Contest-Driven Development of Orbital Tourist Vehicles --- Author: Al Globus
I. Abstract
We explore the size and structure of prizes intended to promote private development of orbital tourist vehicles. While inspired by the Ansari X-Prize, we argue that prizes to spur orbital tourism development must be much larger and structured to reward continued development, rather than a few flights. Mechanisms to promote development of extremely reliable vehicles are also discussed. This paper does not examine the technology or techniques necessary to develop orbital vehicles, but rather the structure of incentives to encourage such development. Analysis suggests that total prize money of one to eight billion dollars may be sufficient to jump start orbital tourism, particularly if sub-orbital tourism proves profitable. This sum is within the means of a few extremely wealthy individuals and foundations. While there is no guarantee of success, the cost of failure is minimal since no prize is awarded if no vehicle is developed.
II. Introduction
Present launch capabilities, while sufficient for communications, remote sensing, some space science and limited manned operations, are grossly inadequate for large scale space settlement. By space settlement we mean very large numbers of people living in giant orbital spacecraft, on the Moon, on Mars and/or within large asteroids. Space settlement could provides humanity with hundreds of times more living area, thousands of time more physical resources, and millions of times more energy1, 2 than is presently at our
disposal. Such a vast expansion of the resources available to human civilization would eliminate the need, although perhaps not the practice, of resource-driven war. Such warfare kills and maims large numbers of people and destroys their work. Substantially better launch capacity is a necessary precursor to space settlement, but progress over the last 50 years has been disappointing. Thus, it behooves us to examine new strategies for moving large numbers of people and massive quantities of materials from Earth to Orbit. Over the last 50 years a wide variety of launchers have been developed up to and including the U.S. Space Shuttle, the most capable space vehicle to date. However, in spite of decades of development, Earth-to-Orbit transportation costs thousands of dollars per kilogram and suffers a catastrophic failure rate of a one or two percent. Worse, these figures have not improved with time. For example, the Saturn V was developed in the 1960’s to put men on the Moon. This vehicle cost less, measured in man-hours per ton to LEO (Low Earth Orbit), than todays major launch vehicles.3 Furthermore, the Saturn never suffered a catastrophic failure, although there were many close calls. By contrast, current shuttle costs run between $500-1,000 million per flight to deliver, at most, a few tens of tons of payload to the International Space Station, and the shuttle has suffered two catastrophic failures in just over a hundred flights.
Aircraft developed much more rapidly in their first 50 years. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of flights occurred in that period, but we have only launched a few thousand payloads into space. Substantial launch vehicle improvement may require tens of thousands of launches per year, not the current 50-70.4 Unfortunately, current markets for space launch: communications, Earth-observing, science, national prestige, etc. cannot support hundreds of launches per year, let alone tens of thousands. However, a new space market has recently been created: Space Adventures, Ltd. and the Russian space program have flown three tourists to the International Space Station (ISS), reputedly for about $20 million apiece. While this sum does not, apparently, cover the entire cost of the flight, there is an extra seat available on the spacecraft which must be flown periodically to the ISS to provide a functioning life boat capability. Although the ISS was originally intended to serve a host of space applications, it has not yet done so for a variety of reasons. Space tourism may be the legacy of the ISS, and it could be a very good one indeed. The only market for humans-in-space potentially capable of sustaining thousands of flights per year is tourism; particularly if the cost is in the $10-20,000 range and catastrophic failures are extremely rare. Published market research suggests that the space tourism market may become very large if the price is right. In 1994, Patrick Colins, et al.5 found that the Japanese market could provide about one million customers per year for space flight at about $10,000 per passenger. In 1996, Sven Abitzsch6 found that approximately 20% of the U.S., Canadian and German populations and nearly 40% of the Japanese population would be will to pay over $10,000 (actually, six months salary) for a trip into space. This represents nearly a hundred million people. In 1999, Oily Barrett7 found that 12% of United Kingdom residents, representing 3.5 million people, said they were willing to pay over $10,000 for a trip to space. In 2001, Crouch8 surveyed the literature and found that the global space tourism market is a strong function of price, with an annual demand of five million per year at $10,000 per flight and 170 at $500,00 per flight, representing annual markets of $5 billion and $85 million respectively. Table 1 shows Crouch’s demand vs. price per ticket. If these projections are optimistic by no more than a factor of ten, and the price per ticket can be brought down to about $10,000, there is good reason to believe space tourism can support tens of thousands of launches per year, a rate comparable to the early decades of aviation.
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