Inspired: maverick designer Burt Rutan solved the problem of re-entry in his sleep.
Credit: Credit: Virgin Galactic
The entrance to Virgin Galactic's London office could not be more adroitly placed. Opposite the world's first space tourism company's head office in Leicester Square, you will find the nation's principal cinemas where glittering premieres are held every month and celluloid fantasies unfold each night. Over Britain's summer holidays this year, billboards round the square were advertising War of the Worlds and Star Wars III. If you are selling the ultimate science fiction dream - trips into space - you could not pick a better spot.
And inside the building, signs of high-tech wonder continue. Buttons for the office's lift are set in a giant pyramid that stands in the middle of the ground-floor lobby like an alien sentinel. It is all chrome, steel and high-tech down here. Then you reach Virgin Galactic's office on the fifth floor and the dream goes a bit pear-shaped: there are a few young men working at keyboards, some wall partitions, a couple of Madonna posters, and that's it. You could be in a call centre in Bangalore.
"It's not much," admits Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, the man appointed by British entrepreneur Richard Branson to mastermind his dreams of stellar greatness. "We are going to have a lavish salesroom in Half Moon Street in the West End, but it won't be ready for months. We are a virtual company, in any case. That is how we have done our business so far over the Internet - but we've already taken US$18 million (AUD$23.8 million) in advance orders. And that's money up front, not promises."
For decades men and women have dreamed of slipping "the surly bonds of Earth", but have been thwarted by the expense of the technology involved and by the bureaucrats who control it. Then, a couple of years ago, events began to change. A host of entrepreneurs announced plans to put paying passengers on board a variety of contraptions that will fling them more than 100km above the planet's surface - the official boundary of where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins. There they can experience a brief taste of zero-gravity and the blackness of space before swooping back to Earth. Forget Disney's Space Mountain ride east of Paris. These guys are offering the real thing.
But what has brought about this change? Why is there a rush to space today? The answer, say the entrepreneurs, is simple: the Ansari X Prize. Several years ago the billionaire Peter Diamandis decided to offer US$10 million to the designer of the first privately built spacecraft to make suborbital flights. "I got the idea from reading Charles Lindbergh's story of how he flew across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927," says Diamandis. "Lindbergh made his epic flight to win a US$25,000 competition, and opened up the skies to international flight."
So Diamandis decided to do the same for space travel and, in doing so, galvanised the business. More than a score of different spacecraft designers entered the competition. These now form the core of the world's fledgling space tourism industry.
In the end, the X Prize was won, convincingly, by U.S. aircraft designer Burt Rutan, whose air-launched SpaceShipOne soared 102.9km above the Mojave desert on September 29, and then again on October 4, this time reaching an altitude of 112km. Both flights were completed within 14 days, as required under the rules, and Rutan snatched the prize.
Branson had worked with Rutan's privately-owned Scaled Composites company on a number of projects, most notably financing GlobalFlyer, an aircraft that Steve Fossett flew in a non-stop solo trip around the world between February and March 2005. He got wind of Rutan's space project early on, and enthusiastically bought the rights to develop it into a commercial passenger venture, creating the ambitiously-titled Virgin Galactic as the airline.
As I sat in one of the company's tiny offices in Leicester Square, Whitehorn - a dark-haired, compact Scot who bristles confidence and commitment - showed videos of the maiden flight of SpaceShipOne, followed by elaborate animations of its successor, SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's ticket to the stars. Or at least, to a quick and adrenalin-pumping, suborbital flight.
The only real difference between the two craft is one of scale. Rutan's prizewinning technology is being expanded to turn his original three-man spacecraft into one that can carry two pilots and seven passengers. Test flights are scheduled to begin in 2007 and then, the following year, Virgin Galactic's space-fleet should be ready to fly customers beyond the limits of the Earth's atmosphere.
