the launch will be like that of an X-15, with the VSS Unity lifted by a specialist “mothership” plane to an altitude of 15km before it lights its rocket motor.
The next flights will have paying passengers at $250,000 a pop. Branson’s ambitions in space seem to extend no further than this.
Blue Origin – July 20
If Branson’s flight is successful he will beat another billionaire who has also determined to go into space at the first opportunity, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origin has also seen its share of problems over the years since its founding by Bezos in 2000. Like SpaceX it has been determined to develop reusable rockets and spacecraft.
While not experiencing the dramatic and lethal problems that Virgin Galactic has, and even though it has had a number of successful test launches of its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft (named after Alan Shepard, America’s first astronaut), Blue Origin simply has not hit its target dates.
They’ve clearly been trying to copy SpaceX’s development approach of rapid prototyping – a quickly repeated cycle of iterative design, build, and test, with building of successive prototypes before previous ones have been fully tested.
But it hasn’t worked. Even as the New Shepard tests continued for sub-orbital flight, Blue Origin started development of a reusable orbital rocket, the New Glenn (named after John Glenn, America’s first man in orbit) and have struck problems with the new, more powerful motors needed for orbital flight.
They’ve also missed out on several billion dollars worth of commercial contracts, although they’ve announced some wins.
All this may be the reason that Bezos recently stepped down as CEO of Amazon, announcing that he was going to apply himself more to Blue Origin and one or two of his other “passions”. Given what he has so often talked about in the past I have no doubt Blue Origin will be his major area of focus.
As part of that new hands-on, Musk style, Bezos announced that he will fly on the first crewed flight of the New Shepard, on July 20. The system is autonomous, needing no pilot, and in a sign of confidence – following 15 successful uncrewed test flights – he’s taking his brother with him, plus another passenger who won an auction for a seat with a bid of $28 million.
Because this flight uses a vertical rocket launcher and capsule craft, like the original Mercury-Redstone flights it will follow a similar sub-orbital path, almost certainly above the 100km Karman line that marks the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, thus making Bezos and company true astronauts, although it should be noted that the US Air Force definition of an astronaut is a person who has flown higher than 50 miles (80 km).
Bezos must be hoping that this confidence and energy will spill over into the rest of the company and enable them to start catching up with SpaceX.
But Bezos has also made it clear that he has different long-term goals for space exploration than his great rival, Musk. Those boil down to two fundamentally different approaches that have been debated for several decades.
The first approach is the traditional one. As described in hundreds of SF books, TV shows and movies, humanity should leave Earth and reach for the planets to explore and colonise them, starting with the Moon and Mars.
Some, like Robert Zubrin, have even argued for skipping the Moon and going straight for Mars.
The second approach is much more recent, basically dating from the 1970’s and whose most well known advocate was American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.
He and others made the logical argument that, having spent so much energy escaping the Earth’s gravity well, it was insane to jump down another one. Instead, once in space why not try living there by using the resources of asteroids and the Sun’s energy to build huge, slowly spinning, cylindrical, “spacecraft” some 32km long and 8km wide.
They came to be called “O’Neill Colonies” and inside them humans could have gravity and sunlight, as well capturing huge amounts of solar energy and using the colony as a base from which they could make low-energy moves around the solar system to obtain resources.
He can be seen making the argument in this long-lost 1975 TV interview, alongside famous SF author Issac Asimov who supported it.
In SF, by contrast with planets, the idea has seen only limited exposure, in movies like the recent Interstellar (check out the scene), TV series like The Expanse (Amazon Prime natch) and Arthur C Clarke’s famous book, Rendezvous With Rama.
I first came across the concept as a child via the latter novel, but that was an alien, interplanetary spacecraft, a “Cosmic Ark” that had been discussed before. It was not until I saw an edition of a famous American counter-culture magazine, Whole Earth Catalog, that I saw the concept turned into one for humans in our solar system. I was blown away by the idea.
Given that the magazine spilled out of the hippie era and thus pushed themes of ecology, self-sufficiency, DIY, a back-to-the-land movement, and the Small Is Beautiful economics of E. F. Schumacher, it sounds like the last place where you would find in-depth analysis of space colonies, but the WEC was a wild place of ideas, as Steve Jobs noted in 2005:
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation … It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Bezos may have also encountered the idea in the same place, or perhaps he read O’Neill’s 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.
In any case it’s clear that he still holds it as an inspiration, as he outlined in a presentation for Blue Origin in 2019 and in a little more detail in 2016:
During last weekend’s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Bezos referred to his long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space, as well as his enabling goal of creating the “heavy lefting infrastructure” to make that happen.
In Bezos’ view, dramatically reducing the cost of access to space is a key step toward those goals.
“Then we get to see Gerard O’Neill’s ideas start to come to life…
“I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off planet. It will be just way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24/7 solar power,”
The picture at the start of this post is a vision of what one such colony could look like, re-creating old earth cities.
No Minister 
I was excited about Virgin Galactic when I saw it years ago but long since lost hope that anything real would eventuate. Lets hope it happens.
Can’t wait to see Starship & Super Heavy in action. Thunderbirds are go !
Thanks Pork. Nice to see that some of our readers appreciate something other than ideology and politics. 🙂