Thousands of flights will be required to determine whether that is the case

Mar 14, 2012 12:33 GMT  ·  By
The suborbital spaceflight industry will require several thousand flights to assess its economic success
   The suborbital spaceflight industry will require several thousand flights to assess its economic success

Commercial suborbital spacecraft are about to begin conducting flights over the next couple of years, but analysts cannot help but wonder whether or not this emerging industry will be successful. They say that thousands of successful flights may be required in order to assess that.

What experts are referring to is figuring out whether this industry will ever become economically feasible, and worthy of the money put in by the companies engaged in this effort. Some of the most notable examples include XCOR Aerospace and Virgin Galactic.

The latter is scheduled to begin ferrying passengers to the edge of space (62 miles or 100 kilometers above the surface) next year, but it will be a while before officials with the company can declare their investment a success.

According to XCOR president Jeff Greason, companies in this emerging industry may have to perform thousands of successful flights to suborbital altitudes before they can be positive that their investment was worth it, and that this type of travel has become a part of the overall transport economy.

This waiting period will occur regardless of how well the first few flights will go, Greason believes. Granted, they will bring more customers, but it's the overall trends that will ultimately determine the success or downfall of these ventures.

“We're going to need thousands of flights to find out whether we have achieved the levels of reliability and reusability that are economically interesting for this industry to become a real transportation sector of the economy,” Greason said last month, as quoted by Space.

He made the announcement during a presentation he gave at the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, which was held in Palo Alto, California.

Companies are relying both on paying customers and on the scientific community to become permanent users. Scientists have a wide array of experiments that need to be conducted in weightlessness, but which do not require extensive stays aboard the International Space Station.

In addition, many research groups simply do not receive sufficient funds to enable them to support the costs associated with an actual trip to space. For these teams, having access to a few minutes of microgravity may be enough to obtain relevant results.

“I really believe this is the engine that's going to finally break the logjam that has kept us, for most of my adult lifetime, wondering how come more interesting things aren't happening in space,” Greason explained.

“Whether it be suborbital or not, a fairly large database of flights is going to be required before economically effective reuse is achieved,” he concluded.