Rocket Race
When Superman returns to theaters next year, the superhero won't be saving only Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. The Man of Steel will also reportedly be lending a helping hand to British billionaire Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group travel, media, and communications conglomerate. In one sequence, apparently, archvillain Lex Luthor attempts to shoot down Branson in his space plane, only to be thwarted at the last moment by the big, blue boy scout.
On the face of it, Branson's corporate cameo sure looks like another savvy marketing move from a guy whose media mastery has helped make Virgin one of the world's hippest and most valuable brands. The product placement also helps position Virgin in the public's mind as the world's leading space tourism company. It already has the best technology. In September, Virgin signed a deal worth as much as $21 million over 15 years to license the technology behind SpaceShipOne, designed by aviation maverick Burt Rutan and financed to the tune of $20 million by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.
Five days later, SpaceShipOne, sporting a slick new "Virgin Galactic" paint job, won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by rocketing into suborbital space (62 miles above the Earth) for the second time and landing safely in the Mojave Desert. A milestone for private, manned spaceflight to be sure and, Branson hopes, a launching pad for an eventual multibillion-dollar tourism industry that will begin flying thousands of people into space within two to three years on Virgin Galactic.
Branson and Allen aren't the only megarich guys with their eyes on the skies. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, another billionaire, has plans to build a research-testing site and spaceport for suborbital vehicles on a recently purchased 165,000-acre ranch near the town of Van Horn, Texas. Bezos has said little publicly about the venture, dubbed Blue Origin, other than that over the next seven years he intends to construct a $30 million, three-person ship that will take off, go suborbital, and land vertically. (Think of a rocket ship in one of those campy 1950s sci-fi flicks.)
Go-getters. Together, these space entrepreneurs are spending tens of millions of dollars to build a new aerospace industry from the ground up. This is far more ambitious than the occasional space stunt--sending millionaires such as Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth into space on Russian Soyuz rockets for $20 million a pop. If these Captain Kirks of industry are successful, space tourism will come of age.For the price of a blowout vacation to Europe or Hawaii--between $10,000 and $20,000 a seat or so--the middle class will be able to afford space travel. "That will change everything," says Patrick Collins, an economics professor at Japan's Azabu University and consultant to that nation's space program.
The space pioneers are talking more than just a quick jaunt. There are plans to build private spacecraft sturdy enough and fast enough to allow passengers to orbit the Earth like space shuttle astronauts. Others see space travel not merely as a journey but also as a destination, where orbiting tourists could actually dock at orbiting space retreats. Who knows? That Hilton Hotel famously featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey might finally become a reality.
But these are big dreams and big plans, especially considering no spacecraft actually exists right now to make them a reality. The five-passenger Virgin SpaceShip--the first one will be called the VSS Enterprise--is still on the drawing board. And while plenty of people may say they're eager to get strapped in, no one really knows the true demand for space sightseeing, especially if there are any catastrophic accidents like the ones that have befallen 40 percent of NASA's space shuttle fleet. Right now, the numbers show only that millionaires are willing to spend big bucks. The airline industry has trouble turning a profit, and it possesses a terrific safety record and plenty of actual passenger demand.
No wonder it's tempting to dismiss the concept of space tourism as an expensive flight of fantasy. "It's hard to come up with a real business plan," says John Hansman, director of the International Center for Air Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The PR of space tourism has gotten way ahead of reality and oversold this whole thing, though it does capture the imagination."
Indeed, when you talk with some of these space cowboys, you quickly get a sense that they are on a religious mission to reach the stars, not merely creating a new profit stream. "Since I was young, I've had an interest in space," says Elon Musk, who cofounded PayPal, the online payment company, and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. "I just think this is where the future of humanity lies. If we are to understand the universe and our place in it, we must become a space-faring civilization."
You'll probably find similar sentiments on any Battlestar Galactica message board, but most of those space dreamers aren't able to spend $50 million to $100 million on a project as Musk is. His El Segundo, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies is currently testing rocket engines and has already contracted to launch satellites for the Defense Department later this year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. But his goal is to build a spacecraft capable of put-ting people, not just machines, into orbit. That's a far more daunting technological test than transporting people just across the boundary of space, as SpaceShipOne did, and then immediately back to Earth. "Given the chance, wouldn't you rather float around for a few days rather than a few minutes?" asks Musk.
Running a more low-key outfit (there are no paid employees) just outside of Dallas is video-game guru John Carmack, who created the software engine behind such top-selling first-person shooter classics as Doom and Quake. Carmack says he has spent under $2 million so far as he and a small volunteer team--"a bunch of guys, a girl, and an armadillo called Widget," as he puts it on his Armadillo Aerospace website--in developing a rocket engine fueled by hydrogen peroxide as the first step toward building a suborbital space vehicle.
Why is he doing it? In his heart, Carmack seems less a space geek than an engineering geek. "I am a problem-solving engineer," says Carmack. " And it's really exciting to go into a field with hard engineering problems that I knew nothing about and then develop my own solutions." Carmack hopes to compete in this financial arms race with Branson and others by building lots of low-cost prototypes and then tweaking them in real-world tests. He hopes that a budget-conscious approach--using off-the-shelf parts if possible--will result in a low-operating-cost vehicle. Carmack says he has no doubt there's money to be made in this embryonic trade, which is why his competitors are "throwing money--serious money--at it. And they expect to make that money back."
Serious stuff. Nonetheless, some critics question the commitment of some of the players. Take Branson. He "sometimes has difficulty separating what he thinks is good business and what he thinks is good press for Richard Branson," says futurist and marketing consultant Andrew Zolli, adding that Branson's efforts in areas such as sodas and bridal planning shops have turned out to be less than blockbuster hits. Where Branson and Virgin have struck gold is in established, commodity-type businesses, when they have figured out new ways of adding value, like putting DJ s into his Virgin Megastores.
But Virgin contends this is no vanity effort. "We believe we can create a viable business, and it's our goal to be a major player in a long-term industry," says Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic. "We would not be prepared to risk our brand if we thought otherwise." Whitehorn is also quick to point out that Virgin's involvement in space endeavors is not the result of having Branson, a lover of extreme aviation stunts like long-range ballooning, become enthralled with SpaceShipOne. "Richard has been a fervent believer since the mid-1990s," he says. "Because of what he knows about the aviation industry, he knew that someone would come up with a solution for the commercial access of space." In fact, the name "Virgin Galactic" was first registered for trademark protection in the mid-1990s.
Whitehorn envisions offering two-hour suborbital flights--complete with 10 "precious minutes" or so of weightlessness--in 2007 or 2008. He expects some 3,000 passengers a year paying about $190,000 a seat, which includes at least three days of preflight training. "This is for customers who want an adventure," he adds. "This is not for the faint-hearted, and passengers should expect some level of G-forces and minimal discomfort. There will be no in-flight masseuse as with Virgin Atlantic."
Already, some 20,000 people have signed up for a flight at the company's website, with some even sending checks for the full fare. (For now, Virgin is holding those checks and not cashing them.) So just how much dough can space rides generate? In 2002, consulting firm Futron surveyed 450 people with a household income of at least $250,000 a year or a net worth of at least $1 million. Of that group, 18 percent were willing to pay the Virgin Galactic's ticket price. Lower the price to $25,000, and 51 percent gave a thumbs up. Based on those numbers, Futron estimates that by 2021, 15,000 people could be headed into space every year, generating annual revenue in excess of $1 billion.
MIT's Hansman, however, has doubts about space travel's feasibility once the novelty wears off. At first, he says, people would be paying for exclusivity. "But once it gets more common, will they keep paying?" It's a good point. The Futron study found that for almost half of those interested in a Virgin Galactic-style suborbital trip, being a space pioneer was either the first- or second-most important reason for taking part. Hansman also wonders how resilient market demand will be in the face of the inevitable accidents. Again, the Futron study found interest tailed off when potential risks were highlighted.
And there is risk. Remember, two of the five shuttles have been lost. On a per mission basis, 1.8 percent ended in disaster. And even the rigors of ultimately victorious flights may prove disheartening for potential fliers. Midway through the first part of SpaceShipOne's initial X Prize flight, the craft began to corkscrew as it rose through the air. Anyone up for barrel rolls at Mach 3?
Just another ride. At some point, perhaps within two decades, flying into space may become more like taking the Concorde to Europe: pretty pricey, pretty cool, and relatively safe. Jay Penn, head of the Reusable Launch Office at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., estimates that at $15,000 a ticket, space tourism will become more of a mass-market experience and less an extreme adventure like climbing Everest. But there are downsides. "You might be able to attract new customers, but you will also alienate those who don't want grandma on the flight because they are pretending to be spacemen," says Zolli. But giving grandma and grandpa the opportunity to show they have the right stuff is exactly the point.
And those folks just might want to stay the night. Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America, hopes to create space station hotels, floating, inflatable modules that could also be used as orbiting laboratories. And to help get the customers to the lobbies, Bigelow is offering a $50 million prize to the first private team to build a craft that can ferry people to his space stations, which he plans to launch on commercial rockets by the end of the decade. This is no easy task, as an orbital space plane would have to climb four times as high and zoom six times as fast as SpaceShipOne.
Some might say that such plans are a real reach given the current state of the technology and marketplace. But Branson is cooking up an even more far-out plan. "Before he dies, Richard wants to take a private space mission to Mars," says Virgin's Whitehorn. Wonder if they'll need Megastores on the Red Planet.
This story appears in the April 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.