The European Space Agency is proposing to develop its current ATV-Ariane 5 system for one-way ISS resupply into, firstly, a two-way system which returns a reentry capsule called the ARV to Earth, and then to further develop the ARV-Ariane 5 into a manned orbital space vehicle.
Europe is thus proposing to base its indigenous manned spaceflight capability on a system with essentially the same architecture as the American Apollo-Saturn IB which first flew over 40 years ago, and over half a century before the anticipated first flight of the manned ARV derivative.
Although the ATV is already in use and a reentry demonstrator called the ARD was flown as long ago as 1998, it is planned that the appearance of the derivative manned vehicle will be delayed until around 2020. This is apparently due to the extremely low level of interest in such a vehicle from ESA’s member states.
Given that ESA’s first manned spacecraft programme, Hermès, was cancelled after seven years of apparently successful development work, it seems highly likely that the current, broadly similar proposal will eventually suffer a similar fate.
At a time of rapid growth in new technologies such as information, communications and biotech, and with the recent historical examples of rapid growth in all terrestrial transport systems (land, sea, air) before reaching their modern plateau of large-scale application, it is clear that manned spaceflight faces a choice between rapid growth or irrelevance.
Manned access to low Earth orbit is current exorbitantly expensive and is restricted to a tiny number of government scientists and private multimillionaires. That access must therefore be broadened and placed on a firm economic basis if the human foothold in space is to become sustainable.
This is particularly obvious in the case of the ISS. Although it has taken a quarter of a century to build (1984-2010) and reportedly cost a sum approaching $100 billion, NASA currently anticipates that this huge investment will be deliberately destroyed around 2016, only six years after its completion, because it is too expensive to maintain. Although ESA and Roskosmos would like to extend its lifetime to beyond 2020, or at least to salvage modules from it for a successor station, they too are far from the concept of a sustainable base in orbit. It must be clear that only if the costs of access are greatly reduced can the ISS and other orbital stations find a secure future.
Securing regular, safe and affordable access to low Earth orbit must be achieved before manned exploration of the Moon and Mars is resumed, otherwise such exploration will likewise remain unsustainable, as history has demonstrated in the case of the Apollo programme.
Because of the large numbers of people who would like to visit space if they could afford it, space tourism is the key to economic access to low Earth orbit. Publicly funded space agencies such as NASA, ESA and Roskosmos therefore have a public duty to give priority to supporting private enterprise in developing and establishing this new industry.
Solar energy harvested in space and beamed down to the ground as microwaves offers a potential clean and sustainable contribution to future industrial energy demand on Earth. The main barrier to space solar power remains the high cost of access to space. The publicly funded space agencies therefore also have a public duty to set up a prototype demonstration of this method of power generation, with a satellite in orbit and a receiving station on the ground, as well as doing everything in their power to develop affordable access to space, which as we have seen requires the growth of a large-scale space tourism industry.
Given the strategic context described above, if Europe’s future publicly developed manned orbital spacecraft and launch system is to provide value for public money then it must satisfy the following broad criteria.
(1) It must be designed in close consulation with the companies which in about ten years time will have a specific need to operate such a vehicle -- companies such as Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures, Excalibur Almaz and others.
(2) The design must be capable of significantly undercutting the current high cost of access to orbit of around $30 million per passenger. A ticket price of no more than $3 million per passenger to orbit and return would be a reasonable initial target to aim for.
(3) The design must allow for sustainable growth in operations, to accommodate rising numbers of visitors to orbit per year and exploit efficiencies of scale. A starting level of activity of one launch per month and a growth rate in traffic of 20% per year would be reasonable initial targets to aim for, leading to weekly flights within a decade and daily flights after two decades of growth.
These are not unreasonable criteria. Economy of operation and growth in parallel with a developing market are capabilities being designed into current British and earlier German work on reusable spaceplanes.
It must be clear that both economy and reliability (= safety) can only be achieved through large-scale operations of reusable vehicles.
The key question is whether ESA should develop its own in-house design, or support existing private work. Given the example set by NASA, in which numerous Shuttle successor programmes were funded and then abandoned, wasting considerable sums of public money, it is clear that a European equivalent of NASA’s current COTS programme is required if any progress is to be made. In such a programme the space agency invests in private work in parallel with commercial investment, gives it technical support and a guaranteed initial customer, but does not attempt to control its design decisions.
At least two separate companies should be supported, as in America, in order to ensure a healthy diversity in the emerging space transport industry. In spaceplane work, this means that at least one single-stage-to-orbit and one two-stage-to-orbit project can be supported.
Europe consciously decided not to participate in the manned exploration of low Earth orbit when in 1992 it cancelled its Hermès programme.
Two decades later, manned activities in low Earth orbit have moved from the exploration phase to the development of applications, focused on the use of permanent space stations. In order to catch up with the rest of the world, Europe now has to recognise that any new manned orbital spaceflight system must therefore be geared towards developing space tourism and space manufacturing -- the major applications of manned orbital spaceflight. Otherwise it may end up in the early 2020s sending say two ARVs with four professional astronauts each to the ISS per year at a time when annual private visitors to orbit number in the hundreds, and will make itself ridiculous and irrelevant as a result.
Commercial ventures such as the ones named above will be able to access space at significantly lower cost than government space agencies have hitherto been able to, thanks both to their openness to innovative technologies and to their focus on achieving high launch rates in the service of mass markets, with resulting economies of scale and rapid improvement in vehicle design.
Therefore if Europe were to proceed with the development of a new manned orbital spacecraft for occasional space agency use alone, such as the current ARV-Ariane 5 proposal, it would risk wasting considerable sums of public money on the development and operation of an obsolescent and irrelevant system. The new ARV-derived vehicle might even have to be abandoned shortly after it came into service, and European government astronauts booked on scheduled services, unless there was sufficient funding to reconfigure it for lunar exploration.
Manned lunar exploration may proceed, all being well, during the 2020s, and should take advantage of the growing commercial infrastructure in low Earth orbit and of near-Earth asteroidal resources for in-space refuelling. But on the Moon too exploration should be planned to eventually give way to the development of commercially viable applications in tourism and manufacturing (for example of parts for solar power satellites to serve Earth), perhaps during the 2030s, setting up a large-scale Earth-Moon and near-Earth asteroid infrastructure which will enable the sustainable exploration of Mars to begin during the 2040s or 2050s.
Last revised 4 October 2009 / 40th Apollo Anniversary Year