Billionaires’ space race isn’t what meets the eye

ISLAMABAD: The space race among billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk reached a milestone of sorts when Branson rode a Virgin Galactic craft into the wild blue yonder, launching what he called a world of “equal access to space” for people of any age, gender or ethnicity.

The real target of these entrepreneurs’ efforts isn’t the small customer base of individuals rich enough to afford five-or six-figure thrill-ride tickets. It's billions of dollars to be spent by the US and other governments on satellite and crewed exploration missions, foreign media reported.

For the moment, popular attention appears to be focused on the billionaires’ launches; Bezos is scheduled to take a suborbital flight via the New Shepard launch vehicle of his Blue Origin space flight company on July 20.

The holy grail of these endeavours is NASA’s plan to return crewed spacecraft to the moon, on which no human has set foot for 49 years, or since the last Apollo mission.

Dubbed Artemis after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, the programme is aimed at reaching the moon before this decade is out and keeping a team on the surface for a sustained period.

For the private companies tapped to participate, the harvest could be impressive: In April, NASA’s inspector general estimated that the space agency could spend as much as $86 billion on Artemis by the end of fiscal 2025, assuming that Congress appropriates the money. Tens of billions of dollars more would flow as the programme moves toward its goal in subsequent years. By contrast, experts believe that the market for individual space tourism is limited. “I’m sceptical that this is a big business opportunity,” John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder and long-term director of its Space Policy Institute, told me. “It’s pretty much a niche market for wealthy individuals and adventure-seekers.” It’s also relatively undemanding in technical terms. Branson’s suborbital flight, which lasted about 15 minutes and afforded its four-person crew and two pilots about three minutes of weightlessness, required the craft to reach a speed of about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound; an orbital flight would have required a speed of about Mach 17, Logsdon says.

Virgin Galactic is competing with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a foothold in the space tourism market, for whatever that’s worth. Blue Origin and SpaceX are also in an intense battle with each other and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, for government space flight contracts. (Blue Origin is also producing rocket engines for ULA.)

Artemis isn’t the only government programme issuing contracts to private space flight companies; there’s also competition for satellite launches and for carrying crew and payloads to the International Space Station. But the moon programme is NASA’s most ambitious and the one most likely to attract public attention to the contractors.