THE sight of Burt Rutan folding his lanky, six foot four inch frame into his Mini Cooper reminded me of the old circus trick in which a dozen clowns pile out of a miniature car, one by one. “Great little thing,” Rutan said admiringly as he revved it into life. “Bit tight on space, but I’m used to that.”
I understood what he meant. I had just spent half an hour with my considerably smaller self crammed into the cockpit of the spaceship he designed, the rather literally named SpaceShipOne, gazing out of its porthole windows and imagining myself viewing the curve of the Earth from sub-orbital space. Unfortunately, the actual view was more mundane: the inside of the busy Mojave workshop of Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, where SS1 is being prepared for a historic flight. After a minute or so, Rutan climbed in and sat in the seat next to me. “See,” he said with a boy’s grin and a distinct flash of joy in his bright blue eyes. “Plenty of room.”
Rutan’s tiny rocket plane has already shaken the foundations of the space world once, when on 21 June this year it became the first privately funded manned craft to go into space. If all goes to plan, on 29 September SS1 will begin its attempt to fly into the record books again, and collect $10 million into the bargain. Rutan’s team is the odds-on favourite to win the Ansari X prize, an international competition in which privately funded groups are competing to be first to make two return flights into sub-orbital space with a single human-piloted craft carrying the weight equivalent of two passengers, in the space of two weeks.
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Winning the X prize would signal the birth of a new era of private space flight. But while victory for SS1 would prove that sub-orbital passenger travel is possible without spending a fortune – the project’s $20 million development cost is roughly half what NASA spends every day – difficult questions remain about the immediate future of privately funded human space flight. Will paying customers actually turn up, and if so, when? If Scaled Composites bags the X prize’s $10 million, what are the prospects for all the contenders for the prize and for the future of the X Prize Foundation itself? And what can the “alternative” space sector, which sees NASA as a hindrance to progress, teach the government space agency?
I first met Rutan a year ago, a couple of months after I had sent him a copy of my book on the waning enthusiasm for space flight. I was hoping he might give me a quote for the dust jacket, but a few days later the following email arrived: “This is Burt. I liked your book. Why don’t you come out to the desert and I’ll show you what we’re doing with the project?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. Rutan’s workshop was off limits to the press, so a chance to peek inside the hottest project in space flight was too good for a space-junky like me to miss. I expected a quick tour by a subordinate, so I could hardly contain my excitement when Rutan himself stepped out of the green Mini that collected me at the gates.
Despite his stature in the industry, Rutan is a modest man who seems as thrilled as a kid in a sweet shop about going into space. But behind the excitable, boyish exterior is a whirring intellect. You get the sense the clock in his mind is always ticking, the hours and days barely able to contain a seemingly endless gallery of ideas and projects, some of which have yet to be sketched onto the famous numbered napkins on which all Rutan projects are born (SS1 was napkin number 316).
Scaled Composites is one of a number of “alt-space” companies operating outside the traditional military-industrial, government-oriented space paradigm. Many of them have made their home at the civilian Mojave airport, which hours after SS1’s historic 21 June flight was officially classified a “spaceport” by the Federal Aviation Administration.
There is a strong sense of camaraderie in the huts and hangars around the airport, even among entrepreneurs developing rival craft. A prime example is Scaled Composites’ neighbour, XCOR, whose experimental rocket plane is test-piloted by Rutan’s older brother Dick, a decorated fighter jock who co-piloted Voyager, the aircraft that in 1986 brought Rutan early fame by making the first non-stop, non-refuelled circumnavigational flight of the globe. True to this convivial spirit, when Mojave area hotels and campsites filled up ahead of the inaugural SS1 flight, XCOR opened its hangar as a makeshift hostel to accommodate some of the overflow.
SS1 is by no means Rutan’s first stab at space. He has had a hand in several government and private space projects. SS1’s lineage can be traced back to a craft called Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, which Rutan worked on in the early 1990s. DC-X was meant to be an inexpensive, reusable spacecraft and was developed and tested over several years on a bare-bones budget of about $60 million. The project was handed to NASA in 1994, but ended ignominiously when the DC-X prototype exploded in a test flight in 1996.
To many in the space community, the DC-X seemed to prove that a reliable, reusable spacecraft could not be developed on the cheap. But Rutan said that he never believed that the DC-X, which looked like a big white parking cone, was right for the job. For starters, it lacked wings. “For years, I would sketch things that could launch from Proteus,” Rutan said, referring to a long-winged Scaled Composites aircraft now used for reconnaissance and atmospheric research. It is no accident that the spindly White Knight aircraft from which SS1 is launched looks and functions much like Proteus.
SS1 may be front runner for the X prize, but success is not a fait accompli. Despite not having flown a single test flight, the Canadian da Vinci project, which plans to launch its Wild Fire spacecraft from a balloon, will take its first X prize shot on 2 October, days after Rutan’s attempt (see Diagram). Nevertheless, when New Scientist went to press no other team had declared a date for an X prize attempt – and the January 2005 deadline is not far away.
There have been other serious contenders, but they have tended to meet with a fiery end. On 7 August, Armadillo Aerospace’s unpiloted prototype rocket, which had operated perfectly on all previous tests, crashed when it ran out of fuel. The following day, the first flight of Space Transport Corporation’s Rubicon 1, also unpiloted but carrying three dummy humans to simulate its X prize load, exploded in a fireball off the coast of Washington state, the victim of a faulty engine. As if to underscore the perils of trying to do space flight on the cheap, one of the Rubicon’s dummy heads floated ominously to shore.
Most insiders believe that Rutan will win. Assuming he does, what will that mean for the unsuccessful competitors – 19 of them in all? Some will undoubtedly fold, and prospects for the more promising runners-up largely depend on whether a market for sub-orbital space flight does, as is hoped, materialise relatively quickly. The alt-space sector has long touted studies indicating that with suitable vehicles and regulations in place, sub-orbital tourism could rapidly become a multibillion-dollar business. X prize co-founder Peter Diamandis, for instance, anticipates that the sub-orbital market will “mature” as early as 2008. But will the customers actually put their money where the surveys say they will? Rutan’s creation certainly challenges the popular notion that billion-dollar budgets are needed to safely send people into space.
Enthusiasts with deep pockets are already lining up to invest. The $20 million it took to develop SS1 came from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who is working out how to build and operate a fleet of passenger-carrying craft based on the SS1 concept. And there are rumours that the British millionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson wants to dive into the space tourism business too. He was among the guests at the June SS1 launch.
So, if Rutan wins, what then? “The most significant effect of SS1 is to diminish the sense of impossibility associated with space,” says Elon Musk, a dotcom multimillionaire who used his overnight riches to found his own space flight company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. The company has developed a semi-reusable rocket called the Falcon that is slated for a first launch later this year from Vandenberg air force base in California. Unlike most rockets that have yet to make their maiden flight, the Falcon already has a paying customer. It will inject a small US navy satellite into orbit. A second Falcon flight also has a customer. SpaceX is a big personal gamble for Musk, who has ploughed much of his estimated net worth of more than $150 million into the company.
In founding, financing and running his own space company without any space industry experience, Musk is following a path trodden by many of the space entrepreneurs. He welcomes the prospect of success by business rivals like Rutan. “Burt is out there, right on the edge, taking big risks. That’s what has to happen if we’re going to see real change,” Musk says. “A commercial success of any kind in space will draw capital and more players.”
Even so, he recognises that sub-orbital technology alone will not challenge the dominant high-cost, low-reliability paradigm in space flight. Even the most optimistic entrepreneurs confess that there is only a limited market in sub-orbital tourism (New Scientist, 4 September, p 20). Orbital access is the real prize, and orbital space flight is far more challenging than a sub-orbital hop. Rutan has dropped several hints that he is working on an orbital successor to SS1, but admits that he hasn’t worked out how to achieve the speed of 28,500 kilometres per hour needed to reach orbit; SS1 can only reach a modest 3500 kilometres per hour. Neither does the current craft have the structural strength for orbital flight, as its lightweight thermal shielding would be virtually useless against the high temperatures generated on re-entry. Rutan is cagey about the cost of getting from sub-orbital to orbital space. “We are spending a lot more than Burt to do Falcon,” Musk says.
Even if the first Falcon and its beefier successors are successful, Musk admits that SpaceX is at least five years away from developing a vehicle for human transportation to orbit. And that’s where NASA comes in. The agency has been watching the X prize developments with a keen eye, and has been so impressed with the achievements of the mavericks that it is now set to adopt the X prize model. Earlier this year it announced a new programme called “Centennial Challenges”, in which NASA will offer cash prizes to private-sector innovators in a variety of technologies deemed useful to the agency.
Great expectations
“Centennial Challenges is the best programme NASA has come up with for a very long time,” says Musk. “If it’s really exploited fully, it could have a dramatic effect on our progress in human exploration of space.” However, NASA has proposed just $50 million in prize money for Centennial Challenges. This is only about half what Musk believes is needed to attract the investment necessary to fuel bona-fide competition. “$10 million [for the X prize] has been the right figure to spur people to reach sub-orbital space, and it’s at least an order of magnitude harder to reach orbital space,” he says.
Courtney Stadd, former NASA White House liaison and chief of staff is equally sceptical. “NASA has promised to engage the private sector before and the result has been unfulfilled promises,” he says.
So can the private space movement continue on its own steam? Diamandis certainly hopes so. He has laid out two ambitious follow-on programmes for the X Prize Foundation to keep a carrot dangling in front of the private space companies after the prize has been won. The first is called the “X prize cup”, an annual event in which “X prize-class vehicles” will compete for additional cash prizes. Categories of competition may include maximum altitude, fastest flight time and maximum number of passengers carried. The first X prize cup will be held in 2006 in New Mexico, assisted by a $9 million sweetener from the state to help develop the required infrastructure.
The second new activity may do more to spark a robust alternative space industry than either the cup or the original prize. Diamandis envisions a point-to-point race, perhaps from New York to Sydney, to demonstrate one of the potentially more lucrative offshoots of sub-orbital space flight: same-day parcel delivery anywhere on the planet. Courier companies have long been interested in finding a way to offer customers such a service. Going via space may be the way to achieve it.
But Rutan is not interested in such extensions of SS1’s legacy, and is happy to let others build up a space-flight industry in its wake. He has, for example, said more than once that Scaled Composites will not be getting into the space tourism business. But that is not going to stop Rutan being one of the first space tourists himself, and experiencing for real that celestial view I imagined when I clambered into the SS1 cockpit. He hinted to me that he might remove the ballast representing one of the passengers and squeeze himself aboard. “I believe we will see enormous progress in the next 10 years in human space flight,” he says. “All it takes is just a few safe flights flown by the little guy.”
