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.
TO DATE, ONLY two people can claim to have bought themselves a space flight - Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth - and both men paid hefty prices. Not only did it cost them US$20 million apiece (AUD$26.5 million), they had to take six months off to train for their journeys. Virgin Galactic says it has taken great care to avoid such problems.
"We will be dealing with wealthy people with busy lives," states Whitehorn. "So we will require people to commit only a week to train and take a flight with us. Nor will it be gruelling. About 80 per cent of the population should be fit enough to fly. Only those with heart conditions or serious circulatory problems will be turned down. Richard [Branson] is going on the first flight and plans to take his father, Ted, who is now in his 80s. On the other hand, we will probably set a minimum age limit of 16."
But what will prospective passengers who have signed up for flights - among them actors Morgan Freeman, Sigourney Weaver and William Shatner - get for their money? Will it truly be an out-of-this-world experience? Virgin Galactic says yes, not surprisingly, though it also promises the experience will be informal and unfussy. Customers will meet in Mojave, in California, where first flights are likely be launched, and will then be given "a couple of days" casual training and some flight-simulator sessions. Then, solid foods will be taken off their menus to reduce their chances of being space sick.
On the day of the flight, there will be no bulky spacesuits either. Jumpsuits will be worn. Then it will be time for take-off. Strapped to the belly of its mothership, a conventionally powered but especially designed jet, the spaceplane will be carried aloft from a runway take-off. After climbing to an altitude of 16,760 metres, passengers will experience a stomach-churning lurch as the spaceplane is released; its rocket engine will ignite; and the little craft will hurtle towards the edge of the atmosphere.
Within a few seconds, passengers will be flying faster than the supersonic Concorde, pressed back in their seats as acceleration continues for another 90 seconds. Then the engine will cut out and the craft will start to coast in weightless silence. One hundred and twelve kilometres below, the Earth will curve against a jet-black background. The Mojave desert will be a tiny patch of yellowish brown. Welcome to space.
Free to float around the cabin, Virgin's customers have six or seven minutes to enjoy the experience and indulge in an ecstasy of videoing and camera-clicking. Then their ship will start to arc back to Earth like a ballistic missile, its stubby wings turning upwards to turn the craft into a giant shuttlecock, allowing SpaceShipTwo to 'flutter' back to Earth rather than slam into the atmosphere as the space shuttle does. At the 16,760-metre mark, its wings return to their original configuration, and the craft glides to an airport landing.
It is a breath-taking prospect, though Virgin is certainly not the only team to be galvanised by the X Prize. Several other outfits - mostly American but also Canadian and British - have announced plans to launch tourists on suborbital flights. In addition, a variety of different locations for spaceports have been proposed: with Australia a key favourite. "It will be our second location: plenty of open space and proximity to the Asian market," says Whitehorn.
These ventures are being closely watched by entrepreneurial outfits such as Space Adventures, a Virginia-based U.S. company led by the hawk-like chief executive Eric Anderson. "We are the only people who have actually managed to get paying customers into space," Anderson points out. "It was Space Adventures who got Tito and Shuttleworth on the space station, after all. We know what is involved."
Space Adventures plans to continue to launch one or two paying customers a year on Soyuz for the next decade, each at US$20 million a shot. "That is not space tourism," admits Anderson. "That is just something for billionaires to enjoy. No, we are watching the suborbital market very carefully to spot early winners. Then we will try to do deals with them and add suborbital flights to our portfolio."
Both Virgin Galactic and PlanetSpace look strong candidates for ultimate success, Anderson believes. "The other interesting group is the one set up by Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He is keeping very quiet about it, but Bezos has hundreds of millions of dollars to invest."
Bezos, Amazon's founder, is worth an estimated US$5 billion and has bought a vast ranch in Van Horn, Texas, where he intends to test spacecraft for his Blue Origin company. Details of his spaceship's design remain secret, however. "In the end, it won't just be money that will have the crucial impact," adds Anderson. "Nor will it be the outfit that has the first system or the cheapest flights. It will be the one that is the safest."
One common factor does unite all these different groups, however: they are all backed by computer-industry or dot.com billionaires. For example, Elon Musk - who sold the PayPal Internet payments company to eBay for US$1.5 billion - has set up SpaceX, his own Los Angeles rocket company. "You had to have some kind of pre-boom to supply the capital to get the rocket boom going, and that only happened with personal computers and the Internet," he says. Similarly, John Cormack, who made his fortune writing computer games, including Doom, is developing Black Armadillo, a conventional rocket he hopes to use for manned flights. Rutan's own effort was backed by Microsoft's lesser-known co-founder, Paul Allen.
This is clearly going to be a game for the well-heeled - and it is likely to stay that way. Astronauts were said to have 'the right stuff' - special physical and mental abilities that qualified them to go into space. Now 'the right stuff' is cash: Virgin Galactic is charging US$200,000 for a single seat on one of its first flights. That's about US$28,600 for every minute of weightlessness and peering out of the porthole (each passenger is promised their own).
Not that this has proved a drawback for Virgin: thousands have already signed up and more than 90 people have actually coughed up the entire cost of their flight, providing Virgin Galactic with a healthy US$18m kitty with which to fund initial development and construction of its fleet of five spaceplanes and two carrier motherships.
"By the time they are all flying, economies of scale will bring prices down to about US$100,000 a flight - by 2013 or 2014," says Whitehorn. "And that is the magic pricetag. Our research suggests that is what well-off individuals - not just billionaires - will be prepared to pay for a truly special experience. It costs about US$100,000 to climb Mount Everest, for example - right to the top, not just to a base-camp. There, you have a 4 to 6 per cent chance of getting killed, however. We expect to be 100 times safer."
Other space entreprenuers agree. "We are starting at US$250,000 a ticket," says Chirinjeev Kathuria, chief executive of PlanetSpace. "That will decrease - probably to about US$100,000 - but I don't see much movement after that."
The reason for this stability is simple: the urge to undercut rivals will have to be balanced by the need to generate cash to maintain technological momentum and create new experiences. Once suborbital flights become routine, the race will be on to take passengers even further. Both PlanetSpace and Virgin Galactic are already thinking about plans for craft that will take passengers into orbit, for example. A few hours circling our blue planet would surely transcend the experience of a suborbital flight and a few minutes of weightlessness. "That is one of the reasons SpaceShipTwo is going to be quite a bit bigger than SpaceShipOne," says Whitehorn. "We will use a version to get into orbit in later years, though with more fuel and fewer passengers."
Some entrepreneurs are even planning hotels in space, although some radical thinking may be needed. It costs several hundred million dollars to launch a single space-station unit, after all. A space hotel manufactured this way would be prohibitively expensive.
However, entrepreneurs, including Robert Bigelow, believe there are solutions. His company, Bigelow Aerospace, based in Las Vegas, is planning to build a space hotel using inflatable units, a technology developed, but later abandoned, by the U.S. space agency NASA. Instead of launching huge chunks of metal, a small spaceship would carry one concertina-like unit that would be inflated in orbit. Tourists can then spend days viewing the Earth and indulging in the joys of zero-gravity life.
And just as Peter Diamandis's X Prize led to the birth of space tourism, so Bigelow hopes to consolidate success for his scheme through his America's Space Prize, a US$50 million award to be given to the developer of the first private spaceship that can take five people into orbit.
This is all very futuristic and exciting. Yet space tourism has been a long time coming. "Isn't it strange that after more than four decades, human spaceflight is still regarded as something very special?" asks Michel van Pelt in his book Space Tourism. To date, only some 440 men and women have tasted zero gravity and looked down upon their home world. In fact, today there are more billionaires than astronauts. "In contrast, tickets were sold for fun rides in aeroplanes almost immediately after the Wright brothers got the world's first motorised airplane off the ground," says van Pelt.
So what's caused the delay? Why aren't we all taking flights into space today? The answer is simple, say the rocketeers: their efforts have been stifled by bureaucrats and politicians. "In America, we had Redstone and Little John rockets in the 60s, and these could easily have been used to fly passengers on suborbital flights," says Geoff Sheerin of PlanetSpace. "But that would have been intolerable to the U.S. and USSR, because it would have meant allowing ballistic missiles into the hands of private owners."
Other rocketeers go further. NASA, that once great temple of unfailing U.S. technology that put men on the Moon, became a bureaucratic monolith that suppressed individuality and pioneering efforts, many say. "The American space program was, for all practical purposes, an attempt to show the Russians we could do Communism better than they could," says Jeff Greason, president of XCOR, another Mojave-based rocket-place company. "Had Apollo never existed, we would be further along today."
These people see themselves as rebels. Many are libertarian in attitude. But they are equally united in a dream to make space accessible - and simple. Consider Rutan's SpaceShipOne. It was as flimsy as a fibre-glass canoe. It had a few portholes, a single computer screen, and the pilot controlled the craft using a stick and two foot pedals. Hanging over his head was a ping-pong ball decorated with a smiley face. When the string lost its tautness, the pilot knew he was approaching zero gravity. "If space is going to be cheap, it has to be stick-and-rudder," says Rutan.
SpaceShipTwo promises to be more complex, of course, but the same back-to-basics drive remains. "Simplicity means safety," says Whitehorn, who also argues that the converse is true, so that each level of complexity involves increasing risks. He points out that space shuttles - which contain more than 300,000 moving parts - involve major safety scares with every flight. By contrast, Rutan's little space-hopper had only 30 moving parts. "That is because the technology that was developed for SpaceShipOne - for US$26 million - is far more sophisticated and radical than anything NASA has ever produced," Whitehorn adds.
Just how many punters will put their lives on the line to fly in space this way remains an open question, as space tourism expert Geoffrey Crouch of Melbourne's La Trobe University acknowledges. "Between 50 and 60 per cent of the people we asked said they would take a flight, with younger males being particularly interested. But when the spaceplanes are actually ready to take off, it may seem much less attractive to spend a year's salary on such a potentially dangerous experience." Nevertheless, adds Crouch, a real reservoir of interest exists. "I was at the National Space Society annual general meeting in Washington in May. One speaker asked the audience if they would fly in space if they had only a 50-50 chance of getting back alive. About a third of them put up their hands.
"Of course, that was a hard-core audience whose members are obsessed by space but it also shows there will be no shortage of people willing to buy seats on private spaceflights," he added.
Robin McKie is science editor of The Observer and a contributing editor of COSMOS.
