The history of New Space (part 1 of a series)

The unloading and reloading of the Dragon capsule at the International Space Station, currently ongoing, is a clear reminder that things have changed in the space business. New Space has arrived. A private company, and a relatively small one at that, was able to build the rocket, build the capsule, and arrange for a successful rendezvous and berthing--and they're about to bring the Dragon back to Earth as well.

This milestone embodies one of the hallmarks of New Space:

• people working in space who didn't or couldn't before
• new missions and technologies that weren't possible before
• new reasons to be in space at all

New Space began to emerge in the late 1990's. One center of thought leadership was at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--which earlier sponsored the work that resulted in the Saturn V rocket, the Internet, and the Stealth fighter and bomber. Also at this time, some radical ventures that had sputtered along were starting to experience some successes. And there were some small centers of discontent within the NASA complex who were arguing for bolder initiatives.

The context in which New Space was emerging was, of course, Old Space. After the Apollo moon landings, manned space flight had been restricted to low Earth orbit--Skylab, Mir, the Shuttle and the Space Station. Scientific missions had had some spectacular successes, those most in the public eye being the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Perhaps the most important humanitarian function performed from space was weather, especially detection and tracking of hurricanes. The military continued to use satellites, classified and unclassified, to augment some of their capabilities--communications, imagery, missile launch warning, and weather. Commercially, the most successful space missions were for TV broadcast and data transmission around the globe. However, the biggest economic impact was from GPS, which began as a US military capability but turned into a critical piece of the global infrastructure. The number of space launches worldwide was 100 per year or less.

Question #1 for the "new space" thought leadership: what else can we do?

One of the striking things about Old Space was how expensive it was. (And this continues to be the case today, with some encouraging trends but no price breakthrough yet.) Launch costs tended to drive all the rest of the costs up as well. NASA claimed that Space Shuttle flights were a few hundred million per launch--but that didn't count infrastructure costs, which arguably made the real price over a billion dollars per launch. Unmanned rockets were less expensive but $5,000 per pound to low Earth orbit was common. And this forced the costs of the spacecraft to be even higher--you had to make sure that your payload would survive the launch, operate for years without any maintenance, and deal with the peculiarities of the space environment. No one could afford to "launch something and see how it works." Everything had to be tried and true; innovation was the enemy of reliability, and low reliability was unaffordable.

New space question #2: how do we bring down costs?

Old Space had one other unattractive characteristic: it was OLD. Space launch and space operations--the missions, the technologies, the procedures--didn't look much different than they had twenty years earlier, when the Space Shuttle started flying. Actually many of them didn't look much different from the 1960s! And this was the era when the Internet was starting to take off, cell phones and GPS were in everyone's hands, industries were becoming roboticized, and fiber optics were becoming ubiquitous.

New space question #3 in the late '90s: how can we leverage these incredible terrestrial technologies to enhance space capabilities?

In the next installment, we will look at some of the systems, technologies, missions, and lines of reasoning that emerged during this fruitful period.