For decades the space race appeared to have stagnated. While there was never any shortage of new projects, none of them seemed to go further than the missions that had already been flown and, by some criteria, the actual cost of launching a satellite had changed little since the days of President Kennedy.
Now things are different. A number of hi-tech start-up companies are trying to make their mark and the industry is in danger of real disruption. Better still, the absolute amount of space activity looks set to soar. To date, the world has sent 10,000 satellites into orbit but within the foreseeable future, we may regard 10,000 launches per year as the new normal and the market for next-generation launch vehicles will be huge.
SpaceX appears to have significantly reduced the cost of each launch by retrieving and reusing the first stage of their rockets many times over. Doubtless innovations to the SpaceX fleet will reduce costs further, but for the precipitous reductions in cost that will be required for very large-scale activity, we’re going to have to do something entirely different.
