2014-04-09 10:34:04
Richard Hollingham
It s easy to dismiss plans to take paying customers into orbit as a pursuit for
the rich. But our space correspondent explains how it could benefit all of us.
Right now, one of the most exciting space facilities in the world is a World
War Two hangar in the Mojave Desert in California.
The wooden hangar belongs to Xcor, one of the start-up companies building
rocket planes to fly tourists into space. In the hangar next door, you can
glimpse Virgin Galactic s spaceplane, slung beneath its carrier aircraft.
Further along the runway, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen s company,
Stratolaunch, is developing a new space launch system. Eleven other small space
businesses are spread around the site at the Mojave Air and Space Port.
Later this year, Virgin aims to fly its first paying passengers into space. The
experience will not come cheap. Virgin Galactic is charging $250,000 for the
privilege of experiencing five minutes of weightlessness; Xcor plans to charge
$95,000 for a ride in its two-seater rocket ship. The cost alone puts this
fledgling space-tourism industry beyond the means of most of us.
So it is easy to dismiss the whole enterprise as private jets in space rather
than benefits for all mankind (as BBC Future readers have done on our Facebook
page). But having followed the development of the private space industry for
the last 20 years, and after a recent visit to the Mojave Air and Space Port
for a BBC radio programme, I thought it was worth outlining why I think space
tourism matters.
1. It frees space ambitions from traditional burdens
The audacious plan to put men on the Moon was championed by politicians and
backed with billions of taxpayer dollars. By the time men had actually stepped
onto the lunar surface, Nasa s budget was already being cut. Subsequent US,
Russian and European space programmes from the Shuttle to the International
Space Station (ISS) have suffered from political compromise and lack of
ambition.
Private space travel companies using reusable spaceplanes could help boost
space exploration (AFP/Getty Images)
Private spaceflight, on the other hand, is unburdened by the favour of
taxpayers or whims of politicians. If the company can raise the cash, it can
build a spacecraft. Inevitably, this free market favours people who already
have a lot of money. But that is not true of all the companies in the private
space business.
We don t have a multi-billionaire funding us, admits the CEO of Xcor, Jeff
Greason. For him, building a sub-orbital tourist craft is part of a long-term
strategy. We started examining how a fully-reusable orbital system would look
and realised we would need to develop earlier versions of that to learn how to
build them, he says. Those earlier versions also have to make money.
2. Failure is now an option
Nasa is forever burdened with the phrase failure is not an option . Private
companies have no such restrictions until the money runs out.
The entrance to the Mojave Air and Space Port is dominated by a reminder that
not all space projects succeed. Resembling a giant white traffic cone, the
Rotary Rocket is one of the most peculiar flying machines ever built probably
best described as half-helicopter, half-spacecraft, and if you were being
cruel, you might also call the concept half-baked.
It was one of the first spacecraft to be developed at Mojave and, in 1999, made
some brief atmospheric test flights. The engineering proved sound but funding
problems caused the company to fold. Today it is gathering desert dust in a
small memorial garden.
One person who worked on the Rotary is Kevin Mickey, President of Scaled
Composites the company now building Virgin s spaceplane. I look at this, and
I m proud of it, says Mickey, as we stand beside the white conical spacecraft.
One of the hurdles in today s society is an intolerance for risk and failure
and if you are truly going to innovate, you are going to fail sometimes, he
says. The carbon composite materials technology that went into the Rotary is
now being adapted for Scaled Composite s aircraft and spaceplanes, so the
expertise has not totally gone to waste.
3. It will inspire a new generation of engineers
The spaceport looks more like a college campus than a space centre. Take, for
example, 26-year-old Xcor engineer, Jeremy Voigt. He proudly shows me one of
the rocket engines he is helping to develop: currently, it s a mass of pipes,
wires and valves.
Rockets can only be launched once - and can cost up to $12m a time (AFP/Getty
Images)
It s the engineer s dream job, he says. Most engineers sit behind a desk all
day, I don t. I get to come out here in the shop, turn wrenches and fire rocket
engines.
He looks around the crowded hangar, crammed with bits of rocket motor and
partially constructed spaceplane. If I was at Nasa, I would be part of a large
team of engineers working on something, he says excitedly. Here I actually
lead the rocket test, I get to push the button.
The way of working at Mojave, in small teams with limited resources, is
completely different to the way the space agencies work. Many people compare
what is going on at Mojave with the early days of Silicon Valley and it is easy
to draw parallels between the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built
the first Apple computer, and the Xcor workshop. Maybe the young engineers here
will have equally world-changing effects.
4. The cost of reaching space will go down
Right now, if you want to launch a satellite, it will cost upwards of $12m and
that is before the compulsory insurance (which can sometimes double the price).
Not only can conventional space rockets only be used once, they are extremely
expensive to launch and there is limited competition.
Compare that with the $250,000 cost of a flight on the reusable Virgin
spaceplane. Scientific institutions have already signed up to fly experiments
on these sub-orbital flights. If the next generation of space planes can reach
orbit then that will massively reduce the cost of getting into space.
This means we will be able to launch satellites, spacecraft and space
exploration missions for a fraction of the cost. The final frontier could
finally become economically viable to a lot more people.
It is certainly something that gets CEO of Virgin Galactic and ex-Nasa
employee, George Whitesides excited. By lowering the cost of space access, we
ll be able to do things like sending little nanosats all over the Solar System
and do all this incredible science, that is so expensive now, he says. If we
are able to tackle some of these challenges by demonstrating access to space
technologies, then I think that will be profound.
5. Hypersonic travel could become a possibility
Remember the idea that you can take off from London, fly into space and touch
down in San Francisco an hour or so later? When discussing technologies that
are promised but never quite deliver, a close runner-up behind flying cars has
to be so-called sub-orbital point-to-point travel. Could the space tourism
companies at Mojave finally help make this dream a reality? George Whitesides
thinks so: This is fundamentally transformational for humanity, he tells me.
How much would you be willing to pay for a view like this? (Nasa)
I really think of our customers as pioneers, opening up the new frontier, he
says. For one thing, everyone would like to get there faster, another reason
is that you re not chugging through the atmosphere for 12 hours, so there could
be environmental benefits to that.
But few people are going to pay $250,000, or even $95,000, for a flight to San
Francisco, however fast. Space tourism companies counter with the argument that
as the technology evolves, costs will inevitably come down. The history of
aviation suggests this is indeed the case.
Most technologies at the front end are funded by wealthier folks, says
Whitesides. If you go back to the dawn of commercial aviation, the real
adjusted cost of crossing the Atlantic was $10,000 or if you look at the early
cellphones they were thousands of dollars, now you can get them for free if you
sign up for a contract.
Right now, the space companies are only on their first-generation rocket
planes. By the 10th generation, point-to-point travel via space may become a
reality.
6. It will provide a new view of our planet
It is widely accepted that one of the greatest achievements of the Apollo Moon
programme was the view of the Earth from space. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders
summed up the impact of the pictures captured by his mission: We came all this
way to explore the Moon, he said, and the most important thing is that we
discovered the Earth . The images put us in our place, a blue marble against
the backdrop of nothingness.
Every astronaut I have interviewed talks about how seeing the Earth from space
changed their view of the world. So imagine what would happen if we started
sending business and political leaders into space and back? Would that view of
the world change them in the way it affected astronauts? And as a result, could
it influence the decisions they make on border disputes, pollution or climate
change?