Private Rockets could Boost Military too

Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies just put the first privately developed rocket into orbit. That's not only a breakthrough for the space community. It has huge military consequences, too -- if the company can turn the one-time launch into a regular event.

The U.S. military relies on satellites to spy on enemies, relay orders and guide unmanned planes. But putting a satellite into orbit is an enormously expensive undertaking. "Humanity has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on space exploration in the past half century, and the numbers have not changed: about $10,000 a pound to put something in low Earth orbit," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity, when speaking with Wired's Carl Hoffman. Only a few, government-backed companies offer these Maybach-priced services. Which means every aspect of the satellite business happens at a slow crawl. Satellites are built, oh-so-deliberately, to have zero defects -- and then take forever to replace, once the inevitable errors happen.

For decades, the military has tried to break this bind of inflated costs and limited suppliers. The Pentagon would rather send up satellites in a hurry, and cheaply -- kind of like how airplanes are flown today.

"For as long as I've been in this game -- 20 years -- the military [has] said they're going to cut launch costs in half," says Theresa Hitchens, who looks at space issues for the Center for Defense Information. "It's never happened."

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is promising to cut that $10,000-per-pound price in half. No wonder the Air Force has committed more than $100 million to the company, founded by PayPal's Elon Musk. Darpa has made major investments, as well. "The military now has a stick to poke and prod the traditional big launch providers (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) into actually being competitive and saving the taxpayer money instead of just sucking off the government teat," former Air Force space officer Brian Weeden tells Danger Room.

But that stick only gets sharp if SpaceX can pull off the launch trick more than once. The company's first three efforts were disasters. And there's no guarantee the next three won't be disasters, too. "Musk will need 20 or so launches before he knows how reliable his technology is -- and how much it really costs," Hoffman wrote. And even if Musk can get these relatively-simple, relatively-small Falcon 1 rocket launches together, the real test will be whether the heavier, farther-reaching Falcon 9s will work out as planned.

It's not just American launch costs that could go down. The next SpaceX rocket is supposed to carry a Malaysian reconaissance satellite into orbit. "This could be the beginning of a general diffusion of on-orbit capability of all sorts and a loss of U.S. ability to call the shots in space," says long time satellite-watcher (and former CIA officer) Allen Thomson.

The kind of satellites could change, as well. Some in the Defense Department -- especially within Darpa -- have been pushing for a shift, "relying on large, expensive, orbiting ducks to larger distributed constellations of microsatellites," Weeden notes. Think of it as the IBM mainframe to Google server cluster evolution of computing."

This gives you is multiple advantages. First, you no longer care about China's (or anyone else's) kinetic kill ASAT [anti-satellite] capability. If you have a couple hundred nodes in your satellite system and they take out a handful, who cares? Properly designed, the system is protected against outages and just routes around them. Second, such a system means you need to launch lots of small satellites into orbit meaning you can take advantage of new, cheaper vehicles like Falcon. Third, you can launch your constellations incrementally in phases and upgrade to new generations of satellites with each increment, as long as the mesh in with the older satellites, instead of waiting 20 years.

Pike isn't sure the space game is really about to change all that much, however. Anti-satellite weapons will still be much cheaper send up than satellites. "It continues to be the case that the ASAT does not have to achieve much more than half orbital velocity, and the ASAT kill vehicle can be a small fraction the size of the satellite," he tells Danger Room. "So the cost of the satellite is on the order of 100 times the cost of killing the satellite -- a factor of two change in launch costs does not alter this. And if the satellite operator can achieve such reductions, then in principle so can the ASAT shooter."