The Biggest Problem Facing The $2.7 Trillion Space Industry

Source: Oil Price

By Michael Kern | Jan 25, 2020,

The space race has begun. Private companies have exploded, soaring beyond multiple billion-dollar valuations seemingly overnight. Some of the hottest tech companies on the planet are already facing off for a piece of the pie. But there's a looming crisis that, if not addressed, could bring the entire industry crashing down. Literally.

After over 60 years of space exploration, humankind has left a lot of trash behind. Already, hundreds of thousands of pieces of space debris are in orbit. This is a terrifying reality, especially considering just a tiny 1mm object can have a catastrophic effect on a satellite or spacecraft.

Holger Krag, head of the space debris office for the ESA, notes, "Even today we are losing satellites due to debris and it is only a matter of time before more start colliding. If we continue the way we do, 10 years from now some regions in space will be too risky to visit."

With companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic eyeing commercial space flight within the next few years, and even more looking to roll out an array of new private satellites, the space debris risk has never been greater. And if Krag is correct, the more crowded our orbit gets, the more dire the threat will become.

Just last year, space companies raised over $5.8 billion dollars, Virgin Galactic launched its much-anticipated IPO, and pure-space plays spiked in trading interest. Space Angels CEO Chad Anderson sees this number going even higher in 2020, predicting that more companies are gearing up to hit the public markets. Anderson explained, "These companies are graduating and going from concept to scale," Anderson said. "All the companies that are in space in the last 10 years are new. They've all entered a different point over that timeline and you need to see them graduate as, in venture capital investing, graduation rates are really important."

What Is Being Done About Space Debris?

Government organizations are currently taking the lead on the space cleanup initiative, with the U.S. Air Force, NASA and the European Space Agency dedicating sizable budgets to the effort. But some private organizations are looking to contribute, as well.

Take Astroscale, for example. The Japanese firm is already in the construction stages of a space junk removal project, ELSA-d, that it hopes to launch by mid-2020.

ELSA-d will consist of two separate spacecrafts. A 180-kilogram "servicer" spacecraft, and a 20-kilogram "client" spacecraft. The Servicer is equipped with proximity rendezvous technologies and a magnetic docking mechanism, while the Client has a ferromagnetic plate which enables it to be docked with. The Servicer will repeatedly release and dock the Client in a series of technical demonstrations proving the capability to find and dock with debris.

Nobu Okada, the founder and chief executive of Japan-based company Astroscale, explains, "Cleaning up space is critical," adding, "People know about global warming. People know about ocean clean-up. But they don’t know anything about the space debris issue."

Another private company looking to tackle the problem is D-Orbit. While the Italian startup hasn’t raised the funds that Astroscale has, it is still pushing forward in its ambitious mission to reduce space debris through new innovative technology. While Astroscale is dedicating much of its focus on a single project, D-Orbit is experimenting with a little bit of everything.

D-Orbit's flagship product is the D3, an "independent, smart motor optimized for decommissioning maneuvers." The D3 is a preemptive end-of-life solution for satellite manufacturers which is attached to new satellites with the goal of being able to remove them from orbit quickly and safely when they have reached the end of their lifespan.

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Source: Quartz

2020 is the year of the $1 trillion space economy

By Tim Fernholz | December 30, 2019

The first time I can find "space economy" and "trillion dollars" in the same sentence is in 1984, when then-congressman Robert Walker told the Associated Press that a space station in low-Earth orbit could "lead to a half-trillion-dollar economy in space by the turn of the century."

Some 35 years later, we've fallen short of the mark. The best estimates of the money made from space—which these days mostly come from building and operating rockets and satellites, and using them to provide services back on Earth—is about $400 billion. To be fair to Walker, now a lobbyist who served on US president Donald Trump's NASA transition team, the space station under discussion didn’t begin operations until 2000.

The turn of the century was a hard time for the space economy, as tech bubble-driven dreams of internet satellites and venture-backed moon missions fizzled out alongside the stock market.

But a lot has changed since then, and the dream of a trillion dollar space economy is now cited by everyone from government officials and space entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 executives and Wall Street investment banks. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have predicted that economic activity in space will become a multi-trillion-dollar market in the coming decades, and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis has launched a new initiative to measure it.

The trends driving this optimism are the same ones driving the tech economy writ large: The increasing power and miniaturization of transistors, batteries and solar panels, generated in part by the smartphone revolution; the convergence of telecommunications, broadcast media, commerce and nearly everything else into "the internet"; and, naturally, geopolitical tensions that still have governments spending on space and, increasingly, hiring private companies.

What does this look like in practice in 2020?

The rise of the mega-constellations

Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to launch its fifth rocket full of proprietary internet satellites in January. That will raise the total number of satellites in the company's Starlink constellation to about 300, well on the way to the roughly 480 the company’s executives say they'll need to begin offering broadband internet access to customers on Earth. How exactly that will happen—as a direct to consumer product or as a partnership with terrestrial telecom firms—remains to be seen, but Musk and his team are confident that if they can build low-latency connectivity, the buyers will come.

Please go to Quartz to read the entire article.
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