We have a lift-off – of a multitude of satellites and enormous profits. Adam Sweeting looks at the amazing growth of the space business
THE Apollo programme is history now, and Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” seems about as newsworthy as the Gettysburg Address, but there is still a mystique about Cape Canaveral, like a frontier never quite conquered.
A curled finger of land looping out from Florida’s eastern seaboard, the cape is a weird mix of time-travel technology and primeval wilderness. The launch towers for the space shuttle and other rockets poke their labyrinths of pipes and girders skywards, while the massive block of the vehicle assembly building, where the shuttle is mated with its boosters and fuel tank, is visible for kilometres.
None of this bothers the alligators sunning themselves in creeks beside the cape’s long roads, nor the armadillos rooting through long grass. Eagles wheel overhead and the shoreline is patrolled by gulls, and the occasional cormorant.
An area devoted to the noisy art of rocket- launching might seem an unlikely spot for a nature reserve, but when woodpeckers kept drilling holes in the panels of a shuttle, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) staff were not allowed to have the birds exterminated.
But if the once-amazing United States space programme is now a stream of shuttle missions that barely make the newspapers, Canaveral is exploiting the new frontier of commercial rocketry, a process epitomised by the brilliant career of the Atlas rocket. The first Atlas was launched in 1957, and in 1961 it was an Atlas that propelled John Glenn’s capsule into orbit.
Thirty years on, the Atlas has evolved into the Atlas IIAR, a flagship launch vehicle in a new, market-driven space race. “Mission success is our corporate mantra,” raves Michael Wash, president of the Atlas division of International Launch Services, addressing a room-full of international journalists and Euroboffins gathered in Florida to watch the recent launch of the Hot Bird II television satellite.
The Hot Bird is owned by Eutelsat, a European body set up in the early 1980s to establish a European satellite system and formed mostly by national telecommunications companies.
With a payload of three tons and offering 20 transponders capable of carrying digital radio and TV signals, Hot Bird II is the largest and most powerful satellite ever made in Europe. It was built by Matra Marconi Space, the Anglo-French merger that suddenly finds itself turning over billions of rand annually.
This is thanks to an unexpected demand for new satellites that has netted the company nine orders in the past nine months. Matra Marconi Space has three further Hot Birds in the pipeline for Eutelsat, plus a swarm of satellites with names like Nilesat, Afristar and even Astra, a name synonomous with satellite TV colossus Rupert Murdoch.
Driven by stampeding advances in digital technology and communications, the new satellite campaign is being fought on a global scale. While Matra Marconi Space squares up to US satellite manufacturers, the battle for market share among the makers of launch vehicles is equally intense.
The Atlas rocket is engaged in tooth-and- claw commercial warfare with the mostly French Ariane launch vehicle – still regarded as an impressive piece of gear despite the fact that the new Ariane V vaporised catastrophically earlier this year – and the Russian Proton, a crude but effective chunk of rocketry based in the hostile wilderness of Baikonur.
The Chinese are getting in on the act, too, with their prophetically named Long March launcher. Soon, some of these vehicles may lift off from the new Sea Launch floating rocket platform, under construction in Scotland and Norway.
A survey by US magazine Via Satellite points out that more satellites have already been launched during the 1990s than in the previous three decades combined. If trends continue, it’s possible that by the millennium, more than 70% of all satellites ever launched will have been dispatched in this decade.
It’s no wonder Wall Street investors are taking a keen interest in the industry. The future looks orbital. Indeed, given the panic provoked by the Russian Mars probe as it fell back to earth, the threat of falling space hardware could become a major concern of the new century. John Glenn never thought it would be like this.