Private spaceflight

During the principal period of spaceflight in the mid-twentieth century, only nation states developed and flew spacecraft above the Kármán line, the nominal boundary of space.

In 1980, the European Space Agency created Arianespace, a company to be operated commercially after initial hardware and launch facilities were developed with government funding.

In June 2013, British newspaper The Independent claimed that "the space race is flaring back into life, and it's not massive institutions such as NASA that are in the running.

[24] On 4 July 1982, the Reagan administration released National Security Decision Directive Number 42 which officially set its goal to expand United States private-sector investment and involvement in civil space and space-related activities.

Prior to the signing of this law, all commercial satellite launches in the United States were restricted by Federal regulation to NASA's Space Shuttle.

[33] The 2004 Act also specified a "learning period" which restricted the ability of the FAA to enact regulations regarding the safety of people who might actually fly on commercial spacecraft through 2012, ostensibly because spaceflight participants would share the risk of flight through informed consent procedures of human spaceflight risks, while requiring the launch provider to be legally liable for potential losses to uninvolved persons and structures.

For example, as of June 2013[update] and in the United States alone, ten billionaires had made "serious investments in private spaceflight activities"[51] at six companies, including Stratolaunch Systems, Planetary Resources, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Bigelow Aerospace.

The ten investors were Paul Allen, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Charles Simonyi, Ross Perot Jr., Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Robert Bigelow.

Launches of government payloads, including military, civilian and scientific satellites, was the largest market segment in 2007 at nearly $100 billion a year.

[63] As of 2008, NASA planned to spend $500 million through 2010 to finance development of private sector capability to transport payloads to the International Space Station (ISS).

[needs update] This was considered more challenging than then-available commercial space transportation because it would require precision orbit insertion, rendezvous and possibly docking with another spacecraft.

The NASA Administrator suggested that space transportation services procurement may be expanded to orbital fuel depots and lunar surface deliveries should the first phase of COTS prove successful.

[66] After it transpired that Rocketplane Kistler was failing to meet its contractual deadlines, NASA terminated its contract with the company in August 2008, after only $32 million had been spent.

Several months later, in December 2008, NASA awarded the remaining $170 million in that contract to Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop resupply services to the ISS.

[70] The Act resolved the regulatory ambiguity surrounding private spaceflights and is designed to promote the development of the emerging U.S. commercial human space flight industry.

[needs update] In November 2009, Zero 2 Infinity, a Spanish aerospace company announced plans for a balloon-based nears space tourism vehicle called Bloon.

[74] Similar projects of stratospheric balloon tourism are being developed by multiple other companies around the world (Zephalto,[75] Space Perspective,[76]...), though none has yet made a high altitude crewed flight (as of Aug. 2022).

[81] The Planetary Society, a nonprofit space research and advocacy organization, has sponsored a series of small satellites to test the feasibility of solar sailing.

[91] In a presentation given 15 November 2005 to the 52nd Annual Conference of the American Astronautical Society, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin suggested that establishing an on-orbit propellant depot is, "Exactly the type of enterprise which should be left to industry and to the marketplace.

"[92] At the Space Technology and Applications International Forum in 2007, Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing made a presentation detailing the benefits of propellant depots.

[93] Shackleton Energy Company has established operational plans, an extensive teaming and industrial consortium for developing LEO Propellant Depots supplied by Lunar polar sourced water ice.

In 1996, NASA selected Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to build the X-33 VentureStar prototype for a single stage to orbit (SSTO) reusable launch vehicle.

On 4 March 2000, the BA-2 project tested the largest liquid rocket engine built since the Saturn V.[98] In October 2000, Beal Aerospace ceased operations citing a decision by NASA and the Department of Defense to commit themselves to the development of the competing government-financed EELV program.

[99] In 1998, Rotary Rocket proposed the Roton, a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) piloted Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) space transport.

After spending tens of millions of dollars in development the Roton failed to secure launch contracts and Rotary Rocket ceased operations in 2001.

[102] In December 2012, the Golden Spike Company announced plans to privately transport space exploration participants to the surface of the Moon and return, beginning as early as 2020, for US$750 million per passenger.

The space station was to have been constructed of both Sundancer and B330 expandable modules as well as a central docking node, propulsion, solar arrays, and attached crew capsules.

[114] The plan was to send a communication satellite and pathfinder lander to the planet by 2016 and, after several stages, land four humans on the Martian surface for permanent settlement in 2023.

"[125] On September 27, 2016, at the 67th annual meeting of the International Astronautical Congress, Elon Musk unveiled substantial details of the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) design for the transport vehicles—including size, construction material, number and type of engines, thrust, cargo and passenger payload capabilities, on-orbit propellant-tanker refills, representative transit times, etc.—as well as a few details of portions of the Mars-side and Earth-side infrastructure that SpaceX intends to build to support the flight vehicles.

In addition, Musk championed a larger systemic vision, a vision for a bottom-up emergent order of other interested parties—whether companies, individuals, or governments—to utilize the new and radically lower-cost transport infrastructure to build up a sustainable human civilization on Mars, potentially, on numerous other locations around the Solar System, by innovating and meeting the demand that such a growing venture would occasion.