Next Stage of Space Travel Is Big Business

Enthusiasm for space exploration is rising once again. The pictures and accounts of Neptune and the ice volcanoes of its moon Triton inspired renewed support for space. And President Bush, on last month’s anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, gave it focus by setting a long-term goal of a mission to Mars.

The business of space is getting a boost also. On Sunday, McDonnell Douglas picked up a $50-million fee for the launch aboard its Delta rocket of a communications satellite for a commercial customer, British Satellite Broadcasting. McDonnell Douglas has orders for eight more launches and is bidding for a ninth in Brazil.

It is not alone in the business. Martin Marietta, whose big Titan rocket will launch two satellites at once in November, has orders for three more such dual launches and is negotiating for a fourth. General Dynamics has 28 launches backlogged for its Atlas rocket, 10 of them for a Navy project with Hughes Aircraft.

And small firms are very active, with sounding rockets that carry industrial experiments into the zero-gravity conditions of the suborbital atmosphere. American Rocket Co., Camarillo, will launch experiments for Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Strategic Defense Initiative on Sept. 20. Space Services Inc. of Houston--former astronaut Deke Slayton’s firm--successfully sent up a rocket in March carrying eight experiments for the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Gearing Up for 21st Century

So are all systems go for a boom in space? Not quite. What is happening today is an industrial revival from the shutdown that followed the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. U.S. rocket makers now see “an attractive, albeit thin, market,” says Alan Lovelace, general manager of General Dynamics space systems division. But they recognize that today’s full order books are the result of the backlog that developed in the Challenger aftermath, when nothing was launched, and that when things settle down, the orders will be only a trickle. Hughes Aircraft, the leading satellite maker with more than half the 40 commercial satellites now in space, estimates about five launches a year.

Yet today’s renewed enthusiasm is important, helping U.S. industry to begin the real work of the next decade, which will be laying the groundwork of space platforms and communications systems for the wide-ranging exploration of space that is sure to come in the 21st Century.

And the revival is timely because competitors have been active. The European space consortium, Arianespace--funded by 13 individual nations--leads the world; it has put up 23 satellites in the past four years and has orders to launch almost four dozen more. China and the Soviet Union are offering launch services at cut-rate prices.

Not surprisingly, Japan has ambitious plans for space. In 1992, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will launch its H-2 rocket, and in the mid-1990s will put up the Japan Environmental Module, which is scheduled to accompany the U.S. space station. Beyond that, Japanese companies are being encouraged to think big by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which is holding a competition for ideas on space exploration in the next century.

Meanwhile, despite today’s enthusiasm, U.S. industry may not have smooth sailing when Congress gets the $30-billion bill for the space station, scheduled for launch in 1995 and envisioned as both a center for experiments and a platform for planetary exploration. There will be cries that it’s a boondoggle and that space isn’t a real profit-making business anyway.

But that’s not true. First, as the Europeans and Japanese understand, projects like the space station are needed to support the early stages of a new industry. And profit margins on space business are already good, says Donald Robinson, vice president of planning for American Rocket. American charges $800,000 a launch on small rockets and earns $200,000.

Furthermore, space is a business with a considerable record of success. Today’s commercial rocket launches are not the dawn of the space business but the second stage of a developing industry, says General Dynamics’ Lovelace, a one-time NASA official. Communications satellites--the first stage--have been a business for decades.

Now we have launches, space-age trucking really. And the next stages, Lovelace says, will be in Earth remote sensing--bringing to commercial business the work being done by spy satellites--and weather control.

Truth is, today’s enthusiasm is not misplaced. Space exploration has already brought us wonders that we take for granted--the techniques of image enhancement for pictures from space have brought our hospitals computerized and magnetic resonance brain and body scanning. And while U.S. industry must now make up for some lost time, the advances of U.S. computer technology give America an edge in space for the decade ahead. What will be needed most in the 1990s is to keep up the enthusiasm and the vision--and that is suddenly easier to do thanks to the triumphal pictures from Neptune and Triton.