General Public's View on Commercial Space Travel Research Paper

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Humans have always been adventurous and pioneering species. At very high risks, humans have climbed difficult mountain terrains and gone into adventures to explore never before seen hostile locations while not having any real idea on what they might find. These risk-taking adventurous spirits, even though at times costly, have ultimately helped the human civilization to progress, evolve and thrive. Since the early 20th century, space and air have been two of man's biggest frontiers. Only in the last few years has there been another spark of innovations in space flights, since the space aeronautics industry captured the interest of interest to private sector firms, that too, at the behest of encouragement from the government. Commercialization and privatization of space flights has brought in the much needed energy in the space industry. In fact, privatization alone has brought about new possibilities and concepts in the few years it has been implemented. However, there are many obstacles that still block the achievement of the goal of making space flights a reality for the common man. This study will investigate the perceptions, barriers and regulations involved in private space flights and how the latest launch failure of both Orbital Sciences and SpaceX rockets including the 2014 accident of SpaceShipTwo that is still being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transport and Safety Board (NTSB) and the manner in which the outcomes affected the view of the public towards commercial space travel.

Research question or problem statement

Space travel industry has a comparatively short history. In spite of its initial sluggishness, the industry has experienced rapid developments over the last 20 or so years. Once a government-only industry, the space industry has now also attracted investments from private entities. Since the initial commercial space travel that occurred in the year 2001, quite a number of other rich space tourists have voyaged into space by purchasing space flight tickets. Currently, over 625 individuals have booked sub-orbital space travel on the Virgin Galactic (Soular, 2013). However, there are still many huge barriers in turning space travel into a reality for the common man. This paper looks into this issue in depth and analyzingthe reasons thereto.

Literature Review

It has been quite a difficult year for space travel. The recent disintegration of Falcon 9, a SpaceX rocket that was bound for the ISS (International Space Station) was the first for that space vehicle, however the case is not the same for NASA which has now witnessed a 75% failure rate in the last 8 months out of four spacecrafts it had contracted to ferry supplies to the ISS. In October last year, an Orbital Sciences rocket, Antares, crashed and burned several seconds after launch. Then in April of this year an unmanned Russian Spacecraft, Progress 59, lost contact with the ground station causing it to veer out of orbit and later disintegrate in the atmosphere. Both Antares and Progress 59 space vehicles were carrying equipment, food and scientific research material to the ISS, just as the case was with the recent disintegration of Dragon, another SpaceX rocket during its lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida. All 3 accidents seem to not be related, and space industry stakeholders have been repeating over and over again their usual tune after the occurrence of the latest accident: that rocket science will always be rocket science and a certain degree of failure cannot be avoided. However, despite these sentiments, the many accidents have numerous spectators worried, particularly members of Congress who are shelving NASA's bill and have of late been reluctant to allocate funds for the agency's partnerships with private commercial entities such as SpaceX (Moskowitz, 2015).

The support of the general public towards the commercialization of the space industry also took a hit last year barely 72 hours after the Orbital Sciences Antares mishap when SpaceShipTwo, a Virgin Galactic suborbital spacecraft, crashed during a test flight, resulting in one fatality. Yet despite there being an investigation into that accident, Virgin Galactic is still moving ahead with its plans to fly space tourists across short arcs on the edge of space form its futuristic New Mexico facility referred to as Spaceport America (Moskowitz, 2015). In cases such as this where the project involves flying only rich people paying huge amounts of money to get them briefly into space, then many people are skeptical and justifiably so that such a project would bring any significant or meaningful benefit to the society as a whole.

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As it stands, every tourist has paid over $20 million for a short 7 day trip and even if this price was ever cut even drastically, it is still hard to imagine such trips ever being affordable to anyone who is not super-rich (Stromberg, 2014).

Future gRoth and potential of licensing

NASA (as may have been believed), however, is not the only federal agency involved in space flights anymore. As commercial flights are getting closer to reality, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) published a framework structure of the practices it recommended for human space travel safety. The framework referred to as Recommended Practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety was published in September 16th by the agency towards forming a baseline if there was to be a need for the federal government to start giving regulations at some point in the long-term. Of late, commercial space flight programs have been gaining momentum, particularly after the completion of NASA's shuttle program in the year 2011. The space agency is now awarding contracts to private firms for sending the first commercial crew to the ISS (International Space Station) (Williams, 2014).

However, by publishing recommended practices, the FAA could in effect be ushering a new phase of space flights that will be spearheaded by private firms. In spite of NASA's domination of the Space industry, FAA has in fact been responsible for licensing and regulating any private firms and entities engaged in commercial space travel. Indeed, going by a fact sheet published by the administration, its Commercial Space Transportation (AST) office has licensed over 220 launches, including private commercial launched by firms such as SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Boeing (Williams, 2014).

To look into this further, the license assessment procedure entails environmental, public safety, foreign policy and national security reviews and an insurance requirement. Expecting a commercial space flights industry in the future, the FAA has commenced issuing tentative licenses instead of full permits for launches and re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere for all reusable rockets that are to fly to the earth's sub-orbital. Additionally, FAA's framework document is assuming that these space vehicles will be staying in Earth's orbit for a maximum of two weeks and with the ability to make the flight back to earth in one calendar day if need be (Williams, 2014).

It is important to note here that orbital voyages and docking, or flights taking more than the two set weeks, or any activities to be conducted outside the space vehicle, and flights to go beyond Earth's orbit are not directly addressed in this framework document. However, even though on the way, commercial human space travel is not yet a common reality. The recommended practices are basically focused on the safety of the flight's human occupants and not mission assurance or public safety. The framework document makes recommendations to space vehicle manufacturers (commercial), and to space flights providers on the operations, design and manufacturing of the spacecrafts. However, in spite of the document being published at a time when the idea of space tourism is growing in popularity and closer to reality, the practices recommended therein do not actually have any statutory, regulatory powers (Williams, 2014).

Space Tourism

Nowadays, trends are changing though and newer types of space flights and travels are emerging. 2001 ushered in a new era of space tourism, as Dennis Tito, a rich Californian, became the first ever paying passenger for a commercial space flight (Seedhouse, 2014). Tito paid twenty million dollars to be on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-32, via dealings between an American firm known as Space Adventures and MirCorp, a Russian firm, which was in charge of the Mir space station. Many other people have since followed Dennis Tito's footsteps including Mark Shuttleworth (a technological magnate from South Africa), Anousheh Ansari (an Iranian businesswoman), and Gregory Olsen (an American entrepreneur) among other rich people (Seedhouse, 2014). Given that, these flights were orbital in nature all of these space tourists had to undergo hard training together with professional astronauts, as a preparation for their missions (Seo, n.d).

Viewing these events or mission launches as the dawn of the 'Age of Space tourism' would be an overstatement. It is true that space has returned to the top of global policy agenda, particularly its commercial agenda, however, why has this taken over four decades and why is it that only three nations (the U.S., Russia and Japan) seemingly have the capability of.....

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