SPACEFLIGHT Space in 2030
Space to 2030
RICHARD LOWE FRAeS, MALCOLM MACDONALD FRAeS and PAT NORRIS FRAeS look at some of the most exciting missions and trends in the next decade and how the UK might get involved.
OneWeb’s fifth launch in March 2021, carried about by Arianespace from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. OneWeb/Roscosmos and Space Center Vostochny, TsENK
The 2020s promise some major developments in space – internationally and, increasingly, here in the UK. The major drag on space progress, launch cost, is reducing as innovation and competition work their magic. As launch costs fall, so do the costs of every other aspect of space technology. Customers are migrating from a conservative ‘must work first time’ culture towards a more ‘adventurous’ attitude, emphasising pace and agility (both are drivers for the UK’s own launch ambitions). The UK’s satellite manufacturers are at the forefront of this change, while national launch capability is rapidly catching up. Orbex will attempt its first launch from a Scottish pad in the next few years. As launches gets cheaper, optimisation can give way to standardisation – driving costs down, and reliability up. The boundary-pushing missions – for national security and for big science – will remain risk-averse but even these will benefit.
Launchers on Mars, quadcopters bound for other worlds, super-observatories, a return to the Moon and holidays in orbit… Coming soon to a planet near you. Watch this space!
Trends
Mega-constellations and/or megajunk
Although still commercially experimental, megaconstellations are fast becoming normalised. The UK’s OneWeb is putting up several hundred. SpaceX’s Starlink has launched more than a thousand already (with some 40,000 planned). While efforts are being made to include de-orbit capability for end-of-life, it is a safe bet that many of these satellites will ultimately end up as space junk… but ‘where there’s muck, is there brass?’ Innovators here in the UK, including Astroscale, are aiming to cash in on the need for clean-up. The 2020s will almost certainly see further successful demonstrations of de-orbit technology – and perhaps even some paying clients. Whether such ventures are commercially successful will depend upon the pressure brought on ‘polluters’ by governments and public opinion. Who’s paying for a mission to de-orbit another mission? If consumers care enough, they will drive the change. If not, then it will come down to business ethics, legislation or the colder economics of self-preservation. This is the space sector’s own ‘inconvenient truth’. We may be no less tardy in responding.
So, is low Earth orbit the new home of global communications in 2030? Although spectrum is a scarce resource, technology will continue to unlock more capacity – and it seems certain that, by 2030, low-latency (read ‘low Earth orbit’) internet will be carrying many terabits per seconds, eclipsing (but not toppling) the traditional stronghold of geostationary communications and challenging the position of companies like the UK’s Inmarsat. For anyone with a fibre to their home though, there is little incentive to dig up the cable. It seems safe to presume that satellite communication will remain dominantly about mobile, out-of-town and rapid start-up communication.
Big data world
Long-running Earth observation datasets will become increasingly valuable to science. Multi-decadal continuous data and global baseline observations are important for climate monitoring and decisionmaking. Services, such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), led from Reading in the UK by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF), will be vital in providing authoritative information about the past, present and future of our climate; this service alone has already delivered over 42TB of data to users – with ESA Harwell, just up the road, driving research on many of the data products that contribute.
Earth observation data is growing exponentially. The coming decade will continue this trend. The second-generation Copernicus rollout will expand the current programme capabilities alongside continued growth in commercial data from companies, such as Spire, whose 100+ ‘Lemur’ satellites are manufactured in Glasgow.
Commercial synthetic aperture radar, SAR, is already expanding (witness ICEYE’s recent success) alongside video from space (eg UK’s Anite) and very high temporal resolution imaging (Planet), both driven by the growth in small satellites pioneered in the UK. All are seeing key interest from defence users seeking more bang for their space-buck (MoD included).
The latter part of this decade will likely see commercial multi- and even hyper-spectral imaging. Once again, defence users will provide impetus for broader commercial success. These are bigger products, delivered at higher tempo, feeding ‘big data’ and, increasingly, AI applications.
Maritime and aviation traffic monitoring; supply chain and animal tracking; deforestation detection – all will give us unprecedented insights to global trade and supply, in a world where transport is never out of sight.
Could Tim Peake return to space as part of the international Lunar Gateway and Europe’s contribution to US Moon missions? ESA
New space races
Today, the internet is the foremost battleground for national and commercial influence but, wherever humanity goes, we take our earthly ambitions and rivalries. The end of the original ‘space race’ in the early 1990s was, in hindsight, merely a pause; a unique geopolitical moment of Western (US?) monopoly of global power. A broader race is back on. For nations like the UK, space represents economic potential, strategic autonomy and vital defence capability. We have some catching up to do.
Competition will serve to define norms of behaviour – not just in orbit but also on the Moon and everything we land on after that. The US-driven Artemis lunar return programme accord is strongly opposed by Russia, which seems bound to turn towards China for partnering as the decade progresses. The accord seeks to interpret the 1957 Outer Space Treaty in a way which Russia perceives as biased to US state and private-sector interests. The UK, keen to participate in Artemis, has signed up. Whoever gets (back) to the Moon first, and stays there, will start to define the norms of how we ‘rule’ the resources of the Solar System.
Missions to look out for
Mars
The first steps in a Mars Sample Return mission have already been taken. The Perseverance rover, already at work on Mars, is collecting samples and leaving them as caches for a future mission to collect. If all comes together, ESA and NASA will work to launch a mission in 2026 which would set down close to Perseverance in 2028 and bring its samples back up to Mars orbit. A further mission would ferry them back to Earth by 2031.
NASA’s ‘Sky Crane’ approach is a gamechanger in Mars exploration. Gone are the days of countrysized drop zones on the flattest areas available, miles from terrain features. The Sky Crane technology enables safe, repeatable, precision landings. Not only does that allow for collaborative missions and infrastructure deployment – but also opens the possibility for descent into hazardous terrain – such as canyons and mountainous regions.
Meanwhile, look out for Martian flight developments. With Ingenuity poised to demonstrate Mars-copter technology as this issue goes to press, we may see a more dedicated aerial exploration mission within the 2020s. Consider what a Martian helicopter, with a radio-isotope battery recharging system might be capable of (see also Dragonfly, destined for Titan).
The UK-built Rosalind Franklin rover (part of the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars programme) will be heading off in 2022. China – and Elon Musk’s SpaceX – will also be reaching out for Mars. We are entering a decade of both national and corporate branding on the Red Planet.
Institutional human spaceflight
The big news of the decade is expected to be America’s return to the Moon’s surface – the first humans there since Apollo 17 in 1972. The second half of the decade looks more realistic for this than the Trump deadline of 2024 but will the Biden administration and partners (including the UK) come up with the $20bn+ needed? If not, will Elon Musk’s SpaceX step in?
Meanwhile, the current destination for most astronauts, the International Space Station, will run short of funding in about 2025. NASA’s attention will turn to the Lunar Gateway, a human outpost near the Moon with the rationale of facilitating robotic and crewed missions to the surface. Assembly will begin in about 2024 with launch of the first two modules – on a SpaceX rocket, not on NASA’s own super-costly Space Launch System. The Gateway’s high price tag and somewhat fuzzy objectives have led to criticism in the US. Nevertheless, signed-up partners, including ESA, UKSA, Japan and Canada, see it as their route to sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit and driving their own national capabilities.
In 2023, India will likely become the fourth nation to achieve manned spaceflight (a modestly delayed celebration of the nation’s 50th year of independence). Will India’s next step involve a tie-in with the US, heading for the Moon?
India’s great rival, China, will strengthen its lead in Asian-crewed spaceflight with the establishment of its Tianhe (celestial harmony) space station this year followed by its servicing and operation throughout the decade. Will Russia engage with Tianhe as it is doing in lunar exploration (see below), putting the nail in the ISS’ coffin? Given the need to first develop a superheavy rocket, the first Chinese or Russian citizen is unlikely to walk on the Moon until the 2030s.
Private human spaceflight
Short trips into space to experience ten minutes of weightlessness and spectacular Earth views should become commonplace for those who can afford the c. $200,000 tickets that will be offered by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin from, perhaps, 2022. Within the decade such flights could be happening from the British Isles, where its sister company, Virgin Orbital, is already active. Adding two noughts to the price already gets you a week-long stay in Earth orbit onboard a SpaceX or Russian spacecraft and the price should fall when SpaceX’s new Starship rocket is available, mid- to late-decade – perhaps to below $10m.
That same Starship will be able to take you around the Moon and back – one customer has already committed $100m+ for a six-person group to take that ride. Starship’s visionary owner, Elon Musk, reckons he will be landing customers on Mars before 2030 but many commentators see this date as ‘aspirational’ rather than likely. In any event, the private sector now seems well positioned to give any nation the chance to routinely fly its own astronauts, for a modest fee. The meaning of ‘crewed space programme’ may have just changed.
The UK provided the lead for the European consortium building the Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NASA
Solar System and beyond
An impressive catalogue of space science missions are lined up for the 2020s. Some are already in flight. BepiColombo reaches Mercury in 2025. ESA’s Solar Orbiter (built in Stevenage) and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe are both working closer and closer to the Sun. Parker will approach to within just 7m km of the Sun’s ‘surface’ (compare with Earth at ~150m km).
Still to depart is ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE), arriving at Jupiter in 2029 before setting its sights on a close-up study of the complex moon, Ganymede. The Principle Investigator (PI) for the mission is Imperial College London’s Michele Dougherty. NASA’s Dragonfly mission will launch a few years later, in 2027, carrying a quadcopter destined for Saturn’s moon, Titan (first visited by ESA’s Huygens probe).
Other missions to look out for on the launch pad are targeting asteroids (NASA’s Psyche to be launched in 2022, Janus 2022 and DART 2021; ESA’s HERA 2024), the Jupiter system (NASA’s Europa Clipper 2024), sample return from the Martian moon, Phobos (JAXA’s MMX 2024) and ExoPlanet observations (ESA’s Ariel 2029).
Throughout the 2020s, we can look forward to seeing the Universe around us in ways never possible before. Consider that, back in 2010, neither a comet nor Pluto had ever been seen as more than a distant ghost-like presence. Today, we have astonishing imagery of both, thanks to ESA’s Rosetta mission and NASA’s New Horizons probe. Launching this year, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) promises to be the Hubble of the 2020s. With its huge mirror and infrared camera, it will reveal a Universe around us that, today, we can only imagine. The UK has led development of one of its four instruments (MIRI), contributed to another (NIRSPEC) and provided components for the spacecraft.
UK Space in 2030
The timescales of the space sector are, necessarily, long. Nevertheless, rapid change is coming – and particularly in the UK, where an ‘awakening’ is already in progress. By 2030, we can reasonably expect the UK to be launching its own satellites on its own launchers, from its own territory. A national comms mega-constellation will be in orbit and a national navigation system may be under construction. A British-built rover will be on Mars. We might even have an astronaut on the Moon.
With recognition of space as a ‘Critical National Infrastructure’ sector, the government is duty-bound to build and sustain capability – for communications, for navigation and time, for observation and reconnaissance and for the protection of all those satellites that provide it. The laissez-faire approach of the past is no longer adequate. A sovereign UK Space Programme worthy of the title is reaching the launch pad. What a difference a decade makes.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Richard Lowe FRAeS is a space systems consultant and Head of GNSS (UK) for Rhea Group. Prof Malcolm Macdonald FRAeS is Chair of Applied Space Technology at the University of Strathclyde. Pat Norris FRAeS is a former Chairman of the trade association of the UK space industry, UKspace, and author of Returning People to the Moon After Apollo (Springer Praxis, 2019).