New Space Mission

The last three sessions of DLD are a great example of how diverse theDLD program is. From a session about fashion, to a short hip hop concert to full fledged nerdism: Space. On stage, Moderator Spencer Reiss has invited Eric Anderson from Space Adventures and George Whitesides from Virgin Galactic to talk about the current status of space travel.

We are seeing an ever increasing transformation of space travel from the domain of governments to a privately driven business. Most people are not aware of the fact, that this trend is indeed not very new. A huge share of satellites are maintained by private companies, but we do see today a push towards the next endeavor for human space exploration.

Commercial interest weren't always as strong. During the cold war, the Soviet Union and the US have been the only major players. This changed and in fact people of means haven been buying space trips to the ISS for a while and Anderson actually gave the audience the sneak peak, that somebody just bought a trip to the moon for the amazing sum of 150 mio Dollars.

While those special trips aren't for everybody, Virgin Galactic is steadily approaching the possibility of space travel for the masses. 250.000 Dollars for a space trip is still not exactly comparable to a flight from Munich to New York, but the price will crumble as soon as the technology gets more advanced. Possibly, in five years time, the price might reach the level of the price of an SUV.

In this context, Reiss brings up the question whether or not governments should get out of the business of going to space completely. Whitesides opinion to that is, that NASA and ESA should be the ones responsible for exploration and extending the reach of humankind with potential Mars missions.

"It is a strategic interest of humanity to be able to go to space. We are living on a little blue dot." - Eric Anderson

There is a parallel of the development of computer technology and space travel. With more private money, the possibilities will increase while the price will sink. Surely, it would be very interesting to find the equivalent of Moore's Law in space travel.

Virgin Galactic expects to fly up to 500 people to space in the first year, which would mean that they would have brought more people to space in one year than everybody else in the entire history of human space exploration.

Reiss shot a few timeline questions towards the panelists. It's feasible to go to Mars on a private mission in 10 till 15 years.