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It’s advertised like any other business park situated outside town, providing necessary infrastructure that meets all needs from research to accommodation. Except that it will be located a little further than that, about 500km above the surface of the Earth, in fact. Welcome to Orbital Reef, a space station that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin has announced it’s going to build in collaboration with a host of partners. Space is already seeing an unprecedented rate of activity with multiple civilian passengers — including Bezos himself — having made a trip to the inky black and back in recent months. Now, with a commercially operated space station, you can actually start planning a holiday to weightlessness. Here’s what you need to know.
Is It Going To Be Like The ISS?
The ISS is primarily a site for leading space-faring nations to conduct experiments in microgravity involving everything from physics to geology and biology. Recently though it was witness to an entirely different sort of “experiment” — that of a film shoot with a Russian movie crew using it as the sets of what is being described as the first feature film to be shot in space. The Orbital Reef has been planned as a “mixed use business park” that its makers say will “open multiple new markets in space”.
“Whether film-making in microgravity, opening a space hotel, or conducting cutting edge research,” its website says, Orbital Reef will allow customers to “lease locations” high up above the Earth as it looks to “open the next chapter of human space exploration and development by facilitating the growth of a vibrant ecosystem and business model for the future”.
The ISS was built through a collaboration of five different space agencies representing 15 countries in total. The ESA — representing the European partners — and Nasa (US), Jaxa (Japan), CSA (Canada) and Roscosmos (Russia) have worked on creating and maintaining the home in the sky for over a period of 20 years. Orbital Reef, on the other hand, will be a commercial enterprise with Blue Orbital and Sierra Space to partner Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University for its development.
The ISS thus is a global project that has since 2000 hosted more than 230 individuals from 18 countries, marking a unique endeavour to promote humanity’s tryst with space. Orbital Reef, too, has expressed an intention to be open to all, saying that it is welcome for “any nation, agency, culture, or customer to join”. But the Chinese will surely be sceptical about such claims given that US lawmakers have shut taikonauts from visiting the ISS, though China now is making its own space station that will reportedly be ready for scientific use by 2022 with Beijing said to have “promised to open the… station to the entire world instead of locking it up”.
How Big Will Orbital Reef Be? And How High?
Orbital Reef can accommodate 10 people at its “Baseline Configuration” in space that the makers say will be “almost as much as the ISS” and come with “big modules with big windows”. It will reportedly have an area of about 32,000 sq.ft to house separate science and habitation zones and provide “world-class technical accommodations, futuristic space architecture with services and amenities”.
Like the ISS — which zips through space at an altitude of more than 400km above our heads — Orbital Reef, too, will occupy a trajectory in low Earth orbit and “fly over most of humankind in a mid-inclination, 500-km orbit”. The ISS makes close to 16 rounds daily around the Earth, which will be the case with Orbital Reef as well with the private space station promising visitors” 32 vibrant sunrises and sunsets each day”, that is a sunrise or sunset about every 90 minutes. To achieve 16 revolutions around Earth, ISS has to travel at a speed of more than 28,000km per hour and is said to every day cover a distance that is equal to travelling from our planet to the moon and back.
Low Earth orbit (LEO) is, like the name suggests, an orbit that is close to Earth’s surface, relatively speaking, that is. It is normally seen as being an altitude that is less than 1,000km above Earth that, however, can be said to begin anywhere at as low as about 160km above its surface. A distance of 100km above Earth is where space is officially said to begin. For comparison, commercial jets mostly fly no higher than 14km above Earth’s surface.
How Is It Going To Be Built?
If you’re thinking that the Orbital Reef space station will be built on Earth and then flown to space, then you’re in for a surprise, because that is exactly the way how not to get a space station up above Earth. As the European Space Agency (ESA) notes about the ISS, “it would have been impossible to build the space station on Earth and then launch it into space in one go” since there is “no rocket big enough or powerful enough”. Which is why the ISS was built on Earth and assembled piece by piece in space.
While specific details about the proposed Orbital Reef, which is planned to begin operations in the second half of this decade, are yet to become available, the process of the creation of the ISS gives a good idea as to what it would take to build a space station. Pieces of the ISS, which altogether weighs almost 400 tonnes and is spread over an area as big as a football pitch, were assembled 400km above the Earth’s surface with mostly Russian and US rockets flying more than 40 missions for the purpose.
Described by Nasa as being the “largest, most complex international construction project”, the first piece of the ISS — the Russia-made Zarya Functional Cargo Block or control module — was sent up in November 1998. The building of the ISS is arguably a work in progress as an addition to it was dispatched by Russia as recently as July this year.
Orbital Reef says it will be based on “an open, scalable system architecture” where experienced customers “can
simply link up their own modules through standard interfaces”, which would suggest that multiple players can work on creating and expanding it, much like how the ISS was built. John Mulholland, programme manager for the ISS, said, “It (building Orbital Reef) calls for the same kind of expertise we used to first design and then build the
ISS and the same skills we employ every day to operate, maintain and sustain the ISS.”
And the cost? Orbital Reef has not come up with an estimate but if the budget for the ISS is any indication then it could take close to USD 150 billion to build and get the structure up in space. It, of course, helps that Bezos, one of the world’s richest individuals, has said he’ll be spending USD 1 billion annually on his space initiatives. Also, the collaborators on the project bring a wealth of experience in space projects, including work for Nasa, which is reportedly prepping to retire the ISS by 2028.
Having Orbital Reef ready by that time would, therefore, imply lucrative earnings for Bezos and company, although they are not the only ones looking to build a replacement for the ISS. One report cited Nasa as saying that as many as 53 companies have thrown their hats into Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Destination programme. Space, it would appear, is soon to become less of the final frontier and more of a launchpad to further reaches of the universe.
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