Space: the new frontier! Hotel guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman when they were tired of floating around in zero gravity.(Resources in Technology)

Publication: The Technology Teacher

Publication Date: 01-APR-08

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COPYRIGHT 2008 International Technology Education Association

The high cost of space transportation is generally perceived as one of the biggest obstacles, if not the biggest, to the growth of space commercialization, tourism, and exploration. In the simplest of terms: it s too expensive! And that's mainly because launch vehicles are expendable--either entirely, like satellite launchers, or partly, like the space shuttle. Civil space agencies, entrepreneurs, policy makers, legislators, satellite operators, and others continue to focus on the extremely high cost of space transportation. Even though they have many different reasons for being interested in launch costs, they all share the same goal--lowering the cost of transporting payloads, including humans, into space.

History was made on October 4, 2004 when SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded space ship, successfully flew to the brink of space and back for the second time in five days, capturing the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The X Prize Foundation is an educational nonprofit institute whose mission is to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. The successful achievement of the "X Prize" has sparked a new wave of public interest in the use of space for commercial purposes. At the same time, a new approach to the government's procurement of space services has stimulated renewed interest and investment in entrepreneurial space ventures. The most prominent example of this is NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which aims to use commercially available space vehicles to transport crews and cargo to low-earth orbit, primarily the International Space Station (NASA, 2007).

A growing number of privately funded companies are now poised to establish a robust commercial space transportation industry. This new space business frontier affords entrepreneurial opportunities to engage profitably in low-earth orbit, between the earth and the moon and on the lunar surface itself. Energy, transportation, media, manufacturing, tourism--all these and many more industries hold significant potential as many new private sector initiatives vie to develop space and space infrastructures without funding from NASA or other government agencies. Free enterprise is the key to space exploration if it is to become a daily reality in a world that to date has seen fewer than 500 astronauts.

Space Transportation

Space transportation capabilities--encompassing spaceports and delivery systems to and from space--are the critical foundation upon which access to and the use of space depend. The space transportation industry consists of many elements, including launch vehicle manufacturers, operators, suppliers, and spaceport facilities. It serves commercial markets as well as government needs. The growing demand for satellite-based services, from communications and broadcasting to navigation and remote sensing, have contributed to the development of a competitive, worldwide market for commercial launch services. Additionally, renewed interest in human space travel and low-cost access to space have attracted several entrepreneurial start-up companies to the scene (Office, 2007). Prior to the early 1980s there was no commercial space transportation industry. Only the United States launched commercial satellites, and these were launched on vehicles owned by the government, including NASA's Space Shuttle. Events of the 1980s, including the birth of a European commercial launch services organization (Arianspace), recognition of commercial space transportation's value by U.S. government officials, and the ban of commercial payloads from flying aboard the Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster, promoted the development of the space transportation industry in the United States. By the year 2002, U.S. commercial space transportation and the services and industries it enables accounted for more...

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