Erstellt am: 13. 2. 2015 - 17:50 Uhr

Private Space Exploration

A Reality Check Special on commercial companies entering the space race.

On this Saturday's Reality Check, we took a look at the plans of certain private space companies, some well-known, some less so and assessed their contribution to keeping alive the dream of space exploration. We heard about Space X with technology writer Daniel Sokolov. We spoke with Mads Wilson at Copenhagen Suborbitals, a group of amateur aerospace engineers and scientists who eat sleep & dream about rockets. We also chatted with David Iron, one of the founders of the private company Lunar Missions Ltd, which hopes to be following in the footsteps of the Apollo moon landings. And we heard from Alan Wasser, Chairman of the Space Settlement Institute about the challenges of private companies setting up a settlement on a moon or planet.

The aspirations of commercial enterprises in space?
A Reality Check Special, broadcast on Saturday 14th February at 12 midday.

Growing up during the days of the Space Age, it was always the capabilities of NASA vs the Soviet sponsored space agencies. And occasionally the Chinese & Indian governments would step in with a rocket of two. Essentially, the race into space was all about goverment money projecting political power down on planet earth. If you had big rockets that could blast off, that all looked impressive to your friends and foes. The subtext being: we have the know-how and plenty of cash to burn up thousands of litres of kerosene so that our men and women can conquer the heavens.

The ending of the Cold War coincided with a diminishing of the aspirations for these kinds of missions. In a time of great change, America did not need to project such pet-projects to the world anymore. And with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Soviet space programme was dissolved in 1991and the new Russian government in Moscow had other things on their mind as well as a serious lack of cash.

But since the late 1990s, many commercial initiatives have started up often with the aim of building smaller, smarter and economically sound space projects. When the costs of blasting a rocket beyond the earth’s gravitational pull run into the millions, can space exploration ever become a commercial success? On our Reality Check Special, we took a look at the plans of certain private space companies, some well-known, some less so and assess their contribution to keeping alive the dream of space exploration.

Ahead of this Reality Check special programme, we also got the thoughts of science writer Peter Bond and asked him what he made of commercial companies getting involved in space exploration in the decades ahead.

Peter Bond:

"I’m a great believer in branching out and spending money going into space. If people can make a profit out of it, if they want to fly up and down and have 4 minutes worth of weightlessnes on a Virgin Galactic space ship for example and they want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to do that, great that’s fine. If you want to send up experiments on a private space ship to lower earth orbit, maybe with one or two passengers as well, that’s great as long as it’s safe of course. That’s the way the airline industry developed a long time ago".

"You can’t have governments forever (I think) using tax payers money to explore space. There has to come a time when private individuals or private companies say that we have to get into this, develop a market, try and make a commercial success out of it and make some profit. Why shouldn’t we have airlines going to and from a space hotel; that may be the future".

And what about the regulations when it comes to safety? If it’s private does it mean it’s more or less safe?

Government bodies like the FAA in America will all be monitoring these things and licensing these companies to fly. If they don’t think they are safe, they won’t get the licenses.

When it comes to really new technologies (like those with Virgin Galactica), if these developments are so new, how can that be regulated?

What happened (the disaster last year) was very early in the development of the Space Ship 2. And space exploration has always been difficult, there have always been people dying whether it be NASA missions or Russian missions, government or private missions, it’s always a dangerous enterprise and there are always people taking risks. What you have to do is try to minimize the risks as much as possible. But I remember some years ago, when a school teacher called Christa Macauliffe went up on the Space Shuttle and the Shuttle blew up after 71 seconds and the school teacher was killed. Nobody said "hey, we mustn’t send civilians up into space anymore". They just got to work to improve the shuttle program, to make it safer and carry on and I think that’s the only way

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