The Commercial Space Race Takes a Giant Leap Forwards

The Commercial Space Race Takes a Giant Leap Forwards

By Daniel Gortat, Futureworx Architect

There is a building inertia, market sentiment, and a general direction for new businesses in the space sector. With increased launch efforts from companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the commercial space race is well underway. 2018 saw the world’s first triple-digit launch since the 1990s and 2021 set the record for sending the most rockets into orbit in history.

In the UK, the space economy GVA has grown at 4.7% over the last four years, compared with the overall UK GDP of 3.7%, making it the fastest growing industry in the country. It is worth over £16.4 billion per year and employs over 45,000 people, with satellites underpinning £360 billion per year of wider economic activity.

The first-ever National Space Strategy, published in September 2021, identified six emerging sectors in the space economy and set out the direction in which the market is headed in the coming decades (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Emerging markets in the space economy as identified by the UK’s National Space Strategy. credit: Crown copyright 2021


This presents an exciting opportunity for UK companies, space and non-space alike, to acquire a potentially extremely profitable share of the business sector and to be in the top tier industry of the British economy. However, timing to enter this commercial space race, as with everything, is key.

A solution to Earth’s energy crisis that lies in space

In 2019, the UK set out an ambitious national clean energy policy, Net Zero, to fully decarbonise the economy by 2050. This requires clean and sustainable energy generation from renewable sources, and this energy generation must at the same time remain affordable, reliable, and secure for the economy to thrive.

If we look at the space market timescale in Figure 2, one of the last and arguably the most sought-out sectors to reach market maturity is space-based energy.

According to the feasibility report published in September 2021 by the UK Space Energy Initiative, space based solar power (SBSP) could be developed by 2040 and has the potential to dwarf all the other sources of energy combined. It has been added to the government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio, alongside others, as a viable solution to help the UK achieve net zero by 2050.

This new disruptive technology will have an enormous influence over the energy market for decades to come and fantastic spill-over benefits in the areas of wireless power transmission, semiconductor and photovoltaic technology, to name a few.

The trouble is, to unlock this technology several other emerging space markets need to be established first. SBSP stations are based on a modular design, where a large number of solar panels are assembled in orbit. Transporting all these elements into space is difficult, costly, and will take a toll on the environment.

If a commercial energy company wants to employ SBSP technology in their arsenal, its first step should be contributing to the regulatory aspect for space sustainability and proximity operations – the number one recommendation to tackle the problem of overcoming the crowded orbit of our planet for any potential space player.

In turn, these regulations will unlock in-orbit servicing, active debris removal, asset relocation, and inspection segments of the space market, according to the UK In-Orbit Servicing Capability report, 2021. Indeed, we are already making significant progress on this with the ISO standard on Space Systems - Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) and On Orbit Servicing (OOS), released in July of this year.

The next entry point for companies to watch out for is the development of fully reusable rockets, like SpaceX’s Starship, scheduled for its first orbital launch in 2025. Fully reusable rockets would significantly reduce the cost of putting the SBSP stations in orbit. Likewise, reducing the overall weight of the SBSP components, for example, by utilising innovative technologies such as recently developed ultra-lightweight solar cells, would decrease the cost of launches further.

However, once the SBSP system is deployed and successfully assembled in orbit, what about its lifetime costs?

The entry point here could be realising the next emerging sector in the space market timescale: in-space manufacturing. An autonomous manufacturing platform capable of producing solar cells in orbit and replacing them on the SBSP station would eliminate the need for maintenance launches from Earth.

The last emerging space market desirable for unlocking the space-based energy sector is space travel and habitation. Cost competitive end-to-end services such as permanent onboard crew, equipment accommodation, operations, and logistics, will allow companies to establish their own postcode in orbit and foster completely new business models for the future.

Any company interested in SBSP should watch closely the developments of such projects as Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station to be built in low Earth orbit by 2030.

Conclusion

The UK’s National Space Strategy’s key objective is to bring together civil and defence policies for the first time – a feat worthy of applause. The UK’s ambition in space is no longer a nationalised industry effort but a private commercial venture, opening the country to all sizes of space-sector businesses to grow and thrive.

Regarding the SBSPs, its first and foremost goal is national and international energy security as well as the environmental impact. However, it is very clear why the National Space Strategy report puts space-based energy sector at the tail-end of the timescale of the identified emerging markets. There is a comprehensive roadmap with market-defining windows that need to be proven first to attract companies to enter the commercial space race.

If a company understands and follows this roadmap, seizing the key moments to kick-start the core technology, it could easily become, for example, the first space-based solar power harnessing business, paving a secure, affordable, and scalable way to clean sustainable energy, thereby de-risking the pathway to Net Zero.

Our Thoughts

26 September 2022


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