On Wednesday, the company’s Starship test model SN10 made a high altitude test flight to 10 kilometers and landed back on the launch pad. The previous two attempts with SN8 and SN9 reached their test altitude but suffered RUDs (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, or in simpler terms, exploding) at the point of landing.

SpaceX attempted SN10’s high altitude test in the mid afternoon, but was automatically aborted by the system at T-0 due to a detected anomaly.

The second attempt successfully launched, with Starship reaching the 10 kilometer test altitude, freefalling back to earth horizontally, and thrust pivoting back to the vertical position to land. 

You can watch the full launch event here:

Starship SN10 did, however, experience an RUD a few minutes after landing, from what some are speculating to be a methane leak. However this is only a minor problem at this development stage, and landing the Starship without an RUD at the landing stage itself is a gigantic step forward. 

Watch SN10’s RUD below:

This successful test of the SN10 stage comes the day after Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, who previously purchased a civilian space flight, announced a chance for you to join him on what he calls the Dear Moon Project. The flight will go around the moon and come back to earth. Musk states that this flight will actually go a little bit past the moon in order to be the furthest humans have ever been in space.

In a joint video released with Elon Musk, Yusaku Maezawa details his vision to bring 8 people who consider themselves to be creative or artistic along with him for the ride on Starship in 2023. 

If you describe yourself as creative or artistic, as Maezawa details in the video that anyone can be, you can enter for your chance at one of the seats at DearMoon.earth. 

Judging from his Twitter handle of @yousuckMZ, yes, he’s very aware of what his first name phonetically sounds like in English.

The successful landing of Starship the day after this announcement should hopefully give people confidence that SpaceX is on track for Starship to carry people in 2 years. Under development by SpaceX, it is intended to take humans to Mars and will be the world’s first fully reusable spacecraft.

According to Axiom Space, only three people will be allowed to make the flight to space for a 10-day out-of-the-world experience at the ISS. Axiom’s president and chief executive officer is Michael T. Suffredini, a former NASA program manager for the ISS between 2005 and 2015. He retired from NASA after a 10-year stint and started Axiom Space to build spacecraft and operate and space flights.

Suffredini disclosed that his company has signed an agreement with SpaceX to take humans to orbit, and has convinced NASA that Axiom could take people to space and back on a private basis. Meanwhile, SpaceX constructed its Crew Dragon capsule to not only fly NASA astronauts to the ISS but to also fly private individuals to space outside of NASA’s well-known space program.

While Axiom Space is trying to be the first private company to fly people to space using Elon Musk’s spaceflight technologies, another company known as Space Adventures is also negotiating with SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon capsule to transport people to space for a 5-day trip. Chairman of Space Adventures, Eric C. Anderson, said the trip could happen between 2011 and 2022.

He added that the trip might be planned to coincide with the 60th anniversary of John Glenn’s February 20, 1962 circle around the Earth. He hinted that the price for the trip will be between $30 million to $40 million.

Conversely, it is not clear if the space tourists will be able to taste or eat from crops grown in space since scientists have revealed that lettuce grown in space tastes almost the same as those grown on Earth. NASA’s Gioia Massa and Christina Khodadad among other colleagues examined several batches of lettuce cultivated in space between 2014 and 2016 and found they taste nearly the same as those grown in our world.

Scientists are experimenting with growing plants at the ISS because they hope to grow food for human civilization in space.

“Right now we cannot guarantee that we will have a diet to meet the needs of the crew for these long, deep space missions, so one potential solution will be to supplement the packaged diet with fresh produce,” they said. “This [space-grown lettuce] will provide additional vitamins and other nutrients, flavors, textures, and variety to the packaged diet. In the long term, if we ever want to have space colonization, growth of crops will be crucial for establishing any level of sustainability and self-sufficiency.”

By Wendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies

If successful, this will mark the first time in nine years that American astronauts will launch into space from American soil. What’s even more remarkable is they will not be launched by NASA but by a private company, SpaceX.

Human spaceflight is incredibly difficult and expensive; the rockets must be reliable and the vehicle must be built with expensive life support systems and a certain level of redundancy. To date, only three countries – Russia, the United States and China – have achieved this feat.

As a space policy expert, I find it hard to overstate the significance for both SpaceX and spaceflight in general. For SpaceX, it’s another step on their road to Mars, but more generally, it demonstrates that spaceflight need not be reserved for only the most powerful of states.

A dream and an opening

In many ways, SpaceX’s achievement is due not only to technological advances, but opportunity brought about by disaster. The breakup of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 led the Bush administration to decide to end the shuttle program by 2010. They directed NASA to develop a replacement, Project Constellation, but due to budget cuts and other problems, NASA failed to make significant progress. As a result, in 2010, the Obama administration directed NASA to refocus its efforts on deep space missions and rely on private companies to provide access to the ISS and low Earth orbit.

Enter SpaceX. Dreaming of colonization of Mars but frustrated with the slow pace at which it was coming, Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. To get to Mars, he decided that spaceflight would first need to be made cheaper. His philosophy was to devise a rocket system that could be used again and again with minimal refurbishment between flights. Over the next decade, SpaceX designed, built and tested its Falcon series of rockets. It signed contracts with NASA to provide cargo services to the ISS and with other companies and the U.S. military to provide general launch services. Perhaps most importantly, SpaceX has demonstrated that its rockets can be reused, with the core stages flying their way back to Earth to land themselves.

The 2010 shift in American space policy gave SpaceX an opportunity to build on its early successes. By 2014, both SpaceX and Boeing were given contracts from NASA to provide commercial crew launch services. And it appears, so far, that SpaceX has made good on its promise of reducing the cost of human spaceflight. Compared to an average space shuttle mission that cost US$1.6 billion, NASA is paying only $55 million per seat for SpaceX’s upcoming ISS flights.

Tourists in space?

This massive reduction in cost made possible through reusable rockets is contributing to several developments in spaceflight. First, it provides NASA a means of access to the ISS without relying on the Russian Soyuz. Since 2011, the U.S. has been paying Russia upwards of $86 million per seat for flights to the space station.

Second, with SpaceX and Boeing providing access to the ISS, NASA can concentrate on Project Artemis, which intends to return humans to the Moon by 2024. They are also leveraging new commercial capabilities from SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to further reduce costs to get there.

If SpaceX is successful, it could also mean the opening of space to tourism. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are planning to offer brief suborbital launches that don’t enter Earth orbit. SpaceX, on the other hand, is already signing up passengers for several-day trips to space at $35 million a seat. Even Tom Cruise is looking to fly on SpaceX and film a movie aboard the ISS. While space companies have long predicted opportunities for space tourism, SpaceX’s Dragon brings that possibility closer to reality.

More broadly, adding tourists to the mix in low Earth orbit may even help make space safer. Debris in orbit is a growing problem, along with increasing tensions between the U.S., China and Russia in space. Both of those things make operating in space more difficult, dangerous and costlier.

For the space economy to really take off, countries will need to put in place regulations that ensure safety and reliability in several areas, including vehicle safety and debris mitigation. And, as I suggest in my new book, having more humans in space might force countries to think twice before taking potentially dangerous actions in space. While orbital space tourism might still be far off for the average American, SpaceX’s crew launch brings us closer to the day when an extraordinary event is a normal occurrence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

While a major milestone for a private company, SpaceX’s most significant achievement has been in lowering the launch costs that have limited many space activities. While making several modifications to the fuel and engines, SpaceX’s major breakthroughs have come through recovering and reusing as much of the rocket and launch vehicle as possible.

Between 1970 and 2000, the cost to launch a kilogram to space remained fairly steady, with an average of US$18,500 per kilogram. When the space shuttle was in operation, it could launch a payload of 27,500 kilograms for $1.5 billion, or $54,500 per kilogram. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the ISS, the cost is just $2,720 per kilogram.

I’m a space policy analyst, and I’ve observed that cost has been a major hurdlelimiting access to space. Since the 1950s, the high cost of a space program has traditionally put it beyond the reach of most countries. Today, state and private actors alike have ready access to space. And while SpaceX is not the only private company providing launch services – Orbital ATK, recently purchased by Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are also players – it has emerged as the most significant.

SpaceX’s achievements

Frustrated with NASA and influenced by science fiction writers, Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Though it suffered several setbacks, in 2008 it launched the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket, the Falcon 1. Falcon 9 flew for the first time the next year, and in 2012, the Dragon capsule became the first privately funded spacecraft to dock with the ISS. SpaceX has since focused on recovering key parts of the Falcon 9 to enhance reusability and reduce costs. This includes the Falcon 9’s first stage which, once it expends its fuel, falls back through the atmosphere reaching speeds of 5,200 miles per hour before reigniting its engines to land on a drone recovery ship.

In 2018 alone, SpaceX made 21 successful launches. The new Falcon Heavy rocket – a more powerful version of the Falcon 9 – launched in February. This rocket can lift 63,800 kilograms, equivalent to more than 27 Asian elephants, to low Earth orbit and 16,800 kilograms to Mars for just $90 million. The test payload was Musk’s own red Tesla Roadster, with a mannequin named Starman in the driver’s seat.

In addition to the crewed Dragon tests this year, SpaceX is continuing development of its Starship, which will be designed to travel through the solar system and carry up to 100 passengers sometime in the 2020s. Musk has also suggested that the Starship could serve as the foundation for a lunar base.

Impact on space exploration

SpaceX’s technical advances and cost reductions have changed the direction of U.S. space policy. In 2010, the Obama administration moved away from NASA’s Constellation program, which called for the development of a family of rockets that could reach low Earth orbit and be used for long-distance spaceflight. With NASA falling significantly behind schedule, because of technological difficulties and budget cuts, the Obama administration was left with a choice of whether to boost funds for NASA or change direction.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama toured Kennedy Space Center and even met with Elon Musk to get a firsthand look at SpaceX’s facilities. The administration chose to reorient the program to focus solely on deep space. For missions closer to home, NASA would purchase services from companies like SpaceX for access to low Earth orbit. Critics objected to budget cuts to NASA as well as concerns about whether the private sector would be able to follow through on providing launch services.

While NASA has struggled to develop its Space Launch System, an analysis from NASA’s Ames Research Center found that the dramatically lower launch costs SpaceX made possible offered “greatly expanded opportunities to exploit space” for many users including NASA. The report also suggested that NASA could increase its number of planned missions to low Earth orbit and the ISS precisely because of the lower price tag.

In addition to substantially affecting human spaceflight, SpaceX has also launched payloads for countries including Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Indonesiaand, most recently, Israel. On Feb. 21, 2019, a Falcon 9 launched a privately built Israeli lunar lander which, if successful, will be the first privately built lunar probe.

Overall, SpaceX has significantly reduced the barriers to space, making it more accessible and democratizing who participates in space-based commerce and exploration.

Challenges ahead

Despite SpaceX’s successes, it faces significant challenges. Earlier this year, SpaceX laid off 10 percent of its workforce to reduce costs. NASA remains suspicious of some of the launch procedures SpaceX plans to use, including the fueling of the rocket with astronauts on board, which was linked to an explosionof a Falcon 9 on the launchpad. The Department of Defense’s inspector general has also announced an investigation into how the Air Force certified the Falcon 9, though it is not clear what initiated the probe.

Among some in NASA, the concern is with Musk himself. In a video last year, Musk was seen smoking marijuana, which prompted NASA to initiate a safety review of SpaceX as well as Boeing, another company aiming to provide launch services. Musk has also found himself in hot water with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding his tweets about another one of his companies, Tesla. In recent days, the SEC has asked a judge to hold Musk in contempt for apparently violating a settlement deal reached last year. While he is undoubtedly the driving force behind both Tesla and SpaceX, erratic behavior could make potential customers wary of contracting with them.

Musk, regardless of his personal missteps, and SpaceX have aggressively pushed technological boundaries that have changed minds, my own included, about the potential of private companies to provide safe and reliable access to space.

According to the report from Tech Times, Moon Express is the first non-government organization that has been given permission by the U.S. government to travel and land on the moon. The $10,000 per seat travel expense might be very expensive for some. However, space travel is not really that cheap.

“In a mission that initially cost us to go to the moon about $25 billion, our mission to the moon next year is going to be $7 million, and the year after it’s going to go down to millions,” said Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express, in a report from CNBC. . And in the next ten years, the cost of going to the moon is going to be $10,000.”

Jain also noted that the amount of time needed to travel from Earth to the moon will also be significantly shorter in the next 10 years. Moon travel may even reach to the point when tourist only needs about four hour to reach their destination, which is faster than the flight from New York to London.

Lunar vacation is not the only thing on the plate of Moon Express right now. The space company has also showed its intention to compete to Google Lunar Xprize with their 2017 lunar mission. The contest requires each participant to put a robotic lander on the moon and drive 1,640 feet while broadcasting back to Earth. The first team or company to do all these things will receive $20 million.

The robotic lander that will be sent by Moon Express will also conduct a survey on the lunar surface to identify the best spots for mining ore, metals, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, rare Earth minerals and helium-3.

Assistant Professor of Management Science, University of South Carolina, and first published on theconversation.com.

In many industries, a decade is barely enough time to cause dramatic change unless something disruptive comes along – a new technology, business model or service design. The space industry has recently been enjoying all three.

But 10 years ago, none of those innovations were guaranteed. In fact, on Sept. 28, 2008, an entire company watched and hoped as their flagship product attempted a final launch after three failures. With cash running low, this was the last shot. Over 21,000 kilograms of kerosene and liquid oxygen ignited and powered two booster stages off the launchpad.

When that Falcon 1 rocket successfully reached orbit and the company secured a subsequent contract with NASA, SpaceX had survived its ‘startup dip’. That milestone – the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit – ignited a new space industry that is changing our world, on this planet and beyond. What has happened in the intervening years, and what does it mean going forward?

While scientists are busy developing new technologies that address the countless technical problems of space, there is another segment of researchers, including myself, studying the business angle and the operations issues facing this new industry. In a recent paper, my colleague Christopher Tangand Iinvestigate the questions firms need to answer in order to create a sustainable space industry and make it possible for humans to establish extraterrestrial bases, mine asteroids and extend space travel – all while governments play an increasingly smaller role in funding space enterprises. We believe these business solutions may hold the less-glamorous key to unlocking the galaxy.

The new global space industry

When the Soviet Union launched their Sputnik program, putting a satellite in orbit in 1957, they kicked off a race to space fueled by international competition and Cold War fears. The Soviet Union and the United States played the primary roles, stringing together a series of “firsts” for the record books. The first chapter of the space race culminated with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing which required massive public investment, on the order of US$25.4 billion, almost $200 billion in today’s dollars.

Competition characterized this early portion of space history. Eventually, that evolved into collaboration, with the International Space Station being a stellar example, as governments worked toward shared goals. Now, we’ve entered a new phase – openness – with private, commercial companies leading the way.

The industry for spacecraft and satellite launches is becoming more commercialized, due, in part, to shrinking government budgets. According to a report from the investment firm Space Angels, a record 120 venture capital firms invested over $3.9 billion in private space enterprises last year. The space industry is also becoming global, no longer dominated by the Cold War rivals, the United States and USSR.

In 2018 to date, there have been 72 orbital launches, an average of two per week, from launch pads in China, Russia, India, Japan, French Guinea, New Zealand and the U.S.

The uptick in orbital launches of actual rockets as well as spacecraft launches, which includes satellites and probes launched from space, coincides with this openness over the past decade.

More governments, firms and even amateurs engage in various spacecraft launches than ever before. With more entities involved, innovation has flourished. As Roberson notes in Digital Trends, “Private, commercial spaceflight. Even lunar exploration, mining, and colonization – it’s suddenly all on the table, making the race for space today more vital than it has felt in years.”

One can see this vitality plainly in the news. On Sept. 21, Japan announced that two of its unmanned rovers, dubbed Minerva-II-1, had landed on a small, distant asteroid. For perspective, the scale of this landing is similar to hitting a 6-centimeter target from 20,000 kilometers away. And earlier this year, people around the world watched in awe as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket successfully launched and – more impressively – returned its two boosters to a landing pad in a synchronized ballet of epic proportions.

Challenges and opportunities

Amidst the growth of capital, firms and knowledge, both researchers and practitioners must figure out how entities should manage their daily operations, organize their supply chain and develop sustainable operations in space. This is complicated by the hurdles space poses: distance, gravity, inhospitable environments and information scarcity.

One of the greatest challenges involves actually getting the things people want in space, into space. Manufacturing everything on Earth and then launching it with rockets is expensive and restrictive. A company called Made In Space is taking a different approach by maintaining an additive manufacturing facility on the International Space Station and 3D printing right in space. Tools, spare parts and medical devices for the crew can all be created on demand. The benefits include more flexibility and better inventory management on the space station. In addition, certain products can be produced better in space than on Earth, such as pure optical fiber.

How should companies determine the value of manufacturing in space? Where should capacity be built and how should it be scaled up? The figure below breaks up the origin and destination of goods between Earth and space and arranges products into quadrants. Humans have mastered the lower left quadrant, made on Earth – for use on Earth. Moving clockwise from there, each quadrant introduces new challenges, for which we have less and less expertise.

I first became interested in this particular problem as I listened to a panel of robotics experts discuss building a colony on Mars (in our third quadrant). You can’t build the structures on Earth and easily send them to Mars, so you must manufacture there. But putting human builders in that extreme environment is equally problematic. Essentially, an entirely new mode of production using robots and automation in an advance envoy may be required.

Resources in space

You might wonder where one gets the materials for manufacturing in space, but there is actually an abundance of resources: Metals for manufacturing can be found within asteroids, water for rocket fuel is frozen as ice on planets and moons, and rare elements like helium-3 for energy are embedded in the crust of the moon. If we brought that particular isotope back to Earth, we could eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

As demonstrated by the recent Minerva-II-1 asteroid landing, people are acquiring the technical know-how to locate and navigate to these materials. But extraction and transport are open questions.

How do these cases change the economics in the space industry? Already, companies like Planetary Resources, Moon Express, Deep Space Industries, and Asterank are organizing to address these opportunities. And scholars are beginning to outline how to navigate questions of property rights, exploitation and partnerships.

Threats from space junk

The movie “Gravity” opens with a Russian satellite exploding, which sets off a chain reaction of destruction thanks to debris hitting a space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, and part of the International Space Station. The sequence, while not perfectly plausible as written, is a very real phenomenon. In fact, in 2013, a Russian satellite disintegrated when it was hit with fragments from a Chinese satellite that exploded in 2007. Known as the Kessler effect, the danger from the 500,000-plus pieces of space debris has already gotten some attention in public policy circles. How should one prevent, reduce or mitigate this risk? Quantifying the environmental impact of the space industry and addressing sustainable operations is still to come.

What’s next?

It’s true that space is becoming just another place to do business. There are companies that will handle the logistics of getting your destined-for-space module on board a rocket; there are companies that will fly those rockets to the International Space Station; and there are others that can make a replacement part once there.

What comes next? In one sense, it’s anybody’s guess, but all signs point to this new industry forging ahead. A new breakthrough could alter the speed, but the course seems set: exploring farther away from home, whether that’s the moon, asteroids or Mars. It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago, SpaceX launches were yet to be successful. Today, a vibrant private sector consists of scores of companies working on everything from commercial spacecraft and rocket propulsion to space mining and food production. The next step is working to solidify the business practices and mature the industry.

Standing in a large hall at the University of Pittsburgh as part of the White House Frontiers Conference, I see the future. Wrapped around my head are state-of-the-art virtual reality goggles. I’m looking at the surface of Mars. Every detail is immediate and crisp. This is not just a video game or an aimless exercise. The scientific community has poured resources into such efforts because exploration is preceded by information. And who knows, maybe 10 years from now, someone will be standing on the actual surface of Mars.