Technologies of the Future: The High Frontier

The High Frontier (2005)
Reporter: Ticky Fullerton
Broadcast: 02/05/2005 - ABC Australia
Length: 39:34



Outer space is open for business. It’s a booming $50 billion a year industry – and growing so fast that not even the sky is the limit.

Few of us give a thought to the myriad satellites bobbing around thousands of kilometres above our heads. But they are an integral part of our daily lives, governing bank transactions, what we watch on TV, the Internet, weather forecasts, international phone calls and stock market trades.

We can’t see them, but they can see us - very clearly. They have the potential to reach deep into our private lives. Just how deeply is a secret – but some experts believe modern satellites can zoom in close enough to read the headlines of the newspaper you’re reading.

Governments and defence forces use satellites to spy on their enemies and on their friends, to communicate in secret, or to lock their missiles on to targets.

It’s a business that reaps millions for companies that build the satellites and for space brokers like Mary-Ann Elliott, a former beauty queen who now buys and sells satellite air-time. She knows US government secrets and keeps them, but she unashamedly spruiks her company: "Over the last five years we’ve grown 1061 per cent."

This is the here and now. In a few years entrepreneurs like Jim Benson plan to send robots into space to gouge metals out of asteroids and transport the ore back to Earth. "Well, I’ve been called a space buccaneer. I haven’t been called a space cowboy - but I kind of like the image," he tells Four Cormers.

Sir Richard Branson wants to send his ubiquitous Virgin brand into space. In three years, he says, five Virgin spaceships will be shuttling tourists into space. At $200,000-plus a ticket, there will be no hitchhikers. "Each passenger will experience weightlessness in space; each passenger will come back as a fully qualified astronaut," he promises.

So what rules govern what entrepreneurs and military powers are allowed to do in space? Four Corners discovers that the legal situation is almost as much a void as space itself.

To "space buccaneers" like Jim Benson, that’s fine. Regulation, he says, is "a communistic approach" that will dampen exploration and development. One opportunistic real estate operator is selling the moon for $59 an acre; there is no law to stop this - and none to support gullible buyers either.

The treaties that do cover space – such as the UN Moon Agreement and the Outer Space Treaty - seek to share its resources among all mankind and to ensure that space is used for peaceful purposes only. But the major space powers either refuse to ratify these agreements or, it seems, are prepared to ignore them.

In a post 9/11 world, national security concerns are overriding. The US, China and Russia are believed to be working on powerful weaponry that can destroy enemies’ satellites, devastating their national economies. There are concerns that the nuclear energy now used to propel spacecraft to Mars may be a precursor to nuclear weapons in space.

How much need we fear our space adventure? As space becomes increasingly commercialised and militarised, are we allowing the dangers to outweigh the potential benefits? And what of Australia’s role ... will it come under pressure to get involved in the Bush Administration’s ambitious space program?