How Will You Benefit From Commercial Space Travel? - Terms of Service with Clare Duffy - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

CNN

4 days ago

Clare Duffy
00:00:01
64 years ago, the first humans went to space. In the decade since, more than 700 people have crossed that boundary, looking down at Earth from above. And in the past few years, the commercial spaceflight industry has taken off, literally, making it possible for people, mostly rich people, to experience space for themselves. The first private spacewalk, funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, happened last September. And this April, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched six women, including Katy Perry, into space. So what's the deal with these private space missions? Do they benefit anyone other than the wealthy few who get to participate in them? In the future, could more of us find ourselves strapping into rockets? And should we even want to? Here to unpack this with me is Lee Billings. He's a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight. And he's a senior editor at Scientific American. I'm Clare Duffy, and this is Terms of Service. Well, Lee Billings, thanks for doing this.
Lee Billings
00:01:10
It's my pleasure, Clare. Thanks for having me.
Clare Duffy
00:01:12
Okay, I wanna know if Jeff Bezos or someone else offered you the chance to go to space tomorrow. Are you going?
Lee Billings
00:01:19
Ooh, it definitely depends on the details.
Clare Duffy
00:01:22
Okay, that's fair.
Lee Billings
00:01:23
I think that something like traveling to space on Jeff Bezos's, or Blue Origin's we should say, New Shepard vehicle, which does suborbital flights. I think I would do that pretty easily. Lots of people have been on those. Once you start getting into the orbital regime, the complexity goes up, the energy required goes up. It gets a little riskier, a little more dangerous. I think I would probably want to do it, but I imagine my wife and two young kids would not.
Clare Duffy
00:01:51
'Yeah, that's fair. So I think that people still think of space travel as a mostly government-driven endeavor. Is that still true?
Lee Billings
00:02:03
To some degree, again, the details matter a lot. There's a big difference between this, I hate to use the word explosion, but one had went into it. So there's a difference between this explosion you're seeing in kind of space tourism or private citizens traveling to space, especially with regard to things like the suborbital launches that we already briefly mentioned. Big difference between that and things like going to the International Space Station or just reaching orbit in the first place. Suborbital feels like, most governments are kind of more in the been there, done that mode. And so that really is the playground right now for average people, or maybe not so average people, we'll just say wealthy folks who are private citizens who can afford it.
Clare Duffy
00:02:43
So on that note, how have we seen the commercial spaceflight industry evolve over the past few decades?
Lee Billings
00:02:53
'Well, that's a big question, but I think that maybe the right way to tackle it is to look at something. I mean, SpaceX obviously is the elephant in the room. They are the biggest success story, I think, in most regards, when you're talking about commercial spaceflight, the so-called new space movement people used to call it. And they came, SpaceX came from almost like, you know, Elon Musk's dream he had of someday making settlements on Mars, taking people to Mars, making space travel more routine and affordable and safe. And a lot of the things SpaceX did to become so successful were pretty significant gambles. They weren't starting to pay off. And yet, they obviously did. And now the company has reaped and is reaping the rewards because they can get things into space and into orbit at a lower price point and kind of a better performance than most of their competition. And so now a lot of the big dogs are playing catch up and we can obviously get into more specifics there.
Clare Duffy
00:03:59
Yeah, when you mention the big dogs, who are you talking about there?
Lee Billings
00:04:01
So, places like, you know, Boeing or Lockheed Martin or United Launch Alliance, which is a collection of a couple of different ones, they have in the past kind of, I don't want to say that they've been resting on their laurels per se, but I kind of do want to say that.
Clare Duffy
00:04:19
Yeah.
Lee Billings
00:04:19
So, in particular, reusability is big. Right now, the Falcon 9 from SpaceX is really the best example of a reusable rocket that gets you into orbit, and that's not something that we have seen, even now, from the other legacy aerospace companies. There is the Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance that I believe might be partially reusable someday. But they haven't, for instance, that's only flown, I think, twice now. And it hasn't done anything like what the Falcon 9 does where it comes back and does that iconic landing on the launch pad after it comes in the space. There's also Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which is an orbital evolution of the New Shepard vehicle that we mentioned earlier that can do suborbital hops, suborbitable flights. New Glenn can go to orbit and it notionally can also come back and land on a barge or on a launch pad and be reusable, but that's a big deal because that saves you a lot of money. And it doesn't just save you money because you're not throwing away the equivalent of like a 747 plane every single time you launch. It also is more efficient. It allows you to do a higher launch cadence. Falcon 9 launches an average of every other day.
Clare Duffy
00:05:36
Wow, to bring satellites into orbit?
Lee Billings
00:05:39
'So almost all of that is through SpaceX's Starlink service that's almost all in service of that. So the vast majority of the Falcon 9 launches are for the Starlink constellation or mega constellation which presently has about 7,000 satellites up in orbit all to provide global broadband high-speed internet.
Clare Duffy
00:06:00
So, we're now starting to see, and you sort of touched on this, celebrities, billionaires be able to take commercial space flights. And I think a lot of regular folks looking at the growth of this industry sort of think it's like a play place for wealthy people. But how important are these commercial spaceflights when we think about advancing research and our knowledge and our access to space?
Lee Billings
00:06:25
'Well, I think that that key word is access. It's a means to an end, and you can do a lot of different things with these capabilities. You can have things like private missions to the International Space Station. You can do things like that. Some people are even talking about having full-on private commercial space stations that might come into being after the International space station is deorbited, circa 2031 is when NASA is targeting that. But you can do lots of other things in space too, and whether that's launching robots to go explore the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa, or building vast constellations of satellites to do various things looking down on the planet, or big space telescopes to look back to the beginning of time to see the echoes of the Big Bang and the first stars and how we all came to be here over billions and billions of years. All that stuff. In some respect, in the same domain, because once you're, to quote the late, great science fiction author and visionary Arthur C. Clarke, once you are in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. So it's all about access and capability. It's not all fun and games, but it can be.
Clare Duffy
00:07:39
Wait yeah, so private space station, is that like go stay in a hotel in space or is that like go do research that some wealthy person is going to pay for?
Lee Billings
00:07:48
Well, I mean, I think the notion is that because you're the paying customer, it can be either one. Now, naturally, there's going to be some sort of quality control, I would imagine, or like, you know, things, restrictions and regulations, things you can and can't do. You know, you're not going to go up onto a private space station with the explicit intention of, let's see what happens if I blow up a stick of dynamite in space. That won't fly, literally. But on the other hand, the whole point is that by breaking this open so to speak and letting more people get in even though they may be there may still be gates, you know and filters you have to be very very wealthy or and have some very very well the benefactor. You're able to do more and kind of diversify human activity in space and economic activity in space and that's really promising and cool. But of course there can be dark sides, right.
Clare Duffy
00:08:38
Can you talk about some of the scientifically significant space flights that are happening right now and what kinds of research is being done?
Lee Billings
00:08:46
It was SpaceX that launched the Europa Clipper mission, which I kind of referred to earlier. That's a mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa, which has a vast subsurface liquid water ocean underneath its icy exterior. And that ocean is actually bigger than Earth's oceans, all combined. And people want to know, scientists want to know, astrobiologists want to if there might be life down there. So Europa Clipper is a step towards that.
Clare Duffy
00:09:14
The Clipper mission, is that like in process, in progress?
Lee Billings
00:09:18
That's already that's already on its way to to Europa.
Clare Duffy
00:09:21
Okay.
Lee Billings
00:09:22
And so it'll get there in a few years.
Clare Duffy
00:09:25
Okay That's fascinating.
Lee Billings
00:09:27
'Yeah, and then you know another big one to talk about is what's called Mars sample return Which is something that NASA as well as the European Space Agency or ESA for short have been pursuing for for decades really and The upshot here is that we have a you know a little robot or actually not so little robot It's about the size of a car On Mars right now called perseverance that is exploring a place called Jezero crater where we know water flowed and pooled, there's a big river delta there, billions of years ago, and it's been collecting and storing samples in these little tiny tubes. And the idea is that you take all these samples that are very carefully curated from different parts of the environment, and you bring them back to Earth, and then you look at them in a way that you can't look at on Mars via a little robot, and then maybe you find out whether or not Mars ever had life on it, or maybe even has life on right now. And the trouble is that, Right now, those things are actually stuck on Mars, those test tubes are stuck on Mars. It was going to be too expensive for NASA and ESA to bring it back according to the official plan of record. So, they started replanning it and they haven't, I don't quite know where the where the the status is of that. There's lots of lots of hush-hush about what's going on there because it's pretty fraught. But the the real takeaway is that a lot of people were thinking, well, maybe SpaceX can help us out there.
Clare Duffy
00:10:51
You would think that would be something Elon would want to do, given his ambition to maybe be president of Mars one day.
Lee Billings
00:10:58
'Haha right, right to die on Mars, but just or retire on Mars just not not on landing. Yeah, you think he might want to do it. This is kind of where we may be veer a little bit into the dark side, right? Where you end up in the situation where instead of being notionally captive to the whims of you know a presidency and, and congressional majorities and appropriators. And the entire process that is our, our democracy and our federal system. You're instead captured to the whims of single individuals. So there are pros and cons to that approach. For the vast majority of astronomy's history, what we recognize as astronomy, astronomers actually kind of had their patrons, their wealthy patrons. It wasn't this government-funded and subsidized model. It was instead, oh, hey, super wealthy rich person over here, would you like to have your name in a telescope? Would you like be behind the first discovery of something amazing beyond Earth that makes us all feel something.
Clare Duffy
00:11:57
Right.
Lee Billings
00:11:57
And and maybe we're moving back to that mode, but but it's uh, it's problematic to say the least.
Clare Duffy
00:12:04
Our conversation with Lee Billings will continue after a short break.
Clare Duffy
00:12:09
So how risky is it that we are so reliant on private companies, but especially this one private company for government space programs? I mean, just a few weeks ago, Elon Musk was threatening Donald Trump that he would decommission Crew Dragon, which brings astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station. Is this a risk in terms of the progress of this industry, of this space?
Lee Billings
00:12:32
Absolutely, absolutely and it doesn't have to be something as extreme as that and and and I think again the SpaceX is everywhere in term when we're thinking about US space capabilities And so it's not just something like cutting off access to the International Space Station which would be a big deal, but in the big geopolitical sense maybe not as big of a deal for instance as Elon Musk disabling, starling capabilities to prevent a Ukrainian strike on Russia's naval assets in the Crimea, right? That's another ball of wax, but the point is that there's a lot of dependency, not only in the civil space program, but also in the military space side of things, on this one company. And he's the CEO, he's boss, so it's not publicly traded. So he can, to some degree, call the shots. Of course, I'm sure there's various kinds of pushback, and I think that's what we saw when Elon Musk walked back those sorts of threats.
Clare Duffy
00:13:35
Right.
Lee Billings
00:13:36
After not too long.
Clare Duffy
00:13:38
He gets a lot of money from the federal government for doing these things so that he probably doesn't want to put on the line either.
Lee Billings
00:13:44
I think so, and I imagine the board of directors probably doesn't want that to happen.
Clare Duffy
00:13:49
How much are the recent budget cuts that the federal government has made impacting space exploration, space research?
Lee Billings
00:14:00
Yeah, I think you paused there for a little bit because you saw me take a deep breath because it's staggering. And we have to, I want to try to be a little careful to differentiate between things that are set in stone, things that are certain, and things that still proposed. But the point is that the proposals that we're looking at are shocking, staggering, unprecedented in their scale and scope. We're talking about, for instance, with NASA, cutting NASA's budget essentially, NASA's science budget and canceling or defunding or just ending a whole slew of missions. There's too many for me to really list. And there's this notion that I think there's a grain of truth in it. There's this notion that, okay, well, NASA and its standard contractors were doing things too slowly and too inefficiently and the price point was wrong, it's too expensive and maybe we can get more bang for our buck by throwing our lot in with SpaceX or a few other companies. There's an element of truth to that, but you have to remember a lot of these things, Mars sample return being one of them, they have no real incentive. There's no profit really to be gained when we're thinking about money, I mean, in some sense. I mean of course you can still be paid. There's a contract that's made, but it's not as if someone's going to strike gold or unobtainium on Mars and then all of a sudden that's going kick off a new economic boom probably. That still seems further down the road. So there is this risk of kind of our vision and our horizon really shrinking if we are only prioritizing or only going after the things that SpaceX wants to do.
Clare Duffy
00:15:35
Are there example, I know you said there's like too many to name all of them, but is there an example that stands out to you of a project or an effort that we could stand to lose because of these budget cuts?
Lee Billings
00:15:48
'It's such a target-rich environment, it's tough to figure out which one to focus on. One would be the Chandra Space Telescope. That's not one that's as glamorous as Hubble or James Webb, but it's very important. It looks in high-energy x-rays of the universe, and there's no other capability quite like it right now, and so according to the budget that's been laid out, Chandra should just go.
Clare Duffy
00:16:13
What kinds of things does Chandra show us?
Lee Billings
00:16:16
'It shows us things like how supernovae occur. These immense bigger than the sun stars that at the end of their life have these catastrophic explosions and they spray out a lot of heavier elements from their cores and those heavy elements that spray out are also the feedstock, the raw material from which things like planets and ultimately people are made, right? So if we are interested in answering bigger questions about the universe, about where came from, where we're going. Who we are in a grand sense, the grandest sense, then we need to be able to look at the universe in many different ways across many different wavelengths or types of light. And so Chandra looks in X-rays, it's very good at looking at things like supernovae, but other stuff too. And if we don't have that sort of thing, it's a blind spot. Another example would be the Voyager probes. I'm pretty sure that the budget is saying, out there and they've been, they've had a really good run, but you know, why bother? Or the Voyager probes, by the way, were launched I think in 1971-1972, Voyager 1 and 2, and they did what's called a grand tour of the outer solar system and now they're the first interstellar emissaries that we've sent out into really, really deep space. They've passed through this boundary that scientists have kind of come up with for where the solar system kind of ends. And so they're out there in interstellars space and maybe we'll just turn them Right? New Horizons is similar. It went past Pluto, I think, back in 2015, gave us the first high-res images of Pluto. And ever since then, it's been cruising on outward, further outward, into the distant outer solar system. And it will also be an interstellar space before too long. But what if we just turn it off first?
Clare Duffy
00:17:53
Yeah, so wait, what does that mean? Like, if we just turn it off, it just continues floating out into space, we're just not looking at the cameras anymore, we are just not connected to it anymore?
Lee Billings
00:18:02
'Well, it would mean that we'd probably power down the spacecraft in various ways and we wouldn't be sending commands to it anymore. We wouldn't devoting the very significant resources to picking up those faint transmissions from so far out there, right? To do that, you have to have really big radio telescopes or radio arrays, big dishes. And right now actually the deep space network is what it's called that NASA uses to communicate with all these spacecraft. It's pretty taxed, it's pretty overloaded. We actually need more money for the deep-space network to build more dishes and have more high-bandwidth comms throughout the solar system. So you do have to cut your losses at some point and get rid of things that aren't really performing. But when it's stuff like that, when we have no other emissary out there, no other thing out there to tell us what it is like, it just seems seems kind of silly, and not in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way, these things are still producing good science.
Clare Duffy
00:18:56
This kind of gets at a bigger question that I have about all of this, which is like, are we creating a bunch of space trash with these programs? Like, what happens to all this stuff that we send up there and then maybe turn off?
Lee Billings
00:19:08
Well, that's a really, really good question, Clare. And the short answer is, in most cases, we kind of don't need to worry about it too much, and that's...
Clare Duffy
00:19:17
It's big out there.
Lee Billings
00:19:18
'Well, actually, it's more that most things we send are usually in low-Earth orbit. We usually don't go too... I mean, if we're thinking about the whole universe and everything we've sent out, yes, space is very, very big, and so most of it... You could make a lot of trash, and it doesn't really seem to matter too much. But when we're talking about low-earth orbit... Mother Nature is great because something in low-earth orbit actually will automatically reenter, automatically its orbit will decay, it will fall into the atmosphere and burn up. However, this too is a double-edged sword. So we, you know, through the entirety of the space age, people haven't really looked very closely at the effects of what it means to launch so much stuff into space, into And for instance, the Starlink satellites that we mentioned earlier, there's about 7,000 of them. Well, those are all in lower orbit so that you can get that low latency. So you can a good ping time on your Call of Duty game or whatever you're playing with for someone halfway across the world. That means that they decay, their orbits decay, and then they reenter. And the service cycle is something like three to five years for one of those satellites.
Clare Duffy
00:20:26
Oh wow.
Lee Billings
00:20:26
'Which means that's why there's always all these launches going on, to replenish and maintain the constellation. Turns out that when all these things are reentering and it's not just starlink. It's it's more stuff than that But when these things reenter they're spraying vaporized metals and plastics and soot and things like that into the upper atmosphere, which doesn't sound necessarily so bad. But the upper-atmosphere where we're talking about is a very delicate very fragile place. And it's around where things like the like the ozone layer are so there's actually increasing evidence that it's not airtight yet, but that this uptick that we're seeing in the volume of reentering material and this material that is then injected into the upper atmosphere will have effects on the ozone layer, not good ones.
Clare Duffy
00:21:14
Already a problem for us.
Lee Billings
00:21:15
Well, it's already a problem for us. Yeah,.
Clare Duffy
00:21:18
The ozone layer in general. Yeah.
Lee Billings
00:21:19
It will you know, you could imagine all the progress we've made since we decided to not have things like CFC's Chlorofluorocarbons and hairspray and refrigerators and stuff all the process we've been could kind of be wiped wiped out.
Clare Duffy
00:21:31
And when these things come back into Earth's low Earth orbit or like, are we gonna have satellites like falling to Earth?
Lee Billings
00:21:40
That's already happening to various degrees.
Clare Duffy
00:21:41
Do we have control over that?
Lee Billings
00:21:43
Well, ideally you should, but there's cases where you don't and there's various different ways we could split hairs here. Are we talking about some big rocket stage that doesn't reach all the way to orbit but instead just gets most of the way there and then falls back to Earth? Or are we talking something that's jettisoned from let's say a habitat like the International Space Station? I think it was last year actually that a battery pack. That was part of a piece of trash thrown out the space station, International Space Station, landed on a house in Florida.
Clare Duffy
00:22:12
Oh my gosh.
Lee Billings
00:22:13
And could have hurt somebody.
Clare Duffy
00:22:14
Yeah.
Lee Billings
00:22:15
And no one's been hurt yet. Yet.
Clare Duffy
00:22:17
Yeah.
Lee Billings
00:22:18
But you can imagine, again, this is not a static situation. We were talking about an upward sweeping trend where we're talking about more and more launches, more and reentries, more and stuff up there. And that can very quickly spiral into rather nasty places that people, most people don't think about.
Clare Duffy
00:22:35
And what about the environmental impact just of the launches that happen on Earth, like let alone sort of the impact on space? Like what about right here on Earth?
Lee Billings
00:22:45
Well, that's also a concern, and it gets back again to the fact that there's a lot of stuff, you know, if you think about emissions, you know carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gasses, soot, black carbon, things like that. Right now, space launch is not the most significant contributor in terms of raw total emissions, right? It's still going to be cars, it's going to transport, shipping, things like that. All that stuff takes place in the lowest level of the atmosphere, or maybe in the stratosphere, right? But we're talking about things that will go even above that. And so they are contributing significant amounts of these things that are detrimental to the environment in various ways, in especially fragile and delicate parts of the big system of the atmospheric. And again, there's an increasingly large volume of studies, it's still pretty small, but it's growing pretty fast, that that suggests that this is going to be a bigger and bigger problem. Because again, it is not a static situation. And we keep thinking that. Oh, well, this is how it's going to be forever right or this is this is the norm It's going be this cadence of launches. It's gonna be this number of of launch providers It's gonna be this many missions so on and so forth this much debris, but the numbers just are poised to go up up up...
Clare Duffy
00:23:55
All of this is making me think of a question that I think a lot of people have when they think of space travel, which is sort of like, we've done a lot already to harm Earth as humans. Should we just kind of leave space alone? What do you think? What do think of that?
Lee Billings
00:24:10
Ooh, I guess I like to answer these things, I'm not quite sure, I may be twisting kind of what you're saying a little bit, but we can do more than one thing at once, right? We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can find ways to repair a lot of the damage that we've already done and mitigate, mediate damage that could be done in the future while still not entirely turning our backs on the skies. And, of course, uh... Space travel, space science, access to space remains somewhat luxurious. It's really hard to get people to pay attention to or care about these sorts of things if they're more worried about the price of eggs or gas or their own personal safety, things like that. And so there is a hierarchy of needs that's here that we need to acknowledge. But to me, I think that a world in which we turned our backs on the skies like that, it would be an impoverished one. It would be a sadder one. There'll be one that, that maybe it's not about finding life on Europa or glimpsing the first moments of time and an echo of the Big Bang. Maybe it's just about laying the gunpowder on the ground for some little child who can then, something can spark it and then they'll go on to a career in science or technology or engineering, that kind of thing. I think that that inspirational quality remains very important, even though it's somewhat numinous and wooly.
Clare Duffy
00:25:33
'Is there a future where going to space becomes more accessible for non-billionaires? How far away are we from that?
Lee Billings
00:25:43
'Ooh, well, you know, I think maybe the way to look at it is if something like Starship succeeds, and again Starship is this, it's the biggest rocket that anyone's ever built. And if that can actually succeed, by which I mean it can fly safely and maybe even do it multiple times a day or every day, the cost of getting to space is going to drop precipitously potentially. And if that happens, then yes, absolutely, you can imagine going to space would be more like maybe making a down payment on a house, which is still really expensive, but it's more within reach of many people and it could probably get even lower than that. And that's part of the official, maybe semi-official plan when you talk to someone like Elon Musk, that's kind of what they want to do, they say.
Clare Duffy
00:26:34
And what about the Mars colony? How likely is that?
Lee Billings
00:26:36
'Mars is a pretty tough cookie to crack, not to crack because there's these other issues that have nothing to do with getting there. It's about how do you live there? And the answer seems to basically be, well, assuming you can get there and you can arrive on planet and not die on landing and be somewhat healthy and capable when you step out of your spacecraft, you're going to go dig a hole. And you're gonna go live in that hole for probably the rest of your life. And you need to shield yourself from large amounts of cosmic radiation that are trickling down to the surface of the planet. Because here on Earth, we have a great geo-dynamo. We have a very powerful magnetic field that protects us, and a big atmosphere that protects us, but Mars has neither of those things. So lots of cosmic radiations on the surface, and that's bad for the cells in your body.
Clare Duffy
00:27:27
Sounds fun.
Lee Billings
00:27:28
'Yeah, right? I can't wait to go to Mars and- be like a mo man. That sounds great.
Clare Duffy
00:27:34
Awesome. Well Lee, thank you so much. This has been really fun.
Lee Billings
00:27:36
My pleasure, Claire.
Clare Duffy
00:27:38
So to recap, here are some things to think about the next time you look up at the stars at night. First, the majority of US space expeditions right now are conducted by SpaceX. It's transporting astronauts and enabling a lot of important work that might not happen otherwise. But it can also be risky for the government to be so reliant on just one company, especially as federal budget cuts threaten the scope of NASA research. Next, space trash is an increasing issue. Especially as more satellites launch into lower Earth orbit. No one's been hurt yet by debris falling from the sky, but the problem is only going to keep getting bigger as we keep launching more things into space. Finally, while space can sometimes feel like a playground for billionaires right now, there is a lot of important scientific research being done that can help us better understand the universe and contribute to life here on Earth. We'll link to Lee's work if you want to read more about some of the fascinating space research happening today. That's it for this week's episode of Terms of Service. I'm Clare Duffy, thanks for listening.