The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘Sci-fi is on the cusp of becoming sci-fact’
2019: a space odyssey,
Up or down? That is the simple choice facing humanity in space in the next 50 years. Whether to go upwards and outwards, to other planets, moons and asteroids, to mine them, put factories on them, to live on them – to create embryonic sanctuaries from a clogged and collapsing Earth? Or to look back down, girdling our home planet with countless-thousands tiny satellites that scrutinise our every move in hi-definition, rearranging themselves – when not required to monitor crop health or parking availability on your high street – to become giant reflective billboards, beaming ads over whichever megacity you inhabit. This message is brought to you by Nasa.
Except it won’t be. Nasa vs USSR is so old school. The Kennedy-khrushchev space-race club has admitted many, many new members. This year alone – the 50th anniversary of the moon landings – has seen launches from India, Israel and China. And nation states must now share their orbital ambitions with private companies, with entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos (at Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (at Spacex) who are building the infrastructure – the rockets, the control stations – on which a swarm of garage-scientists can piggyback to get their own ideas into space. The Space Shuttle was able to launch a payload of over 27,000kg into orbit at a cost of $1.5 billion, more than $50,000 per kg. Now Elon Musk’s biggest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, will bring the price per kg down to less than $1,500. You know the names Armstrong and Aldrin, what about Bob Behnken and Douglas Hurley? They are two astronauts selected to fly Spacex’s first manned capsule, the Dragon 2. If all goes to plan, the United States will soon no longer be reliant on Russia to ferry crew to the International Space Station (ISS). It will rely on Musk instead.
Nasa still has grand plans. In 1962, Kennedy chose to go to the moon. In 2019 Donald Trump has ordained a return. Kennedy set an end-of-decade deadline. Trump has given Nasa five years: the Artemis programme is America’s plan to get astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2024. After vacant decades, the skies of 2019 are thick with mesmerising rocket trails glinting in the upper atmosphere.
This is just the beginning. Next year, a four-way competition to get to Mars blasts off. Nasa is again involved, planning a rover and a two-kilo helicopter – the first time a human-made vehicle will lift off from another planet. Russia and the EU are running a joint mission which will drill into the Martian surface; the UAE is sending up its first ever orbiter; then there’s China. Its ambitions are perhaps best expressed back here on Earth, in Qinghai Province, where construction began last summer on a Mars simulation base.
For those whose space faces look upwards not downwards, Mars is Lifeboat No 1, the planet that one day will become our
first second home – artificially coaxed into developing its own ecosystem, producing an atmosphere which humans can breathe. ‘Terraformed’, in the jargon. Musk is the Martian terra-former-in-chief, brushing aside technical quibbles about carbon dioxide levels with typical brio. But he is not alone. Earlier this year I received an email from Lena De Winne, Minister of Information and Communications for Asgardia. You may not have heard of Asgardia, but it proclaims itself the Space Kingdom, and its mission, de Winne wrote, is to ‘ensure that mankind becomes immortal and in time comes to populate the galaxy’. That sounds like something from a comic. Or plain comic. But Asgardia – founded by the Russian businessman Igor Ashurbeyli – has a constitution, a government. It even has its own (rather boring) satellite, the Asgardia-1. More interestingly, though, it tests the concept of what sovereign territory means in space. The answer: not clear.
De Winne and Musk are the dreamers. Worrying about Earth’s sixth mass extinction – ours – and planning an escape. That is one half of the new space race. But there is another side to it, another breed; the people who bank on humanity having a few more years yet, and hope to capitalise in the meantime. Instead of schlepping the 54.6 million kilometres to Mars, they are sending satellites no further than low Earth orbit (LEO) – sometimes just a few hundred kilometres above us.
There are currently about 2,000 operational satellites in orbit. Military, civilian, for communications, for weather forecasting, to pinpoint you by GPS, to observe distant black holes – they have many purposes. But the next decade will bring an astonishing increase, a quintupling, a sudden blooming of satellites, many of which will be connected in giant, artificial constellations. They have names like Starlink (12,000 satellites, Spacex), Oneweb (650 satellites, potentially rising to almost 2,000) and Project Kuiper (3,000 satellites, Amazon), . To give you an idea of the power of such constellations, GPS relies on 24 satellites.
Not that it will all be plain sailing. Spacex has deployed the first 60 of Starlink’s 200kg satellites, which, along with Oneweb and Project Kuiper, aim to bring high-speed connections to the estimated three billion people on Earth without access to the internet. As of June, it was in contact with 57 of them. The three rogues will eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Other sat-constellations will bring a new level of scrutiny to our activity down here, on Earth. Today, some 760 satellites above us are for Earth observation. The 120 active in the Dove constellation, launched by start-up Planet Labs, take two high-resolution pictures per second. It’s not just pictures. Sensors can detect geological or topographical details. The widespread commercial availability of Earth observation imagery at a cost and resolution that was once the preserve of sophisticated nation states is already proving disruptive: China long denied that up to a million mostly Muslim ethnic minority people are kept in what a UN panel said was akin to ‘a massive internment camp’. But then the news agency Reuters sourced satellite imagery to demonstrate the camp’s existence and expansion.
The images came from Cubesats, shoebox-sized satellites that cost just tens of thousands of dollars. Paired with plummeting launch costs, they mean almost anyone can access orbit. And that access is hard for even the most authoritarian, controlling regime to police.
For while space governance is a not a new legal area, it’s hazy. The key document is the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty,
The skies of 2019 are thick with rocket trails in the upper atmosphere
which enshrines the freedom of use of space for peaceful purposes. Cubesats may be deployed as billboards, or to take snaps of internment camps. They may cause annoyance or diplomatic outrage, but it’s hard to see such missions as acts of war.
Yet a new arms race in space is certainly brewing. Most famously, in February this year, President Trump established a sixth branch of the US military – the Space Force. ‘It’s going to be a very big part of where the defence of our nation – you could say ‘offence’ – but let’s just be nice about it and let’s say the defence of our nation, is going to be,’ he said.
Tempting as it is to imagine Star Wars-esque Imperial Star Destroyers cruising the galaxy, America’s militarisation of space is aimed at securing its own satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which crest outside Earth’s atmosphere, while being able to detect and destroy those of an enemy.
Satellite defence and attack is the battlefield of the future. And there are already skirmishes. According to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Olymp-k, a Russian satellite, recently got ‘so close to a French-italian military satellite that the French government called it an act of “espionage”.’ China and Russia have anti-satellite programmes.
Then, in March this year, India blew one of its own satellites out of the sky in what was intended to be a statement of its military prowess. Instead, it unleashed potential tragedy, as hundreds of pieces of debris erupted into space, threatening the ISS. Jim Bridenstone, administrator at Nasa, described the Indian test as ‘a terrible, terrible thing’. Lasers and hacking are the most frequently touted anti-satellite weapons. But don’t rule out space junk.
‘Speak to any astronaut on the ISS – the warning of the potential collisions they have on board are frighteningly frequent,’ says James Bruegger, Managing Partner at Seraphim Capital in London, which invests in space start-ups. ‘You’re told something is hurtling towards you and there’s not much you can do.’ We’ve all seen Gravity.
The modern space race, Bruegger says, is ‘sci-fi on the cusp of becoming sci-fact’. His job, like that of every venture capitalist looking to invest in a market that Bank of America Merrill Lynch reckons will be worth trillions of dollars by 2045, is to pick and back the fantasies that can come true.
The opportunity in the next five to 10 years, he says, is in the downward-facing market – the collecting and communicating of data about the Earth ‘in granular detail’ from above. ‘Only then can you solve the world’s most pressing problems such as climate change, farming efficiently, urban expansion. How effectively we’re utilising our resources. We’re going to have to do more with less.’
The timeline for looking up and out again, he estimates, will be longer. It will be at least a decade, he thinks, before mankind makes ‘the first tentative steps towards establishing ourselves as a multiplanetary species’.
Others are not so patient. If all goes to plan, the company Astrobotic will in 2021 become the first private company to land a craft on the moon. Nasa had 35,000 employees at the time of the Apollo missions, and another 400,000 industrial contractors. Astrobotic has about 30. One of its official partners is Caterpillar, manufacturer of mining equipment. For though the moon may appear barren, it is in fact rich in Helium-3, touted by some as a safe nuclear fuel, including for rockets. India and China have already proposed harvesting it. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency
(ESA) announced a 2025 mission to extract oxygen and water from the moon’s surface dust, which would be critical to establishing lunar bases from which missions further afield could be launched.
Will such missions, like Armstrong 50 years ago, plant a national flag in that moondust? Could space, or part of it, be claimed for one country? The 1967 UN Treaty forbids it. But then, in 2015, came the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which allows private companies to own what they mine in space – from asteroids at least.
Asteroid mining has long promised immeasurable riches. Even Goldman Sachs has suggested it will create the world’s first trillionaire, accessing vast buried troves of platinum and gold. But so far, despite the riches on offer, the complexities of tapping distant, little-known space rocks has defeated entrepreneurs.
The moon, on the other hand, is relatively close, relatively understood. Some 50 years after man first landed there, and 47 years since man was there last, nation states and private companies are plotting a return. Increasingly a vision is emerging – from companies such as Astrobotic and agencies including the ESA, and perhaps most importantly from powerful entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos – of the moon as a staging post; a depot where Earth might one day offload its heavy industry, and derive the resources, in low gravity, for missions to Mars and beyond. That was the mission Bezos set earlier this year. ‘The reason we need to go to space… is to save the Earth,’ he said. ‘We need to move heavy industry off the Earth.’
Who will win the race to ring the world with small, super-observant satellites? Who will win the race to industrialise the moon? Who will win the race to colonise Mars? It’s impossible to say. But that’s what makes it fascinating. Some 50 years ago, only the US and USSR were in a position to compete. And when America made it to the moon, public interest faded impossibly fast. Kennedy’s mission had been accomplished.
The new space race will keep unfolding, not just in this decade, but beyond, with multiple objectives, from low orbits to far-off planets, in the projects of wealthy countries and cashstrapped inventors alike. Since President John F Kennedy launched the first race to the moon in 1962, almost everything about off-earth exploration has changed. But Kennedy’s explanation of why ‘we choose to go to the moon’ remains true of the new space race today: ‘Because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.’
Or, as Nasa’s Jim Bridenstine says, ‘This time, when we go to the moon, we’re actually going to stay.’
‘The reason we need to go to space… is to save the Earth’