(by Fabio Di Spigno) It finally happened, after a first delay due to bad weather. After years of work, a new race to space, a new era of space exploration, began almost without realizing it, at 21:22 and 42 seconds Italian time on May 30, 2020. In a historical moment in which the borders of nations seem to be closed by the covid-19 emergency, the horizons of space are widened by the imagination of a single man.
Nine years after the last departure from American soil, from the same ramp of the Space Kennedy Center where the adventure to conquer space and the Moon began, which took place with the departure of Saturn V by Von Braun who rose with the Apollo Missions or of the Space Shuttle. Now on that ramp other rockets have arrived such as the Falcon 9, which will be reusable over 10 times, and which has allowed to bring the Crew Dragon 2 spacecraft into space until it docked with the International Space Station, ISS.
The company founded by Elon Musk, Space X, has thus become the first private company in the world, in partnership with NASA, to transport astronauts who were comfortably relaxed on seats designed and manufactured by our Dallara. From today onwards it will not only be NASA to use these new carriers but also more and more technologically equipped private companies to launch men and materials into space towards the ISS international space station and towards deep space. Musk's roadmap is predicting that it will reach the moon again by 2023 and Mars by the end of this decade.
But what has happened and what will happen in the near future? Why have government agencies allowed their hegemonic presence to invade the private sector?
The times when the two blocs, the Soviet and the American, were competing for the supremacy of space with missions and launches of satellites seem long gone. Then a series of evaluation errors slowed down the challenge. The work of improving the jewel of Von Braun stopped and the Space Shuttle itself proved to be an incredibly expensive and not very useful program for the real purposes for which it was created, thinking above all of those two terrible accidents of 1986 and 2003.
Lo Space Shuttlein fact, it was designed to be inexpensive, reliable and reusable, a sort of bus that shuttled back and forth to space and the ISS. The initial cost was $ 10 million per flight, but in the end, each trip cost around $ 1 billion. NASA tried to develop a new "Spazioplano" vehicle, the X33, however the project was interrupted due to safety and reliability problems and forced the American space agency to return to classic carriers, therefore rockets and Apollo-style mission capsules.
This led NASA to definitively close the program in 2011 and have to fall back on the collaboration with Russia that with its historical and more reliable Soyuz rockets has allowed the continuity of space missions in these years or with the European space agency ESA through the “Vega” launcher, another made in Italy pride.
The same ISS international space station, which cost about 150 billion dollars and which has seen the great participation of numerous nations, including Italy superbly (with its own ASI space agency and numerous companies), has not been raised by criticisms of its real utility for the population of the earth.
There is no doubt that the hundreds of experiments carried out in orbit in about 20 years of ISS activity have allowed the development of new materials and new scientific achievements useful for science and for the study of space exploration by man, but the disclosure of these works, researches and experiments has remained the subject of workers in the sector and to the more and still unknown or little known.
Certainly the collaboration of numerous nations has allowed us to cut costs and share new achievements and discoveries, even if China continues with its own space project that has allowed it to reach the Moon and Mars with its own probes, but all this has however left ample space for new actors. The vacuum left by NASA and other governmental space agencies in the development of technology for the exploration of the cosmos has allowed someone new, private "dreamers" to be able to finally reach their first goals today.
A conquest of space, perhaps less ideological and idealistic than in the past and guided more by the relationships existing between the dreams of entrepreneurs-visionaries and their objectives of marketing "stellar projects", including future lunar or Martian colonies.
So what are the new companies that are opening their own way to near and deep space? Elon Musk, Mr. Tesla, with his "Space X", Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon as well as "Blue Origin", or the magnate Richard Branson, his "Virgin Galactic", are only the most famous characters who lead a crowd of lesser known groups and startups from all over the world, who they share the same incredible purpose.
Today there are more and more private companies that play the role of real protagonists in the new season of space exploration, with their own programs and projects, rather than as has happened until now, having to be relegated to simple co-ordinates of government bodies through the construction of an increasingly innovative components.
Private agencies and businesses are pushing the sector much further and faster than it would have been if it had only remained in the hands of governments.
These new companies, in addition to the milestone just reached by Musk, have been able to develop new moon landing modules capable of downloading scientific equipment to lunar locations of particular interest. They built "tow truck" satellites capable of hooking up other satellites and repairing them in a controlled orbit (idea of Northon Grumman), making robots more and more durable and able to operate with multiple tools in conditions of absence of gravity, or they design homes using available materials and achievable on Lunar or Martian soil.
From 2000 onwards the so-called "Space Startups" have had their great boom and have raised funds equal to 8,4 billion dollars, 90% of these resources have been obtained only in the last five years to demonstrate the growing interest and enthusiasm surrounding the numerous private initiatives. Many of these companies are dedicated to the construction of new satellites and equipment, while others are dedicating themselves to conquering space and achieving new scientific goals.
The multiplication of these new groups, moreover, has already seen the costs for take-off towards the ISS International Space Station go down, think that a seat on the Sojuz costs about 80 million dollars for each individual astronaut, now the cost has "fallen" about 20/30 million and with greater ease than in the recent past, making it possible in the very near future even for "normal" people to be able to face a launch and a space trip with a few weeks or a few days of physical preparation. An advance of space tourism has already happened in truth, in 2001, businessman Dennis Tito became the first tourist to visit the ISS by paying the Russian private company Space Adventures an exorbitant ticket for a round trip. After him the same company brought six other tourists into space until 2009.
In the private imagination of the 3 great entrepreneurs (Musk, Bezos and Branson) it will be possible to use these new shuttles also to shorten the distances between cities on earth thanks to the suborbital flight, which will allow according to plans to connect London to New York in little less 30 minutes, or they will be able to bring people into orbit for a "simple" walk in space where they will experience the absence of gravity and will be able to see the Earth from a new and more suggestive observation point before descending safely and safely back to earth . The expected cost for these flights is approximately $ 200.000 per passenger.
In this new space race, however, there is also a new aspect to be evaluated very carefully. As the sector develops and further private companies enter the field of space exploration, there will be a greater chance of accidents. At the moment there are still no precise laws indicating who will have to pay in the event of a disaster. These aspects, certainly less fascinating than what has been told, will still have to be underlined and taken into consideration without delay, to ensure that the new space race can continue by widening the boundaries and dreams of mankind with greater security and protection.
In Italy, the approximately 250 companies in the sector (among the most important are Thales Alenia Space, Argotec, Avio, Sitael, Telespazio, Leonardo) employ thousands of people who produce a turnover of around 10 billion euros. year with a growing trend. In fact, these companies have built numerous modules and complements of the ISS, new and increasingly sophisticated satellites, powerful and reliable rockets, new cutting-edge components thanks also to the collaboration with the most important Italian universities. These are very important indicators to consider for the future, considering that a study carried out by ASI with the Department of Economics of the University of Roma Tre found that every euro invested in space activities produces 11 of economic return on the territory.
But if we had to analyze Italy's commitment to space only through numbers, we would not be able to understand its real capacity and commitment. Especially in Italy the charm of our innate "visionary dream", let's not forget that we have been and are still a land of explorers and inventors, is that linked to our great scientific competence, the planning and excellence that distinguish us and are no less than numerous and fierce foreign competitors. We are in fact the third financier of the European Space Agency and always first in Europe for the number of astronauts (four) present in the current European Astronaut Corps.
Italy is one of the very few countries in the world to have a complete production chain in the aerospace sector, including the great skills and knowledge of our universities as its flagship. The sector has always seen us as protagonists and the future will have to be addressed with efforts that will have to go towards continuous development and investment in our capabilities and potential. Of course, the difficult historical moment we are experiencing now finds us momentarily with the handbrake pulled, but if we are able to be "visionary" again we will not miss the great opportunities that the future offers us.
Fabio Di Spigno, AIDR Partner, Freelancer and trainer, expert in Public Management, Labor Policies and Tourism Policies, collaborates with Formez Pa, Luiss Guido Carli University and other training bodies.