Money lures civilians to the final frontier
U.S. manned space flight is streaking forward and backward at the same time, which is a pretty slick trick.
A privately financed and built rocket reached the edge of space last week as civilian test pilot Mike Melvill took SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 62 miles.
Burt Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, as well as the mother ship that ferried SSO to about 50,000 feet. Rutan is best known for designing and co-flying the Voyager airplane around the world nonstop.
Its pretty amazing that a group of non-government people could reach 100 kilometers and bring the pilot back to Earth in one piece. The enterprise was financed largely by Paul Allen, the co-founder of MicroSoft, which has more money than many small countries.
Even so, space seemed like the sole province of NASA and branches of the U.S. and Soviet military.
Alan Shepard rode a surface-to-surface Redstone rocket to a sub-orbital apogee of 116 miles in 1961. The Redstone, a direct descendant of the German V-2, the vengeance weapon of World War II, was designed to carry a nuclear or conventional warhead about 200 miles.
SpaceShipOne is free of the U.S. human space flight programs ominous Cold War pedigree.
It is a technological feat and odds-on favorite to win the $10 million X Prize. The prize is largely funded by American entrepreneur Abousheh Ansari and requires the winner to travel to space two times in two weeks with a pilot and carrying two passengers or their equivalent weight.
Melvill is the first civilian to be awarded NASA astronaut wings.
Thats the forward part. On the retro side, who in 1961 would have predicted that more than 40 years later innovators would still be using chemical rockets?
In fact, what Rutan, Melvill and colleagues accomplished is more similar to NASAs X-15 rocket plane of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It, too, was carried aloft, but with much more muscular construction. The sleek black rocket eventually reached Mach 5 at an altitude of 285,000 feet. X-15 test pilots received astronaut wings, too.
SpaceShipOne also had a serious control problem that caused the craft to roll wildly for some white-knuckle moments.
And this is apparently the most advanced of two dozen projects designed to win the X Prize.
So, strictly speaking, the civilian space effort isnt up to 1961 standards for manned rocket planes or ballistic missiles.
Allen, major sponsor of SpaceShipOne, believes the project represents the opening phases of private space travel.
Hardly. Its not cutting edge, its quaint.
Not to be outdone, NASA is now also considering awarding cash prizes.
One reward under discussion is a bounty of $30 million to whoever can land on the moon and return or retrieve a piece of asteroid. This is the same NASA that sent men to the moon atop 30-story Saturn rockets.
Estimating the cost of this venture, from Mercury through Apollo, is difficult. The question is whether the sum is in the billions or trillions of dollars. A $30 million prize for a trip to the moon is laughable.
The original aerospace engineers and defense contractors that made the Apollo hardware would need several times that much just to locate the blueprints. If they still exist.
Would an entrepreneur, even a Paul Allen, be willing to reinvent the rocket booster?
Apart from NASA, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas proposed a $200 million prize last week for the first private piloted orbital mission.
This would be fantastic all by itself. But Brownback is the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, Technology and Space subcommittee.
Just what riches will the investor find in manned low-earth orbit? So far, that enterprise has proven dangerous, gigantically expensive and not tremendously useful.
Are we going forward or backward?