The New Space Economy: Star Date 25 November 2015
Since the dawn of agricultural civilization eminent scholars from Babylon to Beijing have looked to the stars to find meaning. This would manifest in our species as an evolving curiosity not just to observe the stars in the sky, but to also explore that void beyond. In 1865 Jules Verne imagined shooting astronauts to the Moon , in 1901 H.G. Wells wrote of his own Moon landing – perhaps portentiously, Wells envisages the two pioneer astronauts as a businessman and a scientist . The popular imagination has since exploded with ambitions and dreams of space travel appearing in popular media, such as Star Wars and Interstellar.
What was science fiction then, may soon be very possible. I still remember as a young boy being taken to the cinema by my mother to watch the first Star Wars movie in 1977, and only four years later wa tching the American Space Shuttle launch live on television for the first time in April 1981. My mother still fondly remembers watching Neil Armstrong’s first Moon walk live on television on 20 July 1969.
Since then however, there have been few momentous milestones in the world history of space travel . The Russian space programme has atrophied to the point of crisis, whilst the US and other states entered a technical plateau—making little progress on new rocket technology , costs or performance of space vehicles. This period would be marked by governments seemingly content to stick to whatever worked in the 1960s or 1970s.
Then 25 November 2015 happened—a turning point in the diary of the new space economy.
On this day, President Obama signed into law what is popularly referred to as the Space Act 2015. Its full name is the ‘Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act of 2015’. This update to US law explicitly allows US citizens for the first time to ‘engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of ‘space resources’ [including … water and minerals ]’.1 The consequence would be the renaissance of space exploration, driven by the vigorous competition of private firms competing against one another in a new space race.
Well-equipped for the costs ahead, with some of the private firms driving the space race having access to larger material and intellectual resources than most governments, we stand on the brink of returning to space—this time, to stay. With the annual space economy already sized in excess of US$330 billion dollars a year, it is a business that is increasingly attracting the attention and wallets of investors, entrepreneurs and Earth-based resource companies. This is no small feat, considering the enormous investment , risk and technical hurdles involved.
Earth, post-Space Act 2015, has already begun to change. I have personally witnessed the first-hand impacts on my day to day work in the Earth-based Energy and Commodity industry thanks to the lowering of costs in access to space and space technology . In fact, access to space satellite technology is now becoming a basic requirement in order to operate a competitive commodity exploration and trading business here on Planet Earth.
For example, we see satellite data companies feeding real-time data and analytics to where resources might be found and prospected . Satellites observe and analyse ship movements around the world , watching raw commodities (the life-blood of economies!) being mined, transported and stored around the world . Two firms already making big headway in this field are Ursa and Orbital Insights.2
The very real impact on the day-to-day Energy and Commodity industry here on Earth is certain, and has given me the drive to pull this book together on deep space commodities. I intend to examine the issues, challenges and opportunities that the development of resources and technology in space can offer Earth-based investors, entrepreneurs and Energy and Commodity firms. Helping me, I have brought together practitioners, scholars and academia in the areas of space technologies, space law , natural resources development and astropolitics to offer their insight into the scenarios, conundrums and potential answers we will face as a collective species, as we venture into the unknown commercia...