Project Persephone

Comsats - a dying market?

For Project Persephone to succeed, exovivaria will probably need to be cheaper than they would be if we had them today. The dominant cost will be in Earth-to-orbit transportation of components and construction materials. Getting overall exovivaria user costs into a manageable range for a wider audience will ultimately require higher launch rates, and possibly projectile space launch technologies which are still very immature, at best. It's long been appreciated that reducing space access costs is strongly related to increasing commercial launch rates or payload mass -- i.e., to increased demand to put things in orbit.

Ideally, user demand for exovivaria -- larger ones, more of them, with more varied ecosystems -- would be so strong as to stimulate a new market for space launch, and help bring Earth-to-orbit costs down, at least for components and materials. This is doubly important because

(1) the old commercial markets might not be around for many more decades;

(2) the (currently tiny) market for launching self-financed "space tourists" into orbit might end up limited to what national space programs are willing to host. At the moment, the prospects for continued private space travel appear very uncertain.

(3) the (currently still speculative) market for suborbital space flights might, even if very successful, still leave the prospects for adequate private financing for orbital manned flights in limbo.

Investment in the most common and traditional commercial use of space launch -- i.e., launching a communications satellite (comsat) into geosynchronous equatorial orbit? -- is likely to decline over the long term. There are two main drivers for this expected trend. One is Moore's Law, which means you can do more with fewer satellites. The other is the Terrestrial Migration of electronic communications, which is itself significantly driven by Moore's Law.

(1) "Moore's Law"

Comsats are almost solid electronics. Electronics for space applications -- as with electronics for most purposes -- follows Moore's Law: you can pack more functions on a chip with each passing year. Solar photovoltaics, which power comsats, and lightweight structural materials, which help comsats survive the stresses of launch, are also performing better with each passing year. This means people can do the same amount of satellite communications with fewer launches. As old comsats reach end-of-life, they'll be replaced with a smaller number of new ones. That is, if they are replaced at all.

(2) "The Terrestrial Migration"

Although demand for satellite broadcasting continues to grow as economic development proceeds apace across the globe, terrestrial substitutes for comsats are inexorably gaining market share. Broadband through fiber optics, crossing continents and ocean basins, has provided a very competitive alternative to comsats.

Admittedly, we have been paying artifically low (perhaps below-cost) prices for the more recent terrestrial substitutes. The bubble of the late 1990s certainly led to a lot of launch activity for speculative "worldphone" comsat constellations, but it also provided an oversupply of capital to continue building out terrestrial capacity, overshooting real demand considerably and resulting in an oversupply (AKA "dark fiber"). Many of those assets were sold for pennies on the dollar, far below cost. However, the mass market has gotten used to the services made available through fiber, and not for those delivered through through satellites. People will very likely continue to invest in further terrestrial capacity even if it means the consumer paying more realistic prices for it -- and those prices would still be well below the cost of delivering the same bandwidth via satellite.

To sum up: established commercial-payload markets are not likely to become a source of dramatically higher launch rates. Quite the contrary. Without higher launch rates, we'll be unlikely to see improved economies of scale for conventional rocket launch. It's also unlikely that telecom and broadcast media will be a source of investment in alternatives to rocket launch, to maintain or increase comsat launch rates. The long-term trend may in fact be terrestrial. Some new market for launch will eventually be required, or else launches might virtually cease to have private-sector customers.

Further reading

• Commercial Space Transportation Study, Ch. 3.1: Communications Market, NASA http://www.hq.nasa.gov/webaccess/CommSpaceTrans/SpaceCommTransSec3/CommSpacTransSec3.html