Community column: What happened to commercial space?

During the 1990s, with the Cold War over, the launch companies knew they needed new customers to sustain their business. Space planners asked, what’s next for the Space Coast?

Their answer came from the growing information economy and its need to move ever-increasing heaps of data around the world. The future they saw for the Cape was in commercial launching of commercial satellites.

How big would this be? Huge. The head of Florida’s first space agency said the Cape might see as many as “50 launches a year.” What a wonderful prospect.

Didn’t happen. Though we’ve had a number of commercial space shots from the Cape (10 percent of the worldwide total of 400), the boom in new business so confidently predicted never arrived. Indeed, 2013 saw only one commercial launch from the Cape and two so far this year. One or two a year is a far cry from one a week.

Commercial space launches from the Cape ran into four obstacles.

The first was the U.S. Air Force. Unprepared for the pace and needs of commerce, the Cape’s Air Force operators had trouble shifting from emphasis on reliability above all to the commercial world’s balanced priorities, where cost is king and reliability is just another pricing element offset through insurance. The Cape’s safety world also needed an overhaul, a return to metric-driven safety goals in place of pushing safety past mandated requirements regardless of cost to the user.

But give the Air Force credit. As time’s passed, it’s worked hard to accommodate these new customers, speeding the process, easing burdens on commercial operators and overhauling its safety regulations while still protecting the public without hampering operations inside the fence. Even so, it remains a government department with a military mission, little funding for commercial space, and imperfect understanding of the ways of commerce. Absent a push from new law, the Air Force won’t do much more than it already has.

The raw cost to launch has stayed high as well. SpaceX is moving toward that Holy Grail of launch cost, $1,000 per payload pound on orbit, and exploring cost-shattering reusable boosters. Other new players are also pursuing serious cost reduction. But commercial launches are still pricey. Those who move data will use means other than space if it costs less.

And it does. As commercial space inched forward through the Cape’s bureaucracy, all that growing mass of data to be moved around the world found easier, cheaper paths. Here in U.S., the bulk of our data flows through fiber-optic cable (18 million miles laid last year alone) and bounces back and forth between a half-million microwave towers. Globally, there are 550,000 miles of submarine data cable beneath the oceans.

The cost advantage of using space assets as a primary pipe for Big Data and the Internet and all the other ones and zeroes moving around just hasn’t arrived. It probably never will.

Last, there’s growing competition. Nearly 30 countries have launched commercial payloads from 12 other launch sites, 10 of them overseas. Now four more U.S. sites are chasing commercial launches. Our Cape is losing out — all that great promise has proved a lot less in practice.

There could be some hope. Our key player, Space Florida, is doing its utmost to bring more commercial space activity to the Space Coast. But it needs more help from its partners. Though NASA says commercial space is an element of its future, it is dragging its feet on Space Florida initiatives. Though the Air Force continues to give quality service to its commercial customers, its bureaucratic mindset persists. We’ve got to make commercial launch easier and a lot cheaper.

Until NASA and the Air Force change their ways, launch costs decline drastically and we start to actually compete for business in business terms, commercial space launch can’t become the economic engine the Space Coast dreamers saw more than 20 years ago.