The race to replace the ISS: ‘A full-scale industrial revolution’

The world is changing. And it was ever thus. This week’s newspapers & TV Networks were ablaze with stories of the dash to invest in the developing & investing in Nuclear Fusion – if that’s not an unfortunate turn of phrase in the circumstances? And today, we are hearing more about the increasing desire for a new privately funded post to orbit Earth by the end of the decade.

Businesses are poised to take advantage of the huge appetite – and accessibility – of going where no man has gone before. Or at least entering Earth’s orbit, which is an important difference. The FAI determine spaceflight as being over 100 kilometres from Earth while in the USA, you can officially acquire astronaut wings when you go above 80 kilometres. Not an insubstantial difference between the two.

What is interesting about this new frontier is that it is encouraging a collaborative approach to achieve a better, faster outcome than going it alone could possibly do. Nanoracks, Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin are three major players collaborating to develop a free flying commercial space station known as Starlab. While London’s Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE) has teamed up with Axiom Space to build their own commercial station.

“The race to open up low earth orbit is providing a huge number of opportunities for companies like ours to develop exciting new projects which take advantage of such a different realm,” SEE co-founder Dmitry Lesnevsky says.

“The winners will be those businesses who are at the forefront of exploiting the latest technology to achieve in reality what would have been science fiction a couple of decades ago.”

After three decades in orbit, NASA is looking to retire the International Space Station and allow these new platforms to replace it with funding from the private sector.

Seraphim Space chairman Will Whitehorn says “This is a sensible move by NASA because the International Space Station takes up a huge amount of budget…it’s very old technology, it’s heavy, it’s impervious to space debris and technology has now been developed which would be better.”

Whitehorn, who dipped his toes in the sector when investigating space for Virgin in the 1990s – before the birth of Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit – had been pitched the concept of a commercial space station when it really was just “science fiction”.

Fast-forward to 2022, and the likes of Elon Musk and Richard Branson have revolutionised the cost of getting to space, which means a whole range of industrial activities are going to move to space over the next five years, the chairman of the London-listed space capital firm predicts. “It’s a full-scale industrial revolution and we’re at the very start of it.” says Whitehorn.

The timing of the sector deciding to open its doors to tourism coincides with the recognition that the commercialisation of space is really taking off. Hamid Soorghali of Satellite Application Catapult says “We are seeing many more companies entering this market,”

Musk’s SpaceX has even tabled plans for the world’s first commercial spacewalk this year, onboard of its ambitious Starship rocket – which analysts anticipate could ‘make or break’ Space 2.0.

“We endeavour to achieve the highest Earth orbit ever flown in addition to conducting the world’s first commercial spacewalk and testing of Starlink laser-based communication,” billionaire and founder of payment processing company Shift4, Jared Isaacman, who will be on board, said in a statement on Monday.

Beyond increasing the sector’s profitability, Linklaters partner Julian Cunningham-Day added that these commercial space stations could give the private sector a chance to participate in research alongside government agencies like NASA, “offering fresh opportunities for research and development for these industry players”.

 “As the commercial space sector develops, with ever-greater industry involvement in diverse areas from satellite constellations to in-space entertainment and commercial rocket launches, it will also be interesting to see how governments, inter-governmental organisations and legislation evolve to keep pace.”