How one company is making space pay

Jim Benson has a plan for colonizing space.

To be sure, building self-sustaining settlements on other planets isn't the first item on the to-do list he sketched out five years ago, as the founder of one of the space industry's scrappiest publicly traded companies. In fact, SpaceDev's 60-year-old chairman and chief executive officer stands to be in his 70s or 80s by the time he gets to that part of his technology roadmap.

But he does have a plan — and so far, the plan is right on schedule, thanks to projects ranging from low-cost, high-performance microsatellites to the historic SpaceShipOne suborbital flights and even more ambitious orbital dreams.

Among the highlights so far for the Poway, Calif.-based company:

• SpaceDev started out targeting an asteroid for a landing mission called NEAP, but found more success in developing microsatellites for scientific missions such as ChipSat as well as for the Pentagon's missile defense program.
• The company helped develop the innovative hybrid rocket engine for SpaceShipOne, which runs on nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") and a rubber-based compound. Although it's not yet clear whether SpaceDev will play the same role for the follow-on SpaceShipTwo project, the company hopes to use a similar propulsion system for its own orbital rocket ship, dubbed Dream Chaser.
• SpaceDev is also developing a low-cost expendable launch vehicle called the Streaker, and is participating in studies for potential missions to the moon's south pole and the L-1 gravitational balance point between Earth and the moon.

For Benson, the highlights are showing up on the bottom line as well: "We've had 10 consecutive quarters of increasing revenue ... two quarters in a row now of bottom-line profits, we are virtually debt-free, we've got over $6 million cash in the bank, and we have over $40 million in contracts," he told MSNBC.com during an interview last week.

SpaceDev Jim Benson is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of SpaceDev.

A decade ago, Benson didn't expect to be the chairman and chief executive officer of a space company. In 1995, he sold two successful software companies and became a retired millionaire. But he quickly found retirement to be just plain boring. After doing some market research, he made his move into the rocket industry by founding SpaceDev in 1996.

The first years weren't easy: His overly glowing comments got him into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he has had to tone down his act since then. Nowadays, he's more reserved about discussing his future plans and prospects, although he keeps hinting that big projects are just around the corner.

"Month by month, keep an eye on us," he said.

Whatever lies ahead, Benson certainly doesn't sound bored, and he just might still be around in 2020 to finish up that to-do list. "This keeps me so energized, I can hardly wait to get up the next morning. ... I'm just having the time of my life," he said.

In a wide-ranging interview, Benson shared his plans for plug-and-play satellites, going to the moon, human spaceflight, filling stations for spaceships and more:

MSNBC: How do you make money in this new environment for space activities?

Jim Benson: We believe pretty strongly that if we want to go to space to stay, space has to pay. That's the bottom line. We've got to find ways of making space happen for all of humanity, other than through government programs, because they're subject to limited budgets and limited political attention span. The programs start and stop, and they change with every political whim.

So the bottom line is the bottom line. We've got to find profitable ways of developing and using space technology.

I was talking to a founder of a very visible space advocacy group a couple of days ago, and I sent him SpaceDev's space technology roadmap for the development of a private-sector space program. I have presented this thing during most speeches that I've given at a wide variety of conferences around the world, and I'm constantly surprised at how few people have actually seen the SpaceDev roadmap.

SpaceDev SpaceDev's space technology roadmap traces a time line stretching from microsats to human settlements in space. Click on the image for a larger version.

The important thing about it is that it shows a 20-year program to develop a private-sector space program, starting from nothing and ending up with self-sustaining human settlements out beyond 2015-2020. ... Surprisingly enough, we're on schedule. We just make minor tweaks to the technologies and fill in the boxes as we go.

When I first started SpaceDev, I thought I could just throw some money at it, do a mission and charge forward to my goals out there on the horizon. It turned out that it didn’t work out that way. I had to go back and rethink the whole direction of SpaceDev, and I came up with the idea that we need to build a foundation of space technology building blocks. It's that foundation growing level by level that's going to give us the solidity and the strength to keep moving ahead.

So way down in the lower left-hand corner, there are Internet-based microsats and hybrid propulsion modules leading into manned propulsion systems as we did for SpaceShipOne. Up above that is unmanned missions and robotic things: We're to the point now where we've gone from a simple little suitcase-sized ChipSat, which was the most advanced satellite of its kind in the country in 2003, to the present, where we're developing small satellites about twice the size that have three times the capability but at the same price.

These are also meant for low Earth orbit, but we just announced a contract with Andrews Space for a NASA mission called SmallTug: We will build a spacecraft bus, and we're heading out to the moon. It will use ion propulsion to spiral out away from Earth, and wind up in a little holding orbit at the lunar L-1 point. That point, and the other Lagrange points, have been described as steppingstones to other destinations. The concept is like "gravity tunnels" or subway tunnels, where you get to a node, then switch tracks and head in a different direction. From the lunar L-1 point, you can go into orbit around the moon, you can go to a lunar L-2 point, you can even head to Mars.

MSNBC: Or a near-Earth asteroid for a mining operation. ... This enlarges upon the idea of an "interplanetary superhighway."

Benson: Yes. And it's really Martin Lo — one of the originators of the idea, I think of him as a navigator — who developed this idea of the interplanetary superhighway, and we're going to hop onto it and ride out to one of the interchanges at L-1. As you look at our technology development roadmap, you'll see that all these things were already plotted out.

The boxes are very generic: unmanned planetary exploration, or unmanned landing on an asteroid, resource extraction, resource utilization, propellant transfer, water propulsion systems. So there are a lot of building blocks in there that all added together result in a human and robotic strategy for getting beyond Earth orbit and eventually arriving at self-sustaining human settlements.

We started off with a bang, and we've actually gotten quieter as we've accomplished more. That's to my chagrin, because I like the publicity.

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