Making Space, Battiston's book that talks about "space economy"

Very interesting review made by La Stampa on the last book of Roberto Battiston "Make space" (Theseus ship, 290 pages, 15 euro). 

Battiston, former president of the Italian Space Agency from the 2014 to the 2018, on the "space economy" has dedicated a very interesting chapter. 

Today the space is worth 350 billion dollars a year. The 37 percent of the turnover concerns satellite services. Four-fifths of satellite services are represented by telecommunications and the television market: in the 2018 TV users were two billion but the Internet and satellite telephony are also important. Geolocation and navigation services, space surveillance, resource remote sensing, meteorology will be fundamental. 

Most of the four thousand satellites in orbit around the Earth have economic significance, only a minority is at the service of pure science.

Remember Telstar, it marks the historic “space economy”. Telstar 1 launched from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, was the first satellite that made worldwide broadcasting possible. 

Today Telstar makes tenderness: it was a sphere of 88 centimeters and 35 kilograms which contained 1064 transistor, it could host 1200 telephone channels or, alternatively, a television channel. In elliptical orbit between 952 and 6000 kilometers, it worked intermittently for six months, until February 1963.

Benefits and risks of a privatized space

Following the use of public money, Battiston observes that if today we can speak of the "space economy" we owe it to the enormous investments that the state space agencies have made steadily for more than fifty years, in particular NASA, but also the '' European Space Agency and minor national agencies, including Italy. Without the contributions of the Russian, Japanese and Canadian agencies, the International Space Station would not be what it is, a kind of UN in orbit.

Musk's Falcon 9 rocket and public money paved the way for the nascent space economy. This is normal: private capital by definition runs risks, but not too great risks, such as those that astronautics had to face in its first developments: just think that the Apollo missions absorbed 4 per cent of the GDP of United States and had only a one in two chance of success. American private space activities have also reaped their failures, but now they appear to have reached maturity.

It was impressive to see the first stage of Musk's Falcon 9 starting from the 39 A ramp of Cape Canaveral (that of the Saturn 5 and the Shuttle), bringing a telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit and returning to the ground resting vertically on its platform. The recoverable carriers are really ushering in a new era of astronautics that will have great reflections on the "space economy".

The space tourism pursued by Branson will remain limited for a long time by costs and risks. It is realistic to think of suborbital flights that bring rich passengers to 80-100 kilometers from the earth's surface, the conventional border at which an astronaut certificate can be obtained. 

They will be short and expensive experiences: about an hour at the rate of one hundred thousand dollars. It is likely that these experiences will gradually become less exclusive, at more affordable prices, and that stays at orbit will last a few days. 

Instead, the prospect of a destination whose destination is the Moon or a lunar orbit station, not to mention Mars, is remote, and perhaps unrealistic.

Battiston's book describes in detail the entire history of space Italy. The debut was with Gaetano Arturo Crocco, who calculated the cheapest orbit for a mission to Mars, e Aurelio Robotti, of the Polytechnic of Turin, with its pioneering launches of small rockets in the Susa Valley and then in Sardinia to Perdasdefogu. From these precursors he took over the witness Luigi Broglio, originally from Ivrea, who with his team from the University of Rome in the 1964 launched the "San Marco 1" making Italy the third country, after Russia and the United States, to put into orbit its own satellite. Broglio was then the founder of the San Marco Space Center in Kenya: two ex-oil platforms off the coast of Malindi (Kenya), one for the launch, the other for the control room, plus services on land.

The geographical position of this launching range, 3 degrees of latitude south, allows to fully exploit the rotation speed of the Earth in proximity of the equator, with the consequent lower need of thrust for the rocket. In this respect the San Marco Center remains the most favorable in the world, better than Kourou itself in French Guyane. 

From here, between the 1967 and the 1988, Broglio put eight scientific satellites into orbit. His passion and his ability to create large companies with few resources - the small American Scout rocket and the support of our army - remain legendary, and it is painful that Broglio did not have the right recognition alive, indeed he was opposed by politicians and bureaucrats who worked hard to give Italian space activities a more solid and less personal structure. At late repair, the Malindi Center bears its name, and the mainland facility still performs telemetry services.

ASI

In the 1988, the birth of the Italian Space Agency ASI. ASI today has a recognized presence in the European context and direct collaborations with both the United States and Russia. As for ESA, the European Space Agency, although it has allocated only 10 per cent of its investments to scientific research, has carried out exploration missions of the major solar system such as Giotto and Rosetta to comets and asteroids, and others for the study of the Sun , of Mars and now of Mercury. In satellite surveillance, the fleet of Copernicus satellites stands out and in the geolocation the Galileo program, which is becoming operational and promises better accuracy than the American GPS, with all the application advantages that will result from being designed exclusively for civil use.

The danger of satellite swarms

The privatization of space paves the way for swarms of thousands of very small but disturbing satellites due to the danger of impacts and damage to astronomical research by terrestrial observatories. An international regulation will be needed that takes into account the fifty years since the Treaty on the 1967 extra-atmospheric space.

 

Making Space, Battiston's book that talks about "space economy"