Let's Go To Space!
Ne Hundred Years After The Wright Brothers' Famous Flight, A New Breed Of Entrepreneur Is Pushing New Technologies To Their Limits, Turning Science Fiction Into Reality
NEWSWEEK
http://www.newsweek.com/id/61708/page/3
Oct 6, 2003 Issue

It was a perfect morning in the Mojave desert last week and almost a calamitous one. At dawn, a white twin-tailed airplane made of graphite composite emerged from the secrecy of an enclosed airport hangar and taxied to the runway. As a dozen onlookers and airport firemen watched, the exotic plane took off to the north over a wind turbine farm, and climbed in slow, lazy arcs to 45,000 feet, where it proceeded to chalk a white contrail in the eastern sky.

The airplane was White Knight, and strapped to its belly, a smaller vessel called SpaceShipOne--the craft that esteemed airplane designer Burt Rutan hopes will be the first privately built manned spaceship in human history. But as SpaceShipOne detached from White Knight for an unpowered glide test, the radio chatter at Mojave Airport was suddenly tinged with alarm. "Cut back on your trim, Mike, you're way out of it!" a voice urged Mike Melville, the ship's test pilot, over the com. SpaceShipOne, weighed down with lead ballast in its aft section to test the plane's handling, was plummeting out of control, rolling over twice and falling 11,000 feet before Melville could wrestle the ship out of its dive. The rest of the trial maneuvers were canceled, and both craft came in for landings just as the desert sun was heating up.

"Sure, there was a moment of worry," Rutan said later that afternoon. "The craft didn't behave as we expected it to." But Rutan, the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer, such as the use of lightweight composite materials in aircraft, also said, "You expect anomalies when testing out radical designs." And the design--and purpose--of his ship are unmistakably radical. When fully operational, SpaceShipOne will sport a single rocket burning a hybrid fuel of nitrous oxide and HTPB (basically, rubber). Upon separating from White Knight, SpaceShipOne will be thrust to an altitude of 62 miles, the very edge of space, carrying a pilot and two passengers. Rutan, 60, is an energetic visionary, with old-fashioned sideburns and a slightly hunched-forward gait, as if he's trying to get to his next appointment faster than his legs will allow. Among his many accomplishments is Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling. So it's worth listening when Rutan says that the design flaw exposed in the test can be fixed, and his private manned space program is on track--possibly for an inaugural flight on Dec. 17, the 100th anniversary of the birth of aviation.

It's probably too early to line up for tickets to space, but it couldn't hurt to start dreaming about it again. Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, is leading a movement to create a new adventure-tourism industry that would take paying customers higher than Mount Everest and make a bungee-cord leap seem as pedestrian as a sled ride. The idea of space tourism isn't new, but for the first time, credible businessmen like Rutan, videogame maven John Carmack and millionaire finance-analyst Dennis Tito are involved in efforts that have produced real hardware. These new adventure-travel entrepreneurs have the same risk-loving, fighter-jock mentality as yesterday's "Right Stuff" astronauts. Some are trying to win the X Prize, a $10 million dollar award offered by a St. Louis space-advocacy organization for the first team that sends a ship to the edge of space twice in two weeks. But they also seek to overhaul the economics of space travel, reducing the price and opening the door to regular folks who have dreamed of the final frontier since the exhilarating days of the Mercury and Apollo projects. "This is part of what human nature is all about, the desire to explore," says Tito.

Tito sparked the age of space tourism with his $20 million trip to the International Space Station in 2001 on a Russian-built Soyuz rocket. South African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth followed last year, paying another cool $20 million. They both describe the "unspeakable beauty" of the flight, seeing the gently sloping curvature of the Earth. Going to space "really does something to you," Shuttleworth says. But humans of more modest means can't afford to experience the transformative flight, and the Russians are unlikely to slash prices any time soon.

That leaves the development of affordable space tourism to Rutan and the new mavericks who are probing the boundaries of technology and safety. These privately built spaceships are designed to climb to what is known as suborbital space. Passengers will experience several minutes of weightlessness--though they'll probably be strapped to their seats--and will get to watch out windows as the sky turns black, the stars come out and the very idea of national borders suddenly becomes ephemeral. Because the ships are not leaving the planet's upper atmosphere, where they would go into orbit, they won't need the complicated heat protection required to return to Earth--a tricky and dangerous maneuver, even in NASA's hands. Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut, took this same suborbital trip in 1961 aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket.

The two dozen teams around the world vying for the X Prize are all pursuing variations on the technology that propelled Shepard. One firm plans to launch its rocket from a helium balloon. Another has designed something akin to a flying saucer. The only team from Russia will load its craft atop a high-altitude airplane. And Doom creator John Carmack's New Mexico-based team, Armadillo Aerospace, has built a capsule that takes off on a rocket, then floats down under a parachute with a crushable nose cone to soften the landing. The first journeys are likely to be fraught with danger, which is OK with X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. "We're talking about opening a frontier. With that, there are inherent risks."


So if some of these X Prize efforts become space-tourism businesses, who exactly would pay for the privilege of taking such a harrowing voyage? Try space enthusiasts like Richard Kummerow, a 46-year-old investment manager from Wisconsin who's been excited about space travel since he was a kid. Earlier this year, Kummerow and a friend took a two-and-a-half week trip to Russia, organized by Virginia-based Space Adventures, the same firm that brokered the Tito and Shuttleworth flights to the ISS. The pals were taken on gut-churning, acrobatic MiG flights, subjected to sickening rides on the centrifuge at Star City, outside Moscow, and treated to a stomach-tossing trip on an Ilyushin 76, an airplane that dives through the air for 30 seconds to simulate zero-gravity conditions. Total price tag for the two-week trip:
$70,000--and they loved every minute of it. As for the possibility of a real, and more expensive, space shot, Kummerow says, "Sign me up, I can't wait until they start flying." Space Adventures says the waiting list is already long. A hundred customers have put $98,000 each in escrow to join a waiting list for a suborbital trip.


Even NASA seems enthusiastic about private industry's taking on the technological problems it solved in the early '60s. "It would be wonderful, if there are business cases to be made, and if low prices and reliability can be ensured," says NASA space --architect Gary Martin. Those are big ifs. It's hard to predict the exact cost of operating a reusable space vehicle until it has undergone several flights, as the massive cost overruns of NASA's space-shuttle program aptly illustrate.


Rutan says his goal is to erase that uncertainty by flying a number of times, finding out exactly how much it costs, and proving it's a low number. "If you have that information, you can credibly run a tourism business," he says. As for safety, Rutan notes that none of the 38 planes he has designed in his career have crashed during testing. But, he says, the early days of the commercial space industry could look like the birth of aviation, where a new industry slowly matured atop the sacrifices of dozens of pilots (page 58).




A bigger question is whether the U.S. government will let those accidents happen today. Jurisdiction over the new industry falls within the FAA. But the emergence of manned, reusable spacecraft has divided the agency: are these new ships more like airplanes, which fall under the aegis of the FAA's aviation team and are subject to a review process that takes years and millions of dollars to complete? Or are they more like rockets, which could be monitored by an office within the FAA called the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, also known as AST? It's traditionally tasked with regulating commercial satellite launches and making sure that people on the ground are safe.


The space jockeys see years of delay if the aviation guys win out, and argued their case in congressional hearings this past summer. (Tito has hired a D.C. lobbyist to press the case for AST to regulate the industry.) Last week AST chief Patricia Grace Smith told NEWSWEEK that her office has submitted a definition of the new vehicles to the FAA administrator: they are spacecraft if they have more thrust (rocket --power) than lift (airplane power) for a majority of the powered stage of their journey. The space mavericks are happy with that classification, and are trying to add it to an AST reauthorization bill on Capitol Hill.


If that definition becomes law, it will come as a particular relief to fledgling space companies like XCOR Aerospace, whose funding depends on presenting an unhindered business environment to investors. The engineers at the small, 12-person Mojave, Calif., firm, down the street from Scaled Composites, have designed the Xerus, a winged space plane intended to carry a passenger and pilot to suborbital space at Mach 4, powered by at least four kerosene rockets. The ship looks sleek in the drawings, the engineers have plenty of experience building spacecraft--but the company is totally broke. They work from an un-air-conditioned former Marine hangar and pay for their efforts out of their own pockets. CEO Jeff Greason says he's waiting to see if the government will even let him have a business, before he can conclude talks with interested investors like Dennis Tito. "There's money waiting for me if we can just resolve the regulatory issues," he says.

Burt Rutan, meanwhile, isn't waiting for anything. Everything he has done so far with his space program appears to comply with no one's rules but his own. He applied to the AST for a launch license. But he insists he doesn't really need one, and worries that the moment his employees need to defend their spaceship to the FAA, they will be in the wrong frame of mind to keep examining and improving it. He's put a human pilot at the controls of the ship, something no governmental space agency will do in an age of ubiquitous computer operations. (A computer, Rutan notes, would have surely crashed SpaceShipOne during the anomalous flight test, whereas pilot Mike Melville was able to save it with chutzpah and experience.) And he's taking the quickest, most aggressive approach to flight testing his creation, throwing caution to the wind even if that means accepting a high degree of risk.


One reason Rutan is able to do what companies like XCOR cannot is his unusually deep pockets: a $30 million grant from a mystery millionaire that his company calls "the customer." NEWSWEEK reported last spring that the customer was rumored to be Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the third-wealthiest man in America. Allen and Rutan still have no comment, but several Scaled employees note that the firm is making not just a spaceship, but also a movie--a documentary film crew has been capturing every major step of the project for more than a year. The production company making the film, NEWSWEEK has learned, does work for a small Seattle outfit called Vulcan Productions--Allen's documentary film company.


The goal of the space program and the movie, Rutan says, is the same: to "get kids dreaming about space again." It already seems to be working. At Rutan's 60th birthday party in June, while friends arrived at Mojave Airport from all over the country in Rutan's innovative airplanes, a young boy approached the brilliant designer with a roll of dimes. He wanted the dimes to go up in SpaceShipOne, so he could distribute them to his friends. Rutan took the roll, and is determined to get it into space--even if he has to overcome a few more close calls to get there.




© 2003