Q&A: Could Space Travel Ever be as Cheap as Air Travel?
It certainly could be, since they use different methods of propulsion.
Airplanes are powered by burning refined crude oil, which we pump out of the ground. There’s a finite supply of it, and it takes a lot of labour and constantly maintained infrastructure to get out of the ground, transport, refine, and transport again.
I’ve worked on completion projects like this one pictured above. There can be 100 or more trucks with incredibly powerful mounted equipment, working 24 hours a day for a week to a month or more, to get a single large well flowing for a few years — then there’s still wellsite maintenance, the infrastructure to pipe or truck the crude & waste-water to a refining plant, the energy-intensive process of separating out the various hydrocarbons, and shipping them to different customers who then store it, do their own processing on it, and ship it to their customers.
I’ve worked on completion projects like this. There can be 100 or more trucks with incredibly powerful mounted equipment, working 24 hours a day for a week to a month or more, to get a single large well flowing for a few years — then there’s still wellsite maintenance, the infrastructure to pipe or truck the crude & waste-water to a refining plant, the energy-intensive process of separating out the various hydrocarbons, and shipping them to different customers who then store it, do their own processing on it, and ship it to their customers.
As for spacecraft, there are several methods of fuel used, but one of the major methods is LOX/LH2 — liquid oxygen & liquid hydrogen. These are the ingredients to water, but water is a much lower energy state than oxygen and hydrogen molecules separately, so if you put them together, and add some heat (such as from a flame), it oxidizes (burns), chemically combining the oxygen and hydrogen molecules into H20 — water, and releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process.
We can reverse this process by simply adding energy back into water. If you conduct electricity through water, the water molecules will break apart into free oxygen, and hydrogen gas, which you can then separate out, collect, and store in different tanks to combust again whenever you want to make your rocket go again.
So, while today it is (typically) cheaper to use the oil reserves which were created by hundreds of millions of years of solar energy and stored underground for eons waiting for us, if we had a cheap, powerful form of electricity generation, would could certainly create carbon-free, completely “clean” fuel such as LOX/LH2 to make space flight as cheap as the electricity generation cost allows us to make it.
There is also ongoing research into the concept of making a “space elevator”, which is a long tether, attached to the Earth at one end, with the other end at a ridiculous distance out in the sky, about 36,000 km up. Although this tether could be longer, to help “fling” probes and spacecraft to more distant parts of our solar system faster, and for less fuel.
A space elevator too, would be powered via electricity, so the cost of space-flight would be as cheap as the cost of electricity generation would allow it to be.
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Originally published at news4starstuffs.com on October 10, 2018.
