A whole new race into space
Willing to pony up a cool $100,000 for a thrill ride just a few minutes long? Tech-happy entrepreneurs are betting on plenty of yes answers from deep-pocket daredevils--if it's by private rocket to the edge of space and back. The highlight, after a boost to several thousand miles per hour nearly straight up, would be three or four minutes of zero gravity and the view of a sunlit Earth's horizon curving awesomely along an ebony, star-flecked sky. You might even be able to keep your spacesuit as a souvenir.
The panoply of vehicles that would-be space-hop guides are proposing ranges from modified business jets with rockets in their sterns to multiple-stage vertical launchers. Some would be ferried part of the way up, by balloon or mother plane. Development ranges from wishful engineering diagrams to at least one fully fabricated spaceship making test flights over the Southern California desert.
"It could be a billion-dollar business," says Mitchell Burnside Clapp of Pioneer Rocketplane. "Thousands of rich people might drop 100K on this." Clapp wants to modify a Learjet with rocket power and start passenger service from Oklahoma in 2006. If business is good, some of these space entrepreneurs believe, they could cut the tab to as low as $20,000.
One major obstacle is psychological: No rocket is perfect, and some blow up. But the hope is that unlike a national disaster like Challenger or Columbia, an occasional, deadly loss of a private rocket and its rocketeers will come to be seen as just another casualty of risk-taking vacationers--much like a surfing or mountain-climbing accident. In other words, danger may not kill the business. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed legislation sponsored by Southern California House Republican Dana Rohrabacher to streamline the permit process for such launches and make it harder for passengers or their survivors to sue if things go bad. The bill is now in the Senate. "I want to help people follow their vision to space," Rohrabacher says, "to take a chance . . . and make a profit up there."
If things really go well, some companies plan to build far more ambitious vehicles able to take high rollers to orbit and back for multimillion-dollar fees. "When you are not in training, you could be sitting around the pool sipping a mai tai," imagines Brian Feeney, director of the Toronto-based da Vinci Project. He foresees tourist-oriented spaceports located around the world, many of them near tropical resorts where customers could spend a week or so getting ready for their big ride.
Prototypes. Feeney's team has built a 16-foot test rocket and is putting together a second, reusable vehicle it intends to loft to 80,000 feet under a helium balloon before firing the rockets. It will have room for a pilot and two passengers and will fly to about 62 miles (100 kilometers). This is less than a third as high as the international space station, but it's essentially out of the atmosphere.
Feeney's company is just one of 26 entrants in a contest started eight years ago in St. Louis to foster space tourism. Originally called the X Prize (it was recently renamed the Ansari X Prize to acknowledge a large donation), it offers $10 million to private operators of the first piloted, reusable vehicle to reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks with room for three people. The rush is on, however. The prize money expires at the end of the year. At least a dozen teams are considered credible contenders, most of them from the United States.
Flash Gordon. All agree the favorite is from aerospace innovator Burt Rutan, best known for the Voyager plane that in 1986 became the first plane to circle the globe on a single tank of gas. The craft he hopes to launch into space, SpaceShipOne, is a featherweight craft evocative of the Flash Gordon spaceships of 1930s movie serials. Rutan built the rocket at his Scaled Composites facility in the Mojave Desert. Already in tests, it rides to around 50,000 feet under the belly of a twin-turbojet airplane. After the rocket drops free, the pilot ignites the single engine and heads upward. On its most recent flight, on May 13, it exceeded twice the speed of sound and soared to 211,400 feet--two thirds of what's needed for the X Prize--before gliding back down. Many expect Rutan to try to win in a few months.
The private space rush is not limited to the X Prize list, but it is a small world. Just a few hundred yards from Rutan's operation is a faded blue World War II-era hangar, the home of XCOR. This company's tiny one-man rocket ship is a 27-year-old home-built aircraft designed by Rutan, but with its propeller engine gone and two 400-pound thrust rockets in its tail. It can get up to only about 9,000 feet before it runs out of fuel, but it helps impress investors. XCOR's test pilot is Dick Rutan, Burt's brother. XCOR President Jeff Greason, a former Intel executive, once invested in a company called Pioneer Rocketplane that now vies for the X Prize and then worked for a now defunct start-up company called Rotary Rocket before trying his own hand. Most of his workers, and many throughout the budding private rocketeering biz, have similar long, nomadic devotion to unconventional space travel.
XCOR is not in the X Prize running because its first true, planned spaceship--called Xerus, designed to take off from a runway--will carry only two people. Launch is a year or two off. While such teams say they can get to space far more cheaply than NASA or established aerospace companies, most are scratching to raise the several million dollars it takes just to get off the ground. But the quest has attracted a few men with deep enough pockets to get started.
In Seattle, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is pouring money into a venture called Blue Origin, a spaceship-building company. John Carmack, the programming wizard be-hind such wildly popular shoot 'em-up video games as Doom and Quake, is testing an X Prize entry at his Armadillo Aerospace company in Texas. Elon Musk, wealthy from E-commerce ventures, now heads SpaceX in Los Angeles. It has a line of rockets that may drastically cut costs of commercial satellite launches and could help make space tourism more affordable. Representing an older generation of high-tech tycoons is Paul Allen, billionaire cofounder of Microsoft Corp. and Burt Rutan's prime investor.
Some say such spaceflight privateers need a reality check. In the past few decades, dozens of small, private companies have tried to join the space race on the cheap, but the business remains locked up by giant government-subsidized companies like Boeing and government-backed firms in Japan and Russia. "I wish them well. I really do," says Charles Gunn, a space consultant and retired NASA engineer who oversaw development of Boeing's rocket launchers. "This is a tough business to get into. It is high risk." By his calculation, the success rate of existing space launchers in their first five years of operation is about 83 percent; few would ride an airliner with odds like that. Suborbital flight is much easier than going all the way to orbit, and re-entry is far less challenging, but "they are still going uphill, where 97 percent of them fail because that is when you are sitting on a big powder keg of explosive. If you kill a couple of people, your business is going to dry up awful fast." But maybe, say these new barnstormers of space, the danger itself will be, for many, irresistible.
Rocket men
The Ansari X Prize challenges private teams of rocket engineers to launch three individuals to an altitude of at least 62 miles twice within two weeks to win a $10 million prize.
[Drawing labels]
Space shuttle and ISS orbits 200+ miles
First American in space: Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 116.5 miles
X-PRIZE MINIMUM ALTITUDE 62 miles
Commercial aircraft 7.8 miles (41,000 feet)
Source: X Prize Foundation
Stephen Rountree--USN&WR
This story appears in the June 7, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.