AIR MEETS SPACE: SHAPING THE FUTURE OF COMMERCIAL SPACE TRAFFIC: I. STUDY INTRODUCTION AND INITIAL RESULTS

Abstract

There are high expectations for a globally growing market of commercial space travel which is likely to turn in the next 10 to 20 years into a multi-billion Euro business. Those growth expectations are also backed up by OneWeb’s order of about 700 small satellites which are likely to be brought into LEO via air launches and by a continuously growing LEO launch rate showing an increase of about 60% in the last decade. Advances in electric propulsion and spacecraft design (CubeSats) helped to significantly reduce launch costs, so that space exploitation becomes affordable for the first time also to the private sector (e.g., for school labs, micro gravity research or in the area of human spaceflight). Several key players in space business, companies like Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Orbital or SNC get ready to serve the commercial manned and unmanned spaceflight market by developing their own ballistic reusable space vehicles which shall carry humans and cargo payload into suborbital and LEO space. Europe’s single stage to orbit concepts, like REL’s Skylon or Airbus’ Spaceplane, even target for commercial manned point to point mass transportation, similar to today’s travel through airspace, but with much shorter flight times. All these developments will likely stimulate demands for launch sites and spaceports, where commercial aviation and space vehicles will have to be safely managed and controlled in parallel granting easy access to potential customers. Today, management of and access to commercial aerospace is lacking a coordinated European and global approach so that the expected growing number of space vehicles passing through the air-space interface in a rather “uncontrolled” way will likely pose significant threats to human health and airspace safety. This issue is further intensified by the flood of CubeSats and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles which increase collision risks in LEO and lower airspace. Without doubt, space and airspace will move closer together in the next decade, which is why Space Tra ffi c Management is expected to become a global undertaking. Because we think that safety in aerospace should not be jeopardised by those developments, we initiated an evaluation study together with ESA aiming at the generation of a roadmap towards a European Space Traffic Management. This is the first in a series of papers which gives an outline of the study and presents initial results from a European perspective.