The Second Space Race

July has been a big month for commercial space companies. SpaceX did a test fire for the main Starship Booster. Relativity Space announced that it was building a new factory in Long Beach to help scale up Terran R production. And Rocket Labs is working on a contract from NASA to create satellites to study Mars’s atmosphere. But, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin did something that only SpaceX has been able to achieve: send civilians into space.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip 2 (Left)
Blue Origin's New Shepard (Right)

About two decades ago, people were starting to have the idea of commercializing space. People wanted to make it easier to go to space and feel like an astronaut. They wanted a form of space tourism to help people experience what only astronauts feel at the time. Some of these companies that were started around this time were SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. I won’t be focusing on SpaceX too much because I already talked about them in this article.

BE-4 Rocket Engine Developed
By Blue Origin

Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and whose main goal was to create the space tourism industry by decreasing the cost to go to space and increasing the safety of going into space. Blue Origin first started off as a rocket engine supplier for other companies, such as ULA(United Launch Alliance). Shortly after, in 2005, Bezos discussed plans for a vertical-takeoff and landing rocket ship called New Shepard, a one-stage launch vehicle. These plans were kept secret until 2008 when Blue Origin published a timetable for New Shepard. This timetable was highly ambitious with the first uncrewed flight being in 2011 and the first crewed flight being in 2012. However, the project was too ambitious and the dates were starting to be pushed back. In 2016, Bezos said that the first test flight of New Shepard would be in 2018, but this again was pushed back. The first test flight of New Shepard was on April 29, 2015, with the flight being a partial success. Blue Origin kept on updating the New Shepard rocket and eventually started to reuse them. In 2016, Blue Origin announced New Glen, a two-stage rocket, which is still in its conceptual stages.

Blue Origin Crew for July 20th Flight
(From Left to Right): Oliver Daeman, Wally Funk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos

Eventually, after 15 launches on July 20, 2021, New Shepard launched with 4 passengers: Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk (the oldest person to go into space), and Oliver Daemen (the youngest person to go into space).

On the other hand, there is Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic was founded by Richard Branson in 2004 and was a part of the Virgin group. Virgin Galactic’s main goal was always to make space tourism a thing by making it cheaper and more normal. Virgin Galactic’s approach was very different from Blue Origin. While Blue Origin used a traditional rocket, Virgin Galactic used a carrier plane to launch a smaller plane that would have an incredibly strong engine to help propel it into space. The carrier plane is called the White Knight Two(WK2), which is a large fixed-wing aircraft. It looks like two planes joined at the wing. White Knight Two is also a part of the Virgin Orbit Company, another company under the Virgin group which uses planes to lift rockets higher into the atmosphere and launch them. Branson hopes that this can be used to launch satellites into LEO for cheaper.

SpaceShip 2 on Descent

The smaller plane that actually holds the passengers and goes into space is called SpaceShip Two(SS2). SpaceShip Two is a smaller aircraft that is attached to WK2. SS2 was unveiled in 2009 and customers could start to sign up to fly on it and go to space in 2013. Well, it was a full five years later in which an SS2 named VSS Unity achieved a piloted sub-orbital flight in 2018, and on July 11, 2021, Richard Branson and three other employees were able to go into space, making them some of the first-ever civilians to go into space on a private rocket.

Now, let's talk about the two vehicles. First, there is New Shepard from Blue Origin. The New Shepard (NS) is Blue Origin’s suborbital launch vehicle developed for suborbital space tourism. Prototypes of the launch vehicle and its engine date back all the way to 2006. In 2010, Blue Origin started working on the NS vehicle engine and finished its development cycle in 2015. The NS vehicle uses the BP-3PM liquid rocket engine, which has 110,000 lbf (489 kN) of thrust.

New Shepard Launch in 2015

The first successful launch of NS was on November 23, 2015, when NS successfully performed a vertical landing after going suborbital, being the first rocket to ever do so. The version that launched on July 20, 2021, was the NS 4. It was the fourth propulsion module to be built but the first that was designed to carry passengers. NS 4 has two parts to it: the rocket and the capsule. Both the parts are reusable, which makes spaceflight cheaper and more routine. During the launch, the booster came down for a powered landing in the landing zone while the capsule settled a short distance away, using parachutes to land. The capsule reaches an altitude of 66 miles (107 kilometers), barely making it into the border of space (the boundary of space is at an altitude of 62 miles (100 km)). The capsule itself has six seats and is capable of making both land and sea landings.

SpaceShipTwo (Center) Attached to
White Knight Two (Left and Right)

Then, there is WK2 and SS2. WK2 is a twin-fuselage and has 4 jet engines (2 on each wing) and is mostly made up of a carbon fiber composite. Unlike its predecessor which had T-Tops as its vertical stabilizers, WK2 has cruciform tails. Cruciform tails are a type of vertical stabilizer where the horizontal stabilizer is in the middle of the horizontal stabilizer.WK2 has a wingspan of about 140 ft wide and is around 80 ft long. It has a maximum capacity of 200 kg to LEO and has a maximum altitude of 70,000 ft. Then, there is SS2. SS2 is a low-aspect-ratio passenger spaceplane that has a capacity of up to eight people - six passengers and two pilots. SS2 has a maximum altitude of 110 km (68 mi) and can reach a maximum speed of 4,200 km/h. It does this with its single hybrid rocket engine called the RocketMotorTwo. SS2 is also able to reach supersonic speeds after being deployed by WK2 at an altitude of about 49,000 ft. SS2 uses a feathered reentry system and is able to glide back to a spaceport similar to how the space shuttle used to land. Currently, there are only two SS2s. The first one was VSS Enterprise, which broke apart during a flight in 2014 and the second one is VSS Unity, which is operational and was used in the July 11th flight.

Virgin Galactic Crew on July 11th Flight
(From Left to Right): Dave Mackay, Colin Bennet, Beth Moses,
Richard Branson, Sirisha Bandla, Michael Masucci

Both of the flights barely passed the Karmen Line, which is considered the boundary of space. And both of the crews weren't considered astronauts by the FAA. But both of these flights showed how technology and how the modern space race is evolving. Every year, there are more and more aerospace companies in the United States. In fact, in 2019, the space industry had an average growth rate of 10.6% and was valued at $424 billion. However, due to the rapid increase in private space companies, the Bank of America forecasted that by 2030, the industry’s revenue will grow by 230% and be about $1.4 trillion. And in the next decade, we will see more and more companies approach space tourism as a business model, but this could be troubling for humanity.

How and Where Both Flights Occurred

Rocket launches do a lot of damage to the atmosphere because they burn fuel in the highest parts of the atmosphere. This damages the ozone layer and may contribute greatly to climate change. The reason this issue hasn’t been a huge contributor to climate change was that rocket launches were very infrequent. However, with the growing number of launches, the issue is bound to be a bigger problem. To tackle this some companies are creating biofuel, like BuShift Aerospace. To learn more about them, check out this article. Another issue that is already a huge problem is space debris. Space debris is any defunct or broken manmade object orbiting the Earth.

Model Showing Space Debris in LEO

This debris is different from satellites because they no longer serve any functions. Space debris is a big problem, as there is constantly being more and more space debris added into our orbit, and it imposes a risk for us and anything in orbit. Space debris already can be deadly, and by having more launches, we will be adding more debris into orbit, which may make space inaccessible if space debris is not handled correctly. If you want to learn more about space debris, check out this article.

Ultimately, we are in the second coming of the space race. While the Space Race was a competition between the USSR and the United States, this new space race is a competition between companies and which company will succeed. We already have major competitors in this space race like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. But more and more companies will enter the race. While there are many pros to this, there are also negatives that can affect the world greatly. Only time will tell how we will perceive this space race.

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