Fly Me to the Moon – Tech Europe – WSJ

By Ben Rooney

Only 24 people have been close to the moon, and the last of those was nearly 40 years ago. That may be about to change.

U.K.-based space-research company Excalibur Almaz hopes to make trips to the moon if not commonplace, then certainly more routine. It plans to use modernized Soviet-era space vehicles — of which it has six — to take people on missions around the moon.

But CEO Art Dula is keen to stress that this isn’t about space tourism — high-net-worth individuals seeking the ultimate holiday snaps. Some 520 people have taken manned flights into space, but those have all been orbiting the earth.

“The people are not tourists,” he said. “This is much more about private expedition members — conducting expeditions that will go further into space than anyone has before.”

Mr. Dula draws a parallel with the seafaring expeditions undertaken by European colonial powers in days gone by. “It’s exactly in the same vein as the historic exploration that was done by Europe and the British Isles over the last several centuries that resulted in so much growth,” he said at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London.

This isn’t for the faint-hearted. A mission ticket is going to set you back about $100 million to $150 million and you would have to undergo six months’ training.  According to research conducted by Excalibur Almaz, there is a demand for at least 29 such tickets over the next 10 years, a demand Mr. Dula described as very conservative.

“We are going to to do this, and let the market decide,” he said. “We think we can get there faster and cheaper than national systems.  It is never going to go back to just being national space programs.”

At the heart of Mr. Dula’s plans are the six Soviet-era space vehicles: four re-useable re-entry vehicles and two Salyut-class 29-ton space stations, each with a capacity of 95 cubic meters. The two spacecraft are equivalent to the Russian Mir core or the International Space Station Zarya module. The Soviet-era electronics have been completely gutted and replaced with modern avionics.

While the costs associated with space are pretty mind-boggling, Mr. Dula said that by using modernized, tried-and-tested equipment rather than developing technology from scratch, the project is saving around $2 billion in development costs. The Russian Proton rocket, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, will be used to launch one of the spacecraft into space, where it will remain. Astronauts will use the RRVs to get to and from the spacecraft.

Mr. Dula is adamant that the returns more than justify the huge costs.  ”Space is a resource frontier. The resources in space are thousands of times more vast than those on earth,” he said.  He cites one example, an asteroid called Apophis. It is believed that the asteroid has very substantial nickel ore deposits.

“Our spacecraft has the ability to get to this asteroid. That one asteroid has more nickel than has been used by the human race since the beginning of civilization,” he said. Nickel sells for about $19,000 a ton.

Mr. Dula makes for an unlikely space explorer. A lawyer by training, he is the literary executor of the Sci Fi author Robert Heinlein. An accident while visiting Russia left Mr. Dula in intensive care for several months. He used the time to listen to a series of lectures about Chinese history, and was inspired by the country’s bold projects, the so-called leaps forward.

He is joined by a former Cosmonaut (and “Hero of Russia”) Valery Tokarev who flew in both the U.S. space shuttle Discovery and the commander of the Soyuz. “I spent about 200 days in the International Space Station,” he said.

Excalibur Almaz is based on the Isle of Man, a self-governing dependency of the U.K. The island is establishing itself as a space-technology cluster. According to Mr. Dula, some 30 of the world’s 54 satellite companies have operations on the island.

 Fly Me to the Moon – Tech Europe – WSJ.

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