The case for suborbital...

'The greatest space market no one is talking about'

'The Newspace 'boom' is all about satellites. Satellites need to be launched on orbital rockets. The drive for the new UK launch sector is therefore solely focused on developing orbital launch capability, as fast as possible.'

On the surface, that sounds like sane reasoning, it's the same reasoning driving the development of most of the new spaceports around the world, not just in the UK. The massive, and increasing value of the small-sat launch market is a hell of a draw and it's certainly the reason that so much money is flowing (or has been flowing) into the launch sector and into the 140+ start-ups now developing new orbital launchers.

Walk first - Then run

The trouble is.... the UK launch sector could be seen to be trying to run before they've walked. Missing out the training wheels and climbing straight onto a 500CC racing bike because the cool guy next door is riding one.

About sixty or seventy years ago the UK was going through this exact same learning experience. Following the other nations who were developing satellite launch capability, we had teamed up with Australia and were setting up a launch range at Woomera to ultimately try and get a satellite into orbit. This was a government funded project of course, not a commercial enterprise, but the end goal was essentially the same.

The US and Russia had already launched satellites by the time Woomera was fully operational, we had seen them do it and were certainly in a position, if we wanted, to copy that technology and just build an orbital vehicle and 'have a go' as quickly as possible... but we didn't. We spent twenty years or more building up to that goal and building experience in our personnel and our facilities. As the image above shows, the UK spent many years building and testing smaller rockets from the Woomera range, eventually working up to space-capable suborbital vehicles like the Skylark, and then large liquid fueled rockets like the Black Knight before finally launching the Black Arrow satellite launcher over twenty years after the range was first opened.

The World as a whole was indeed on a 'learning curve' with rocket technology at that time, everyone was doing things that were at the cutting edge and gaining incremental experience was a critical part of that engineering journey for the British as much as the Americans, the Russians and any other nations joining the race. That experience however, wasn't really 'collective' experience. Just because the Russians, or even the Americans, had worked out how to launch large liquid propellant rockets safely, or track objects into orbit... no one was sharing. The security value of that technology, and that experience, was too high to even share it fully with allies. That is also not experience that the UK has retained in any meaningful way. You can't read a book about Black Arrow and then go and build an orbital vehicle, claiming to be building on that engineering heritage... that heritage, that experience and knowledge has, unfortunately, been largely lost.

A lesson unlearned?

Which brings us to today and the 'Newspace' era. It could be argued that the political environment is less 'heated' now, in terms of countries such as the UK gaining that experience second hand from the US at least, but that political protection of expertise has now simply been replaced with commercial protection. National security is no longer the thing at risk if launch expertise is shared, it's your profit margin. The UK's burgeoning launch sector (both governmental and commercial) has looked at the success of SpaceX and Rocket Lab and perhaps decided 'That looks easy'. We have grabbed our pickaxe and run to join the gold rush without realising that that bearded old-timer out there in the wagon just ahead of us has been doing this for half a century. Whilst all that may be obvious as you watch him is that he has a pickaxe and finds the gold, just going and buying a pickaxe won't make you equal. He doesn't just know where the richest seams are, and how to wield that pickaxe with more skill.... he also knows how to spot a sleeping rattlesnake.

I tend to use these two images quite a lot when I explain how the only two commercial orbital launch companies in the market got to where they are now. Above, Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab stands next to an Electron small orbital launcher, but the Electron is not the most important rocket in that image, the smaller rockets on the wall behind him are the ones that are important. Rocket Lab (and New Zealand with them) didn't just spring into existence one day and build a successful orbital vehicle. They built suborbital rockets first, learning through the engineering challenges of those early flights before applying that experience to their orbital vehicle development.

Below that, Tom Meuller, CTO and head of propulsion development at SpaceX wasn't hired by Elon Musk for his business acumen or his sales experience in the automotive sector... he was hired because he had spent 20 years at the 'Reaction Research Society' playing with small liquid rocket engines in his own time, ironing out the kinks and understanding the nuances of how they could be made more efficient and reliable. Even once at SpaceX, he oversaw dozens of smaller vehicles that were test flown before an orbital vehicle was even designed.

As of today, no one has ever set up a company and built an orbital vehicle with zero prior experience with smaller vehicles. And that expertise cannot be learnt in a classroom, you can't just hire 20 bright graduates and ask them to design you a launch vehicle, you need to climb that engineering ziggurat step by step to get to the top. Likewise no country has ever 'skipped' the suborbital flight testing and just set up an orbital launch site and staffed it with personnel who have never seen a rocket fly and begun raking in the money from satellite launches.... and it won't ever happen.

Show me the money...

"But what about the money?" I hear the bureaucrats cry... "Isn't orbital launch worth hundreds of billions and therefore the only way we're all going to get rich?" Small rockets = small profits? I guess there's some truth to the latter of those statements at least. Suborbital flight is never going to be a market to match satellite launch, but it IS a market, and it's currently at the same stage that the orbital market was around 15 years ago... as industry just starts to realise the commercial opportunities it holds.

The key benefit to suborbital launch is that it is the only way to get things into space, and then get them back again. Suborbital flight is in need of a makeover and a good publicist, part of the solution to solving its image problem is possible going to be down to rebranding and for a few years now I've been trying to use the term 'short duration space access' to better describe what suborbital flight offers. With the exception of the small capacity that exists for microgravity experiments to be taken to the ISS (at great cost), there is no other way to do an experiment, or test a product, in space and then return it safely back to Earth to analyse the results. From biotech giants needing to do research in microgravity to space companies wanting to test and demonstrate the viability of space-destined products, there's now a LOT of companies who (even if they don't know it yet) need access to cheap suborbital launches to accelerate their development cycle and very visibly increase their TRL.

At present the global suborbital launch market is worth somewhere between $350m and $500m annually, most of which is government funded research, but the anecdotal evidence of growing demand from the commercial sector strongly suggests that value could at least double in the next five to ten years.

Another string to the bow...

The other critical benefit that suborbital launch could bring the UK (and other countries scrabbling to set up space ports and join the big boys in the global launch market) is constant and immediate revenue. This week it was announced that the proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the north coast of Scotland had received planning permission with a tentative limit of twelve orbital launches per year. On the surface this is a great step forwards, however looking at the figures, and assuming that any new space port has to be competitive in terms of what it charges launcher companies to use the site for a single orbital flight, at a rate of 12 launches a year, the site will take at least 50 years to break even on the costs of having built it. That's a very long term investment, and reliant on the embryonic UK orbital launcher market and attracting/retaining customers... many of whom are still a long way from having a rocket. It's a lot of wishful thinking upon which to bet tens of millions of pounds of public money. New space ports need any other revenue stream they can get, and fast.

Atmospheric rocket launches carrying commercial payloads are already taking place in the UK. True suborbital launch to 100km+ is going to be possible within the next year from at least one UK company. Suborbital flight will be here, by the looks of it, long before orbital and will be waiting on the legislation and the infrastructure to be ready... and be seeking to use those facilities as soon as they are open for business.

It may be that the rules written into the Sutherland planning consent mean that '12 launches' means '12 launches of anything', not just orbital vehicles, so making money from suborbital launch may be impossible for that site specifically, but for the other vertical spaceports, it's got to be a clear target to begin revenue generation ahead of orbital capability landing in the UK, and more critically, it should be something the government is supporting.

Whilst the amount a site can charge for a suborbital launch is perhaps 10% or less of the charges that could be levied on an orbital launch, the cost of infrastructure and legislative compliance will hopefully scale down similarly. Suborbital launches also traditionally tend to be made in multiples and more frequently. Companies such as our own (Raptor Aerospace Ltd) are specifically working to make the launch infrastructure for our suborbital service entirely non-site-specific, meaning there would be zero cost to any site to charge for those suborbital launches in terms of physical infrastructure provision, if the correct permissions were in place and it was safe to do so, we could turn an empty field into a profit-making space-port in a day.

Orbital launch's agile little brother...

For the UK (and every other country developing launch capability), suborbital is a commercial opportunity that is only just starting to shine, but is still in the shadow of the more immediate scramble to be part of the orbital launch market. The benefits of a burgeoning new launch nation embracing suborbital to accelerate it's space aspirations are however becoming obvious...

• The training of staff and testing of ranges and range equipment ahead of orbital launch at new space-ports is a necessity, not just a nicety.
• That launch activity can not only help prepare those space-ports for orbital capability but provide an immediate and regular income for them as well, massively boosting their business case.
• The space industry itself, and high-tech industry as a whole, is just beginning to realise the possibilities (and publicity) that sub-orbital flight testing of their products can open up.
• Many of the fastest growing business sectors globally can benefit from microgravity environment research, especially pharmaceuticals and bio-tech. Suborbital flight is the most cost effective way to achieve that research.
• The positive press coverage (and the positive public perception) that can be derived from people seeing rockets flying into space from expensive national sites and making money for the nation cannot be ignored. As the date for the first orbital launch slips year by year into the future, and with native suborbital vehicles ready to fly, a shift of focus to seize that positive story and make it happen seems an increasingly wise choice.

Will the UK realise in time and seize the opportunity to get ahead in this emerging market? We believe it will. For barely 1% of the investment that an orbital launcher needs, we could be flying commercial payloads into space and take the nation's commercial space aspirations out of the PowerPoint presentations of the last ten years and into reality. Can we afford not to?