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.
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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.
