Space is Changing Fast
When I was a kid, back in the 1970s, the only people who went into space were astronauts. They were brave, they were heroic, they were all men, and there weren’t a whole lot of them. This was what we might call the first age of exploration for human beings in space. Just getting above the Earth’s atmosphere was really hard and really dangerous. Just as important, we still hadn’t put a lot of machines (i.e. satellites) into orbit. The ones that were up there were mostly for military or communications.
That first era of exploration is now over. The era of commercial exploitation has begun. This is the most significant change in how human beings relate to space since the first rocket launches of the 1950s. In this post, I want to briefly introduce you to a couple of important facts about this new era so later we can think about what it means for all of us.
Let’s start a few definitions. Here, by “Space”, I mean Earth orbit. The Moon and beyond is a different question which we can take up later. But for right now what we’re talking about is putting people and machines (mostly machines) into different orbits around the Earth for commercial purposes.
This distinction is important because there are different kinds of orbits and they have different advantages and disadvantages. There is a critical relationship between how far a satellite is from the Earth’s surface and how long it takes to complete an orbit. This matters for the kind of commercial activity you want to engage in. For example, Low Earth Orbit means putting a satellite between 100 and 2000 kilometers above the planet. At these distances, it may take about 90 minutes for a satellite to make a full revolution around the globe. That means the machine is constantly speeding over the land below. This is good if you’re providing something like global imaging services. It’s not good, however, if you’re trying to just stare at one position on the planet continuously. If that’s a service you want to sell, then you need to hoist your satellite around 36,000 km above the Earth, into what’s called Geosynchronous Orbit.
Here is a nice figure from an excellent Royal Society Report which shows you the location of the different orbits.
Taken together all these orbits are the principal domain of current commercial activity in space. And there is a lot of that activity. Recent estimates put the total investment in companies that want to make money putting stuff in space to be more than 250 billion dollars. This includes everything from mundane stuff like communications and imagining to more exotic ideas like space manufacturing or even tourism.
If the money alone doesn’t convince you something new is happening, here is a figure from that same Royal Society report showing the number of launches per year. In 2015 there were fewer than 500 rockets blasting stuff off the planet’s surface. In 2024 there were almost 3000!
So, what does all this mean? Good question. That’s the one we will need to unpack across a lot of posts. On the one hand it’s exciting if you, like me, think it’s vital that we become a true space-faring species. On the other hand, there are a lot of dangers as we can already see the possibility that just a few space-zillionaires will define the high frontier without anyone else’s input.
Either way, we live in interesting times.
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PS: In other space-related news, if you always wanted to be an astronaut, my friends over at Science Alert are running a Space Coast trip sweepstakes where you might at least be able to fool around learning to train like one.
PSS. Thoughts? Leave a comment on the website version of the post or email me at [email protected]
— Adam Frank 🚀
