On Monday night, December 21st, 2015, SpaceX made history again. The private space rocket firm launched 11 satellites into orbit for ORBCOMM, but that has become the norm for them. What was impressive was the achievement of their secondary objective: successfully landing the primary stage rocket on land. That has never been done before, by anyone, and it is a big deal.
The biggest problem for space travel, tourism, research, and really anything involving putting stuff into orbit is costs. Making a rocket is very, very expensive. It is made even more expensive by the fact that they are not reusable. Upon launch, the rockets and fuel chambers, which cost millions of dollars to develop and build, are jettisoned into the ocean, or burn up on reentry.
To understand the immense waste this causes, think about a commercial airplane. A Boeing 747 costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and seats less than 700 people. If the plane were to be built, carry 700 people across the country, and then immediately be dumped into the ocean, that would be something like what space travel is currently like. To make a profit, each passenger would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for one plane ticket. The result: very few people, if at all anyone, would fly. That is the current state of space travel: only big governments and corporations have the money to even think about going to space. Several months ago, SpaceX's website listed the cost of one flight on their Falcon 9 rocket as over $60 million dollars. Their larger Falcon Heavy model was over $90 million per flight. At the time, however, that was the cheapest anyone could get.
The significance of SpaceX landing the rocket in one piece is that now it is reusable. Now that we are no longer dumping multi-million rockets into the ocean after one use, the cost of building a rocket can, like the cost of building a plane, be spread out over many flights, making each individual flight much, much cheaper. As of today the prices on SpaceX's website have been taken down, and not yet replaced: likely while they recalculate the new cost of space travel. This raises the question: exactly how cheap will such a future be?
SpaceX now has the closest thing to a monopoly possible in today's space age. Already the cheapest way to transport goods to space, no one can now compete with them on price. Traditional basic monopolist theory would suggest that they would artificially keep the price high to boost profits. This would be a shame. Fortunately, basic monopolist theory assumes that the producer is pursuing profit, and SpaceX is not. Elon Musk has made it his goal to drastically reduce the cost of space travel, with the eventual goal of sending humans to Mars in large numbers to establish a colony. This means that the price of space travel is likely to fall dramatically.
The changes of reusable spacecraft, and thus cheap space travel, cannot be understated. Commercial aircraft have revolutionized the world, accelerating globalization, and connecting us across continents. How much easier it is to travel to Europe by plane rather than boat. A cheap way into orbit and beyond will mean many more satellites, which could, say, give internet access to everyone in the world. It will drastically reduce the cost of research, and allow much more accurate weather and climate tracking networks. Already there has been talk of sending fleets of nano-satellites into orbit, and even plans for asteroid mining. All these plans and more have just become much more feasible.
There will likely be many more changes brought about by this revolutionary feat: the future is coming, and it really doesn't look so grim.
By: Jonathan Wood