To Space and Beyond

By: Vincent J. Schodolski
Posted In: News

MOJAVE, Calif.- Some day, the tiny airport in this high-desert town may be considered in the history of manned commercial spaceflight much as Roosevelt Field on Long Island, N.Y., is to commercial aviation.

It was here that SpaceShipOne, piloted by Michael Melvill, made the first commercial flight into space in June, making history just as Charles Lindbergh did in May 1927 when he took off in the Spirit of St. Louis at from Roosevelt for the first solo trans-Atlantic airplane flight.

Just as commercial aviation was spurred by Lindbergh, the success of SpaceShipOne seems to have given a boost to the growing private-sector space business. People involved in the industry are confident that anybody able to afford the steep price of a ticket will be flying in space within the next several years.

Days before the SpaceShipOne flights in late September and early October that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, Virgin Atlantic Airways founder Richard Branson announced the formation of Virgin Galactic with the goal of providing regular flights into suborbital space, perhaps as soon as 2007.

Using the basic design of SpaceShipOne that was created by aviation innovator Burt Rutan, Branson plans to build VSS Enterprise, a craft that will carry five to nine people into space at a starting price of about $200,000. Other craft will be added to the fleet over time.

Seven thousand people already have signed up for one of Branson’s flights, Virgin officials said.

It took more than three decades for programs run by governments- primarily the United States and the Soviet Union- to move from the first manned space flights to journeys to the moon to the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

But commercial trips to space, guided by a pioneer spirit and the lure of profit, are expected to take just a few years.

“They can scale up the SpaceShipOne and White Knight model,” said John Olds, a professor of aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech, referring to the spacecraft and the plane that carried it during the first phase of its flights.

“I don’t doubt the technical viability,” Olds said.

While Branson and Rutan grabbed early headlines, a host of others are planning and building spacecraft with the intent make both suborbital and orbital flights.

Booster for the business

“This is a good time for entrepreneurial space ventures,” said Jim Benson, the founding chairman and chief executive of SpaceDev, a company that designs and builds space products. “I think we have to give Branson credit for what he is doing and for being a good businessman.”

SpaceDev was part of the SpaceShipOne project, building the rocket that boosted the craft into space, which begins at 62 miles above Earth.

With an innovative design that used synthetic rubber and nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”) as fuel, the rocket booster is less likely to explode than conventional liquid- or solid-fuel rocket engines.

The company recently announced plans for SpaceDev Dream Chaser, a craft to carry passengers into suborbital space and later, with design changes, on orbital journeys to dock with the International Space Station.

“It showed that you don’t need all the layers of management that the government has,” Tom Gwynne, vice president of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, N.Y., said of the SpaceShipOne mission. “I’m sure as the price comes down, the pool of people grows.”

That does appear to be what will happen as the opportunity for travel into space becomes more widespread.

According to a survey and market study conducted in 2002 by Futron Corp. of Bethesda, Md., there seems to be a considerable market for space tourism and one that grows exponentially as prices fall.

The world’s first space tourist was American businessman Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz ship in 2001. Anyone willing to pay that price can- after six months of training and learning Russian- make the same eight-day trip.

That is the only way to go into orbit as a private citizen paying a commercial fee, at least for the moment.

While plans are being developed to put paying customers into orbit sometime in the future, the first opportunities for non-government space travel would be relatively brief suborbital flights of the sort planned by Branson.

Those flights would last about three hours from start to finish, but only a brief period will be above the 62-mile-high line that marks the start of space. According to Branson’s plans, passengers, who would be strapped into their seats during the trip, will experience weightlessness for about six minutes and will be able to see the curve of the Earth.

According to the Futron survey and other academic studies of the potential for space tourism, Branson’s plan to put 1,000 people a year on space journeys for $200,000 a ticket is about right. Branson aims to maintain that pace for three years, by which time Virgin Galactic would have earned revenue totaling $600 million, dwarfing the $60 million he plans to invest to get the flights going.

That is when prices should start falling, according to the Futron study. Starting at the $200,000-a-flight price, Futron estimated that the price will fall to about $95,000 by 2012 and to $50,000 by 2021, when the company estimates about 15,712 people will fly during the year.

Still, the price of orbital flight will remain out of the reach for all but the super-rich, the survey concluded. By 2006, Futron estimated, it would cost $15.6 million for a trip, falling to $9.5 million by 2012 and to $5 million by 2021.

Innovation and the laws of supply and demand could radically change those estimates, experts said.

Another application for the kind of parabolic, suborbital flights planned by Branson would be point-to-point flights going through space as a way to reduce flight times. “Why can’t we have 30-minute coast-to-coast flights?” asked Benson of SpaceDev.

The $10 million X Prize won by the SpaceShipOne team was established to encourage entrepreneurs to speed the pace of commercial spaceflight.

Now multimillionaire businessman Robert Bigelow has put up part of a prize of $50 million for the design and testing of a five- to seven-person craft that could put people into space and allow docking with the International Space Station or other orbiting modules.

Bigelow, who made a fortune establishing the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, has said he hopes to build the world’s first space hotel.

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c 2004, Chicago Tribune.

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