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Also in this section:
What's happening in the space industry, and the role Panama might play
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's annual science seminar

Where the space industry is going, and the role that Panama might play in it
by Eric Jackson

Yes, the president of the United States is talking about a manned mission to Mars, on some future president's watch when he's not responsible for the budget. Yes, the International Space Station, a product of the end of the US-Soviet space race, is still in use. They have even had their first Brazilian astronaut aboard.

But the old paradigm about the Americans and the Russians in a competition for national pride and military dominance of the "high frontier" is now at best a side show in the space industry, which these days is primarily dedicated to the launching and maintenance of communications satellites, is increasingly privatized and is dominated by France. So might Panama have a role to play within this changing framework?

This was the subject of a talk by Dr. TA Heppenheimer, an aerospace engineer by training but better known as a leading historian of science and technology. The author of NASA's authorized two-volume history of the Space Shuttle (a third will likely be forthcoming) and "Turbulent Skies," a history of commercial aviation that became the basis for the PBS "Chasing the Sun" television series, Heppenheimer spoke to a small audience on April 5 at the Colegio de Abogados.

He began with a history of the space industry from the time that the US Space Shuttle went into service. The shuttle program, he opined, "is rapidly going downhill, and has been for some time now." Why is that? Because, he said, the shuttle's original premise was to create cheap space flight, but "we don't have low-cost space flight, we have high-cost space flight." That's because it takes a lot of people, many of whom command high professional salaries, to launch something into orbit.

In the early 1970s, Heppenheimer recalled, NASA estimated that it would be making 60 shuttle flights per year. That estimate kept going down and down, but by 1986 hopes were still being raised to get up to 24 flights per year by the early 1990s.

Then two important decisions were made. First, the US Air Force, which never really liked the shuttle, decided to launch its military satellites with its own Titan IV rockets. Second, President Ronald Reagan decreed that the shuttle would no longer carry commercial payloads. That left the space station and the shuttle in a "manned space flight ghetto" divorced from the world's increasing dependence upon automated devices for communications, navigation and observation.

Meanwhile, out of the failed 1960s British Blue Streak ballistic missile program came the Europa rocket, the beginning of a European space program led by the French. At first it was an uncoordinated affair, though it did come up with the German/French Symphony communications satellites.

The taxpayer-funded NASA program, however, became subject to economic strictures imposed for more narrow private interests. In particular, NASA refused to launch communications satellites that might compete with those promoted by AT&T.

The French in particular, and the Europeans in general, were unwilling to cede the entire field of commercial satellites to a government-backed US corporation, and so embarked on the creation of the Arienne rocket and the construction of a space center at Kourou in French Guiana, just more than five degrees north of the Equator.

(On the Equator the Earth moves faster, as its circumference is bigger and thus a given point along it covers more distance while spinning at the same one revolution per day that does a point at another latitude. This creates a "sling" effect that boosts the velocity of a spacecraft that is launched from at or near the Equator, which in turn means that it can get into orbit, or to a higher orbit, using less fuel than if it were shot from another latitude. It's one of the reasons why, for example, NASA launches from Cape Canaveral rather than Cape Cod.)

The first Arienne was launched in 1979 and meanwhile NASA had stopped buying rockets for unmanned space flights. In 1986 when the Challenger blew up shortly after launch, NASA only had some half-dozen rockets to launch satellites during the two-year moratorium on shuttle flights. At that point, Heppenheimer explained,  the French "promptly grabbed more than half of the satellite launch business."

There are only a few satellite launch facilities in the world, Heppenheimer noted, including those in the United States and the former Soviet Union, the French facility at Kourou, a Chinese launch facility and a more modest Japanese one. Also this past year, a private consortium led by Boeing began to launch satellites from the Equator in international waters west of the Galapagos. But cheap space flight is still neither a reality nor in sight, so the for-profit space industry is limited to high-value payloads, most notably telecommunications satellites, and although that's a growing business there are only so many launches to go around. Thus Heppenheimer does not expect a great proliferation of launch sites around the world, but rather a fierce competition among a few sites for "only a certain number of payloads." Will the private sea launch project survive the competition? Heppenheimer takes a wait-and-see attitude, but doesn't see it as a big threat to the French industry lead at this point. "Maybe they're going to get some launches," he said of Boeing et al.

At this point, Heppenheimer said, it costs about $200 million to buy and launch a communications satellite, and close to the same amount to build a facility to launch it. Finding enough work to make it profitable to keep intact the team needed to run a launch facility is a bigger problem than actually building the thing.

And Panama? After receiving the canal and the former Canal Zone, the country impresses Heppenheimer, who graduated from Cristobal High, as a place eager to build things like the Centennial Bridge that make the statement "we have this land and we're going to build on it." Moreover, this country's long association with the Americans would help in any venture into the space industry.

Heppenheimer notes that our intention to be a major international banking and finance center creates an opportunity in space. Either by itself or more likely in alliance with neighboring countries, Panama could have a satellite in large part dedicated to the handling of the huge amounts of electronic data in which a globalized financial services sector deals. That would save on the cost of capacity on other people's satellites to move these data streams, and create possibilities for profitably renting out the space that Panama doesn't use to other customers.

Also in this section:
What's happening in the space industry, and the role Panama might play
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's annual science seminar