Space Dominance In The Next Space Race: How Our Future Depends On Who Wins
Mr. Thomas R. Messegee
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The greatest challenge facing the U.S. when it comes to global competition is dominance of Space. Space is no longer a cooperative environment for commercialization and exploration, it is a battle-space, and China and Russia wish to militarize it. China sees space as the new South China Sea and does not intend to abide by treaties or respect our right to freely operate there. The loss of U.S. dominance in space to either Russia or China would not only be a disaster for the United States both strategically and economically, but for the entire free world. Our hopes for space as a place in which free enterprise and cooperative exploration can be realized relies on our investments now in our space infrastructure, how we teach our children to be inquisitive about science and technology and how we strive to develop the technologies of the future.
The United States was the first, and after more than 50 years, still the only nation to put a human on the moon. This event had many impacts on humanity, some direct, some indirect but most all for good. Its significance in history for our nation and for most other countries has been the opening of space for free commercial and scientific use by anyone with the desire and technological ability to explore and advance their national goals. This great expansion into space started as a race between the two post World War II superpowers the former Soviet Union and the United States vying to be the first nation to put humans on the moon. It culminated with the Apollo 11 landing and the failure of all four of the Soviet’s N1 rockets, the Soviet’s version of the Saturn V, that were intended to take Cosmonauts to the moon. Shortly after these events the Soviets ended their moon aspirations.
The first space race was over and the U.S. has maintained peaceful space dominance ever since that incredible day on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. His words had a broader meaning than just an astronaut demonstrating the advancement of technology or accomplishing arguably the grandest feat of exploration ever committed to by a single nation. Armstrong claimed the moon for the world and space as free for all of humanity. For over fifty years it has been that way but now new and old actors on the stage of space exploration have emerged to challenge that dominance. Some with less than peaceful intent and with growing technological advantages that could overshadow all the gains we have made since the day Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fuel rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts.
The U.S. has maintained dominance in a mostly non-hostile, exploratory Space which is an essential part of our lives. The information age in space has delivered GPS global positioning and the entire telecommunications network as a few examples of “things done in space” that are absolutely essential to daily life in the United States and around the world. Now, with the highly publicized launch of Virgin Atlantic’s VSS Unity space plane and Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, the space tourism industry has been inaugurated. Not only is commercial space growing rapidly but the number of countries that are capable of putting things on the Moon, launching rockets with complex satellites, or building space stations is growing rapidly as well. Space is a vital national interest, and is a foundation to our economy and way of life, supporting our academic, agricultural, banking and travel sectors, among others. Moreover, the rapidly growing commercial space sector offers enormous promise for the prosperity of Americans and our global partners. The economy of space is rapidly growing to be a multi-trillion dollar industry.
The United States still has a lead in space, but that might not last long. Russia and China, for instance, are looking to asymmetrically undermine our space-based capabilities. China has expanded by orders of magnitude and the Russians have increased their capabilities as well. They have recently invested in space and developed some relatively sophisticated capabilities. But the scale of the Chinese investment is larger than everyone else out globally, including Russia. They have more rocket launches this year than the United States and are the lead rocket-launch nation in the world. As of March 2020, China began launching satellites every other week and by the end of that year had launched 35 satellites. The U.S. was a close second with 33. China and Russia are developing military capabilities, doctrine and organizations intended to place U.S. space systems at risk, including anti-satellite weapons, ground-launch missiles and directed energy weapons. Additionally, they continue to launch experimental satellites that conduct on-orbit activities to advance counter-space capabilities.
The DOD’s proposal for U.S. Space Force, establishment of U.S. Space Command as a unified command, and establishment of a Space Development Agency are all part of DOD’s efforts to move forward within this new reality. As of August 1st 2020 the U.S. owned and operated 1,425 of the 2,787 satellites currently in orbit. In order to protect these critical assets and expand our capabilities the United States must make investments in key space infrastructure. Our intellectual trust and our financial investments need to be focused in three areas to advance our interests in space; 1) Reducing the cost of launch systems and advancing space propulsion technologies, 2) Autonomous spacecraft operations through advancements in artificial Intelligence, deep learning and machine learning, 3) Advanced on-orbit processing, data storage and quantum computing. The new second space race is underway, and who wins this time, is in many ways, far more important than who won the first space race. The choices we make in the next five to ten years will determine the outcome, the results of which, will impact our daily life directly. This is one race we absolutely can not afford to lose.
Reducing the cost of launch systems and advancing new spacecraft propulsion technologies:
The United States currently performs approximately 30 satellite launch’s per year from all commercial and Governmental agencies. This number will likely grow by 5% to 10% each year for the next three to five years. China launched 35 satellites in 2020, but this constituted a growth of 40% in one year. Beijing will rapidly overtake our capabilities on orbit unless something changes. The good news is that we are making significant gains in rocket technology. To watch a SpaceX booster return from orbit and land on a floating recovery pad is impressive. On August 6th of this year SpaceX briefly constructed the largest rocket ever built by attaching the U.S. aerospace company's Starship spacecraft to the Super Heavy booster at its facility in Texas. The combined height of the structure was 400 feet, nearly 40 feet taller than the next largest Saturn V rocket built by NASA. It is an impressive sight to say the least. At the other end of the size spectrum the Pegasus XL boosters delivering small and medium Sat payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is another exciting and game changing technology. Our newly constituted Space Force now operates on a 30 day launch call in which they can put a 900 lb payload into LEO. That is really impressive considering most DoD Satellite programs of record take on average 10 years to field a new system. To sustain and build our space infrastructure though, the United States must drive down the cost of not only launching into LEO orbits, but taking greater advantage of MEO, GEO and CISLUNAR orbits on launch schedules that are competitive with the Russians and Chinese. We still hold technological advantage in this area driven by the free market and commercialization of space but that could be fleeting if we don’t continue to invest and encourage our commercial partners to strive for newer and better technologies.
Beyond Earth’s orbit we lose the advantage of being ahead in rocket propulsion technology. Here the Russians may be well ahead of us with systems designed for interplanetary travel. A ground-breaking Russian nuclear propulsion system for human space travel began ground-based testing in 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025, giving Russia a head start in the outer-space race. The megawatt-class nuclear drive will function for up to three years and produce 100-150 kilowatts of energy at normal capacity. The new project proposes the use of an electric ion propulsion system. The engines exhaust thrust will be generated by an ion flow, which is further accelerated by an electric field.
NASA is laying the ground work for a return to the Moon as well as landing and returning from Mars and are in fact moving the ball forward with newly designed rocket propulsion systems. They know that these new lofty goals and incredible human achievements will not be accomplished with chemical rockets. Most mission profiles for a manned trip to Mars using a chemical rocket are 150 to 300 days. During this time the exposure of astronauts to cosmic rays (high-energy protons and atomic nuclei that move through space at nearly the speed of light) would not only be unhealthy to our crews but most likely deadly. Instead NASA and DARPA have begun investing in new propulsion technologies that will get us there quicker thereby minimizing exposure to ionizing radiation. DARPA’s DRACO program is working on a Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) system that will culminate in placing a rocket in cislunar space that will test out this new technology. Using Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) as a fuel, the reactor heats a hydrogen propellant that has twice the specific impulse (Isp) as a chemical rocket engine racing our Mars crews to the red planet in 30 days instead of seven months to a year. The impact of this effort on our ability to explore the outer solar system and potentially the stars beyond will be profound. Coupled with advances in Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP), a type of spacecraft propulsion system where thermal energy from a nuclear reactor is converted to electrical energy, which is used to drive an ion thrust or other electrical spacecraft propulsion technology, we are taking the necessary steps to build our critical space infrastructure and enable deep space exploration.
Autonomous spacecraft operations through advancements in artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning:
Our spacecraft are dumb, it’s a fact. If you don’t tell them what to do everyday almost hourly they stop working, degrade their orbits and in the case of LEO and MEO burn-in, or worse, in the case GEO, become space junk that must be avoided or destroyed. Even really expensive DoD spacecraft with the fastest radiation hardened processors and advanced flight software will only safe themselves long enough for humans to wake up and take some type of corrective action in the event of a spacecraft sub-system failure. In the space business we often wring our hands over the cost of boosters and satellites but one of the largest investments that must be included when we plan and build a satellite architecture is the cost of the ground system. We require large ground systems with communications and processing hardware and software to maintain the health and safety of our spacecraft, manage and direct their daily operations and to house the hundreds of employees tasked with keeping an eye on our valuable space assets (think NASA’s Mission Control in Houston like in the movie Apollo 13).
Imagine for a moment what an autonomous satellite network would look like with space vehicles that operated on a “launch and forget” philosophy. Continuous health status monitoring and decision making, autonomous switching to redundant systems, making microsecond decisions on vehicle maintenance routines like when to charge batteries, dump momentum or even fire thrusters to maintain orbit geometry. These autonomous functions could potentially extend the life expectancy of a satellite by decades.
NASA sees these advantages as we begin to expand our exploration of the outer solar system. To land and operate a rover on the surface of Pluto, commands from mission control would take 5 1/2 hours to be received and the same amount of time to get the telemetry and data back. That’s just the time for the round trip of the communication signal and does not include the time it takes for the humans involved to decide what to do to prevent the rover from falling down a giant ice crevasse. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key to making our space infrastructure here close to the Earth far more resilient and to enable the technologies we need to explore the outer solar system, Kuiper belt and, one day, the stars.
Advanced on-orbit processing and quantum computing:
I have left the most important advancement in space infrastructure for last for a reason, it is the enabler for everything else we must accomplish. To run advanced processing algorithms like spacecraft machine learning for autonomous spacecraft operations, precision control and sustainment of nuclear propulsion systems, establishing and maintaining micro servers in Earth orbit or on the Moon or Mars, we must invest in and significantly advance our capabilities for computer processing in space. In other words, we must push our processing to the edge of space. Vastly greater improvements in on-orbit processing is the single most enabling technology for everything else we want to do in space and will determine our position in the race for space dominance. There are many companies around the globe researching and developing advance processors for space and they all attack the problem with generally the same approach. A microprocessor with its millions of gates on Silicon substrate is prone to error and degradation in performance when subjected to high radiation fields. Space is filled with ionizing radiation of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei zipping through space at nearly the speed of light. The solution for most vendors of Technical Readiness Level (TRL-9) space qualified microprocessors is shielding, slower speeds and fewer transistor gates to be corrupted. We have yet to explore approaches like banks of multi-processors and server farms running parallel processes that average out errors by real-time co-correction comparison, advance error detection and correction codes far beyond the state-of-the-art in EDAC algorithms like Parity Checking, Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), Longitudinal Redundancy Check or Check Sum. We need the next generation of genius computer scientists and mathematicians to solve some of the hard problems to advance this critical technology. We now are only beginning to grapple and wrap our arms around the fantastically futuristic field of Quantum Computing’s theoretically blinding processing speeds that make even PKI and almost all encryption regimes obsolete. Quantum computing can be a game-changer in such fields as cryptography and artificial intelligence when the technology becomes more mature.
Conclusion
So how do we want the story to end? Do we wish to keep space commercially and economically free, driven by a free market and our natural human curiosity to explore space and discover new worlds? Of course we do, but time is of the essence. We are at a critical decision point as a nation as to what investments we will make, what policies we will pursue and even how and in what direction we will encourage our children to pursue study. Are STEM subjects important enough to teach our children or are we willing to contract out to nations where science, technology, engineering and mathematics are treated as important? To build our critical space infrastructure, to tackle the hard problems, to develop, design and build new propulsion systems, AI algorithms, and advanced on-orbit processing capabilities, we need the best and the smartest minds that a free market and free people can provide.
We can still win this second space race but not only must we invest in new technologies and develop infrastructure that doesn’t exist today, we must also invest in the next generation of scientists and engineers. To quote the late great scientist Dr. Steven Hawking, “So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and hold on to that childlike wonder about what makes the universe exist.” I couldn’t agree more and it is the key to ensuring space remains free for commercial development and exploration by all nations and all free people on our planet. Encourage our children to learn, to be inquisitive about science and to earnestly pursue the answers to the mysteries of the world and space around us. Our freedom and our future depend on these investments in technology and in our children. It will determine whether or not their generation will take that next small step, and next giant leap for mankind.
----------------------------
Space Dominance In The Next Space Race: How Our Future Depends On Who Wins
Mr. Thomas R. Messegee
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.