Revisiting the Golden Spike questions

Jeff Foust — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 22:52:01 +0000

Illustration of a Golden Spike lunar lander. (Credit: Golden Spike)

This morning I posted some things to look for in today’s unveiling of Golden Spike, the company planning commercial human lunar missions as early as 2020. With the company’s Washington press conference now complete, let’s quickly revisit those topics:

Technology: As expected, the company is leveraging existing capabilities in terms of launch vehicles, spacecraft, and the like, focusing on developing only those components that don’t exist today. “Take a look at what you’ve already got in terms of existing assets, use existing launch vehicles, adapt crew capsules that are already in development,” said Alan Stern, president and CEO of Golden Spike. “Only develop new systems, like an expedition lander and surface suits, where no system exists today.” He calls this a “head start” architecture that “offers enormous and convincing cost, schedule, and reliability advantages” over an entirely clean-sheet approach.

Financing: Even with this “head start” approach, the company will still need significant amount of money to develop this system: Stern said they estimate the cost to be $7â€“8 billion, which is still far less than any other human lunar mission approach. Stern said that while they’ll raise the money though a variety of means, including advance sales of expedition and an “enterprising financing plan,” they’ll still need to raise “hundreds of millions of dollars” from outside investors.

The company declined to go into details about their investment plans, including how much they’ve raised and from whom. “We don’t have any billion-dollar backers,” Stern said. Gerry Griffin, the chairman of the company’s board of directors, addressed “some pretty wild speculation” in the media about who might be funding the company. “For example, I read that Warren Buffett is involved. Let me just say that we’re in an earlier stage of this company than some people may think,” he said. “On the other hand, if any of you know Warren, I’d be grateful if you’d point him my way.”

Business Case: Who would be the customers of the company’s lunar expeditions? Their biggest target is what some in the industry call “sovereign clients”, or national space agencies that don’t have their own human spaceflight programs. “We expect significant demand from foreign space agencies,” Stern said, citing an internal market study that identified 15 to 20 “or more” nations out there that could afford such a mission, which the company prices at $1.5 billion a flight. “We’ve already had conversations with some national space agencies, and they’ve expressed their interest.”

Other markets include individual tourists or companies interested in commercial exploitation of the Moon. Stern said he’s talked with one unnamed individual who is “very seriously” interested in such a trip.

But are those markets big enough to warrant the hundreds of millions of dollars of outside investment, when other ventures, like Google Lunar X PRIZE teams and Space Adventures’ circumlunar flights, have struggled to find customers and line up significantly smaller tranches of funding? Stern and Griffin said that landing people on the Moon is big and exciting enough to attract interest that other ventures haven’t found. “It’s apples and oranges,” said Griffin, calling human spaceflight “a different domain” than robotic landers. “You can’t compare this to the Google Lunar X PRIZE. It’s not the same animal.”

Human missions, said Stern, “will attract a lot more interest, and, unlike a figure-eight flyby around the Moon”â€”a reference to the Space Adventures proposed missionâ€”â€œthese are serious scientific expeditions, so you don’t have to justify it as a stunt” but instead as science.

Indeed, human missions to the surface of the Moon are far different than anything else proposed to date. Whether they are exciting and compelling enough to open up investors’ pocketbooks and space agencies’ coffers to the tune of several billion dollars is a question whose answer will unfold over the next few years.

What to look for in today’s Golden Spike announcement

Jeff Foust — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:00:56 +0000

Over the last several weeks there’s been growing rumors that a new commercial space venture with an audacious goalâ€”human missions to the lunar surfaceâ€”was under development. In mid-November, NASASpaceFlight.com reported that there would be “a ‘game-changing’ announcement as early as December that a new commercial space company intends to send commercial astronauts to the moon by 2020.” Since then, more details have emerged, including the name of the company: Golden Spike. On Wednesday, the company issued a release confirming it plans “to offer routine exploration expeditions to the surface of the Moon by the end of the decade,” which it will discuss in more detail at a press conference Thursday afternoon in Washington.

With that background in mind, there are a few areas to think about when considering whether the company has a viable plan or not.

Technology: Many people will focus on the technical elements of the company’s plan, but in some respects this is not as big an obstacle as some might think. Any venture planning commercial human lunar missions by 2020 will be able to leverage a fair amount of infrastructure that already exists or should exist in the next several years, including commercial crew transportation systems under development by Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX to get people to low Earth orbit. In addition, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, slated to make its first launch next year, could play a major role in providing more affordable heavy-lift needed for lunar missions.

Still, such a venture will require some new infrastructure, most notably a lunar lander. The venture may also require a vehicle to go from earth orbit to lunar orbit (which could be adapted from a commercial crew vehicle), transfer stages, and lunar surface infrastructure (hab modules, rovers, etc.). All of these will significant development time and expense.

Finance: To develop that infrastructure, and to keep the company running until sufficient revenues come in, will require significant investment. How much? It will depend on the specifics of the business plan, but it’s hard to see how this could be done for less than a few hundred million dollars, and potentially a billion or more. Who will provide that? Keep in mind that Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, seeking to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon, have struggled to raise tens of millions of dollars for their efforts.

Business Case: Who are the customers who will be lucrative enough to make a compelling case for potential investors, and to maintain the high costs of running human missions to the Moon? Tourism is one option, but how many people, and at what price? It’s worth noting that Space Adventures has been selling seats for a circumlunar mission (going around, but not landing on, the Moon) at $150 million each, but has yet to line up both customers needed for the first such flight (the company has reportedly signed one and has several prospects for the other.) What other businesses are so compelling that they can support—and require—human missions to the lunar surface by 2020?

These challenges don’t mean that a commercial human lunar venture is impossible, but that Golden Spike will have to make a compelling case that they have lined up not just the technology for such missions, but can also close the business case to fly such missions profitably. We’ll see soon enough.

NewSpace Journal » Golden Spike

Revisiting the Golden Spike questions

What to look for in today’s Golden Spike announcement