__ Got a satellite? Have we got a launch vehicle for you. __
On the edge of Australia's vast central desert, with the midday heat quivering above the ground, an air-conditioned Land Cruiser cold enough to freeze beef glides across flat terrain stretching hundreds of miles toward a vacant and cloudless horizon. Communications gear dangles from the dashboard: two-way radio, GPS receiver, mobile phone, satellite phone, and a special military communications link - backup systems come in handy when you're crossing a missile-testing range the size of England.
Judging from initial appearances, range activities manager John Draper remains sane after four years of working in this two-tone habitat of bush and sky, though when he veers off the paved road and bounces into trackless scrub and heath one might wonder. But with little work he locates what he is looking for: a small pile of rocks with a metal pipe sticking ramrod straight out the top. This makeshift marker represents ground zero of the new space age: the launchpad of what may be the world's first fully reusable rockets.
Within months, a simple, single tower will rise up here, inaugurating an era of space access in which launching payloads to low Earth orbit could be as easy as booking a night flight to New York. Kistler Aerospace, headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, is the company behind the project. Using one of the finest collections of post-Apollo space engineering talent ever assembled, Kistler wants to upend our approach to reaching space and transform this scrubby Mad Max desert into an active spaceport. Its vehicle: a rocket that returns to Earth using parachutes and airbags, ready for relaunch within days.
If Kistler succeeds, it will be the first in a group of companies dubbed the Four Musketeers to realize the vision of reusable space transport. These new enterprises - Kelly Space & Technology, Pioneer Rocketplane, Rotary Rocket, and Kistler - plan to toss away a decades-old Cold War legacy of government space monopoly and expendable ballistic-missile technology and instead launch private rockets that can be rapidly refueled and reflown. By introducing airline-type efficiencies to the launch business, the Musketeers aim to reduce the cost of a typical satellite launch to US$1,000 per pound, down from the current $5,000 to $10,000. Telecommunications, transportation, medicine, even tourism could be transformed as dramatically as PCs were transformed by falling chip prices.
"If the future holds infinite possibilities for man's presence in space, transportation is one thing that has to happen," says Mike Kelly, cofounder of Kelly Space & Technology.
Nearly 1,700 payloads worth $121 billion will need a ride to space over the next 10 years, estimates the Teal Group, a defense and aerospace market analysis firm. Since the launch industry has never before seen demand like this, the anticipated bonanza is pulling in everyone from NASA lifers to writer Tom Clancy, who has invested $1 million in Rotary.
Seventy percent of the payloads will be commercial communications satellites, most of them in low Earth orbit. Constellations of LEOs, as they are called, will let you travel around the entire world with one phone number. They'll make pagers beep in even the most bucolic of rural settings. They'll render high-speed Internet access more pervasive than ever thought possible. Taken together, these satellite families will transform the night sky, effectively turning the orbits into foundations as solid as city streets for the building of new industries based in space.
Last year, 77 commercial payloads were carried to space worldwide, tripling the number seen the year before and outnumbering military and civil-government payloads for the first time. The quicker these new constellations get deployed and the more rapidly and cheaply they can be serviced, the faster the prices of new paging, mobile-phone, and Internet services will fall. And as prices fall, all kinds of other space-based products, ranging from increasingly sophisticated car-navigation systems to remote telemedicine, are sure to emerge. The reduced gravity of orbit could result in new materials processes, while reusable rockets could deliver packages more quickly than overnight services by climbing to orbit and dropping down half a world away in just a few hours. Many imagine space tourism as a big earner, and one company is already delivering cremated remains to low Earth orbit for "burial."
Iridium, which will begin its global telephone service in late September, has set the stage for this coming revolution in space commerce. Although launched on conventional, expendable boosters, its 485-mile-high, 66-satellite constellation has shown that giant space-infrastructure projects could be completed at a speed and budget once considered impossibly tight. Hot on Iridium's heels is Globalstar, a system of 48 satellites 870 miles high that's expected to be operational next year. Other constellation builders include ICO Global Communications, which is aiming for a first launch to the slightly higher medium Earth orbit (MEO) before year's end. Next come what sound like a forgotten Homeric trilogy: Ellipso, Constellation, and Odyssey; each plans initial launches for the year 2000.
Once these constellations are in place, replacements will be needed regularly as satellites burn out and break down. Late last year, Motorola, already a big buyer of launch services as it builds Iridium, told launch-service providers it may put up 500 or more birds by 2010.
These "big LEOs" will be joined by "little LEOs," which will soar about 500 to 1,500 miles above Earth (commercial airplanes fly at an altitude of about 5 miles) and perform highly specific functions such as reading water meters from space, offering advanced two-way paging, and tracking fishing vessels on the high seas. The master of this domain is Orbcomm Global, a Dulles, Virginia, company well on its way to completing a 28-satellite system for industrial monitoring and two-way paging.
Around 2001, deployment will start for ultrasophisticated high-bandwidth constellations known as "broadband LEOs" that will make high-speed connectivity - for videoconferencing and Internet services, among other activities - available just about anywhere in the world. In this category are Motorola's Celestri, with 63 functioning satellites; Alcatel Espace's Skybridge, with 64; and, the big kahuna of them all, Teledesic, now at 288.
Until now, most LEOs have gone skyward on heavy booster rockets capable of carrying several satellites into orbit at once. These expendable and expensive ballistic workhorses - with heroic names like Delta, Proton, and Long March - are highly impractical for the kinds of one-by-one replacements the new communications systems will require.
Recognizing that every large edifice requires a maintenance staff, Kistler and the other Musketeers aim to be the lightbulb changers of space.
For 80-year-old George Mueller, the success of a reusable rocket would mark a final transition from Cold War technologist to commercial businessman. Formerly head of NASA's Apollo project and considered the father of the space shuttle, he's now Kistler's CEO.
Mueller, whose space career blasted off in 1961 when President Kennedy started the race to the Moon, left the agency to grow jojoba in Arizona. He was drawn out of retirement by Kistler to realize a long-held dream denied by the government. "I had wanted to design the shuttle to be fully reusable," Mueller says. "This position enables me to accomplish that."
Mueller's new line of work was made possible in 1984, when the US Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Act to encourage private companies to join the industry. Momentum picked up after the 1986 Challenger explosion caused an effective ban on commercial payloads aboard the remaining shuttles, leading to a bottleneck that persists to this day. And post-Cold War reductions in military spending meant increased access for entrepreneurs to US military facilities, not to mention an excess supply of aeronautical engineers.
Not surprisingly, some of these nascent commercial space operations have set up shop in old government haunts - including Vandenberg Air Force Base and the shuttered Norton Air Force Base, now renamed the San Bernardino International Airport. Others have located elsewhere - the California-Nevada desert, for example.
While the reliability rate of US-based launches in 1997 was 97.4 percent, the remaining 2.6 percent represents a set of devastating possibilities. So, for its gamble, Kistler believes there's no better place than Australia, a country that joined the space fraternity in 1967, when an atmospheric-testing satellite launched atop a Redstone rocket made it the fourth country to orbit a satellite, behind the US, the Soviet Union, and France.
"Australia has a large footprint of flat land, and almost no population," says Robert Wang, Kistler's chair. "It's a lot safer to launch from there."
To the north of Kistler's base in Woomera, there's 1,000 miles of open territory that begins with the huge Simpson Desert and ends in the Gulf of Carpentaria, near Indonesia. To the northwest there's 1,250 uninhabited miles of the Great Victoria, Great Sandy, and Gibson Deserts stretching all the way to the Indian Ocean, nearly the distance from London to Moscow. Since its 1960s heyday, when British Cold War missile-testing and fledgling European space programs found the location ideal, Woomera has shriveled to roughly 1,200 people and now exists primarily to service a joint-defense listening post 10 miles away. Clustered within a 3-mile perimeter road, the town looks as misplaced on the outback as an estuarine crocodile on a sand dune - grasses imported from Australia's greener coasts, small single-story suburban homes nestled beneath eucalyptus trees, weeds cracking apart concrete walkways fringing empty apartment blocks. The nearest settlement of any size is Coober Pedy, 190 miles to the northwest, where, to avoid the desert heat, roughly half the population of 3,100 lives in underground homes carved from abandoned opal-mine shafts.
At Missile Park, in the center of Woomera, replicas of rockets, planes, and missiles are mounted on poles as if in flight. The rumpled remains of a Redstone that crashed in the Simpson Desert in the late 1960s are also on display. The bent metal of this failed launch more closely resembles a car wreck left in a ravine than a rocket capable of piercing the cosmos.
The challenges Kistler faces remind George Mueller of NASA's gung-ho days, but he also sees the distinctions. "Now, while the schedule is just as intense, you also have shareholders to worry about," he says. Through private placements, Kistler has raised $300 million and will seek more to carry it through the testing phase and into commercial service in late 1999. The company's technology utilizes a K-1 rocket that will shoot to 135,000 feet, where a second stage will separate from the first and carry a payload to low Earth orbit. Navigational systems will then guide both stages back to the launch area. Assuming test flights go well, Kistler plans to deliver a commercial satellite for Space Systems/Loral late next year, marking the first of a 10-launch, $100 million contract. This, Kistler is sure, is only the beginning.
Others are equally confident. Revenues in the global space industry could rise 20 percent annually for years to come, says John Higginbotham, chair of SpaceVest, a Reston, Virginia, venture firm dedicated to space investments. (The California Public Employees' Retirement System and the District of Columbia Retirement Board are two major investors in the $50 million VC outfit.)
"In some ways the space industry in 1998 is where the automobile industry was in 1938," Higginbotham says. "If you look at where the space industry can be in 2048, it could be a major sector of the global economy, equal to health care or the auto industry today." He sees profitable new products emerging from the space business.
For Higginbotham, it's uncertain how many independent launch companies the space industry can support. Competition may emerge from a privatized US space shuttle and from low-cost launch services from China and Russia, both of which use expendable rockets; NASA is also working with Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences on two aerospace plane projects dubbed the X-33 and X-34, intended primarily to test new engine and materials technologies for a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.
Higginbotham believes the industry's financial viability will become clearer within three to five years, and plans to hold off on major investments until the winners become more obvious. Still, interest is already picking up within the traditional finance sector. Investment bank Barclays Capital has established the Satin, an index composed of 30 satellite and space-industry companies. And the performance of early birds like Iridium could open the investment floodgates.
"If Iridium is operating and making money two years from now, and others are pursuing the concept, this is going to convey to investors that this is a real market," says Carissa Christensen, director of the technology-management division of Futron, a Bethesda, Maryland, consulting firm specializing in space-market forecasting. "But if Iridium is struggling, one of the other rocket companies has gone out of business, and a third has had an accident, the market environment will be seen as very risky."
While Kistler is developing technology that returns rockets to Earth on parachutes and airbags, other outfits are eliminating the launchpad itself.
One of them is Kelly Space & Technology, which is camped out in the suburban confines of San Bernardino, California. Using a modified commercial jet, Kelly plans to tow an aerospace plane to 20,000 feet, where it will detach and rocket up to 400,000 feet. From there, an expendable stage will carry a payload to orbit, while the piloted aerospace plane returns to Earth, landing, like a commercial jet, on a runway.
"If you look at the first stages of any launch vehicle, that's where the most thunder and shaking goes on, and where 90 percent of failures occur," says Richard Hora, president and CEO of Eclipse Space Lines, a licensed operator for Kelly. "We've eliminated that, and as a result we have a much more benign launch environment and a much more reliable system." By igniting a rocket at a higher altitude, Kelly can use less fuel to reach orbit, reducing the dangers of igniting large amounts of explosive gases on a terrestrial pad. If there's a malfunction at 20,000 feet, Kelly's space vehicle can return to Earth as a glider. The company has been testing the system in the California desert, and hopes to carry commercial payloads next year.
Cofounder Mike Kelly says the idea for the company grew out of MX missile development and other aerospace work he did during a 12-year career with space and defense contractor TRW. After trying and failing to move TRW in the direction of building commercial flight systems, Kelly left in 1993 to start Kelly Space with a TRW colleague, Michael Gallo. The company has an $89 million, 10-launch agreement with Motorola to put 20 satellites in orbit for the Iridium constellation - if Kelly's technology proves workable. So far, Kelly has raised $17 million through private placements and hopes to issue $450 million or more in bonds for further funding.
Musketeer Number Three is Pioneer Rocketplane, a start-up venture located at Vandenberg Air Force Base, just north of Santa Barbara, California. Pioneer is fusing aircraft and rocket into one in an airplane-like space vehicle that takes off from a commercial runway with a payload inside. At 20,000 feet, the vehicle meets up with a tanker plane, which loads an oxidizer. The rocket plane then blasts into orbit and releases an additional stage, which carries the payload to its destination and later disintegrates in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the pilots return the rocket plane to Vandenberg. The vehicle is still in development, but it could take flight by 2000, says Mitchell Burnside Clapp, Pioneer's president and cofounder. The company estimates its total development costs at $100 to $200 million, with first revenue expected by 2001.
"We'll be looking for replenishment business from Iridium, Globalstar, and, of course, the Teledesic deployment," Clapp says. "There's going to be no shortage of market."
Rotary Rocket is taking an equally bold step. The Redwood Shores, California, enterprise plans to use a piloted rocket on the way up to low Earth orbit and a unique set of helicopter-type rotors to return to Earth, requiring little in the way of ground infrastructure. The system remains in the design phase, with tests at California's Mojave Airport scheduled for next year.
Among those watching Rotary keenly is novelist Clancy, an acknowledged space buff who invested in the venture after meeting its president, Gary C. Hudson. Hudson has been plying the commercial launch market without a launch for some 20 years. (See "Insanely Great - Or Just Plain Insane?" Wired 4.05, page 128.) So far, Rotary has raised $17 million of private capital, and it hopes to raise another $30 million through a private equity placement. All told, the company needs about $100 million to get a small fleet operational and start bringing in revenue.
Like Pioneer, Rotary has no contracts yet, but it believes the LEO-replacement market will provide ready bookings. "Expendables are big and can carry a lot at one time, but they're not very good for patching holes in a system when one satellite fails," says Geoffrey Z. Hughes, Rotary's director of business development.
It was Hughes who dubbed his firm and its three major competitors the Four Musketeers, and he thinks there's room in the market for even more players, all offering somewhat differentiated services and products. "There are other companies, though most of them are still garage operations," he says. "We distinctly remember when we were a garage operation, so we don't dismiss them."
Many of these more futuristic companies are focusing on tourism, with initial launches expected in 2001 or later. Conceivably, for a ticket costing about 90 grand, you could hop a flight to suborbital altitude for a quick dose of weightlessness, a view of Earth's curvature, and a peek into the blackness of space.
While the success or failure of these individual firms may not be known for a few more years, the early activity is already making for crowded conditions at established launch sites.
"It's hard to be treated as the prime customer here anymore," complains Edgar Zapata, a systems and advanced-projects engineer for the space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center. "We've had people coming down here to look who ended up going elsewhere." Besides Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, a site on Wallops Island, in Virginia, has been licensed by the FAA for commercial launches. New Mexico and Alaska are also looking to provide launch operations, along with a site in Manitoba, Canada.
In Australia, other groups of entrepreneurs also are evaluating launch sites. One has studied the Northern Territory, focusing on Christmas Island, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that offers open seas for flight corridors to the south.
For George Mueller, the NASA vet now leading Kistler, the prospect of so many enterprises entering a chaotic new market, of costs dropping like descending reusables, and of hundreds of lightbulb-changing launches keeping vast networks like Iridium aglow - well, the changes are as startling as they are gratifying.
"During the Apollo project," he says, "I never thought that one day I'd be using Russian rockets." Yet today, Kistler's Russian-made NK-33 and NK-43 engines are powering the company's post-Cold War flights.
Traveling out to the lakeless, peopleless South Australian outback surrounding Woomera, Mueller is doubling back in time. Forty-one years after Sputnik - the first LEO - circled the globe and kick-started the space race, Mueller is returning to the launchpad, prepared this time to create a different kind of liftoff.
