Toward the First Private Space Station

Recently Robert Bigelow, the Los Vegas hotel tycoon who has been working on an orbiting "space hotel" made a couple of announcements that have shaken up the commercial aerospace world. Bigelow has reached an agreement with a major aerospace company to explore ways of making an existing launch vehicle a carrier for people and cargo to and from his "space hotel." He has also proposed to build a version of his private space station beginning at the end of the decade, rather than in the middle of the next.

Bigelow Aerospace has signed an agreement with aerospace giant Lockheed Martin to study ways to make the Atlas V capable of taking people and cargo to and from the Bigelow space station. As currently designed, the Atlas V is meant to carry satellites into Earth orbit. It would have to undergo extensive modifications in order to turn the launch vehicle into a cargo and people carrier.

The agreement does not obligate Bigelow or Lockheed Martin to actually go through with the scheme. Presumably some new arrangement would have to be made if both companies find it to their mutual advantage.

This agreement has a number of potential implications. First, smaller start up companies, such as the winners of the Commercial Orbital Transport Systems competition, SpaceX and Rocket Plane/Kistler, had hoped to use the Bigelow space station as a market for their services. If Lockheed Martin, a corporate giant with access to billions of dollars and expertise in building space systems going back decades, moves into the commercial space transportation market, will there be room for the little guys?

Of course the question arises as to whether Lockheed Martin can make a man rated Atlas V cost competitive either with the SpaceX Falcon 9 or the Rp-K K-1 launch vehicles. Currently, the Atlas V heavy costs a customer upwards to a quarter of a million dollars a launch as of 2004. Presumably, with increased launch rates, the price of a launch on an Atlas V would decrease.

Lockheed Martin is also the prime contractor for the Orion space craft that is envisioned to take four astronauts back to the Moon late in the next decade. Some of the "growth phase" versions of the Atlas V being studied by Lockheed Martin could, conceivably, launch a fully loaded Orion into low Earth orbit.

NASA has already rejected the use of a modified Atlas V is favor of a launch vehicle called the Ares 1 as the launcher for the Orion. Some analysts criticize this decision since, first of all, they disagree with NASA that modifying an Atlas V would be less safe and more costly than building a new launch vehicle and, also, NASA would have only one means to launch Orion. In the latter case, should something happen to the Ares 1 that caused it to have to stand down for any length of time, as has happened to the space shuttle twice, the lunar exploration program would be affected.

But what if Lockheed Martin, perhaps as part of a commercial arrangement with Bigelow, was able to man rate an Atlas V capable of launching an Orion space craft commercially? Besides the obvious embarrassment for NASA, such a move would provide two ways to get an Orion into low Earth orbit. So, if something happened to one launch vehicle, the other would be available for use.

The second announcement Bigelow made concerned the launch date of his "space hotel." Bigelow now intends to launch a fully functional space station, called Sundancer, in 2009 or 2010. Sundancer, which will be based around an inflatable module, will be fifty percent larger than an International Space Station habitat module and will sustained three people. In 2012, a second module, with 500 cubic meters of volume and capable of sustaining six people, will launch and be attached to Sundancer.

Bigelow intends to sell three week stays on his new space station at ten million dollars per visit. That is roughly half of what is being charged for private visits to the International Space Station. When such "space vacations" will become available is dependent upon when transportation services to and from the Bigelow space station becomes available.

The Sundancer module will take four to eight launches a year to maintain it. The combined space station will take sixteen launches to keep it occupied and supplied.

If and when the Bigelow "space hotel" comes to pass, it will represent a new age of private space travel. Those with the money and the health to accomplish it will be able to travel onto the airless ocean of space, once only the privilege of highly paid, government employees. While a few people have already had the ultimate adventure vacation, Bigelow's big idea will expand the opportunity of people to voyage to the high frontier. Space travel will no longer necessarily be a vicarious experience, but one that anyone-in theory-can undertake.

That prospect is as exciting, in its own way, as voyages to alien worlds.