Yesterday was truly historic. SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites/Mojave Aerospace, ascended into space and on its way to capturing the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. This prize is awarded to the first private spacecraft to complete two suborbital flights within two weeks. Encouraging private spaceflight with prizes is the new method to further the space program. Even NASA has adopted the prize format to encourage development of aerospace technologies.
The X-Prize is a doubtless success. SpaceShipOne is the first privately designed, built and flown spacecraft in the world and has successfully completed numerous tests and three suborbital flights. The craft is powered by a hybrid rocket engine that reacts solid rubber with laughing gas and dropped by its White Knight carrier jet from about 50,000 feet. It then ignites its rocket and climbs to more than 330,000 feet-high enough to officially make it a spacecraft and its three person crew astronauts.
The truly amazing thing about SpaceShipOne is not what it can do-the first manned suborbital flight took space in 1961, after Yuri Gargarin completed the first orbital flight-but what it takes to do it. Unlike all successful spacecraft before it, SpaceShipOne has been privately funded, designed, built and flown for a total cost of about $30 million. In contrast, the cost for entering space has historically been very high. A single space shuttle launch costs about $500 million.
SpaceShipOne demonstrates that spaceflight is no longer a nation-state-only activity. Instead of monolithic national programs subject to the fickle whims of politicians, spaceflight is now open to private citizens and investors such as Paul Allen, who funded SpaceShipOne, and Richard Branson, who has recently contracted with Mojave Aerospace Ventures to produce a line of spaceliners for Branson’s company Virgin Galatic. Branson’s company will put spaceflight closer within reach of the average citizen. Admittedly, at $200,000, it won’t be cheap, but it is well within the range of wealthy tourists and space enthusiasts.
If Virgin Galatic succeeds, it will prove to investors that commercial spaceflight, and commercial manned spaceflight is profitable. Given the competitive environment already in place-many of the X-prize’s 24 teams plan to continue as commercial operations now that the contest is over-and the potential for profit in private spaceflight, the field will develop at an accelerating pace. Realistic plans for orbital hotels have been developed by millionaire Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace. He’s also looking into a lunar cruise ship.
Already, the fledgling private spacecraft industry is turning its eyes to higher goals. At the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Airventure fly in, Scaled Composites head Burt Rutan-a legendary aerospace engineer-announced his intention to build an orbital follow up to SpaceShipOne. Unlike suborbital craft, which pass out of the atmosphere for only a few minutes, an orbital ship can stay in space indefinitely. The challenges he and his team faces are great, but given his team’s demonstrated ability with SpaceShipOne and the ever increasing investments in spaceflight, they are not insurmountable.
Commercialization is a necessary step to the development of spaceflight. The drive for profit focuses human effort like nearly nothing else. As investors see profits in limited spaceflights like SpaceShipOne’s groundbreaking sorties, the cash inflow will allow private spaceflight to grow in size and scope. Eventually whole new worlds-the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt-will be open to human exploration, exploitation and colonization.
Space has long been called the final frontier, but frontiers aren’t conquered by nations or national programs. They are developed not by explorers or scientists looking for knowledge or national prestige, but by settlers, capitalists and profiteers driven by dreams and profit. SpaceShipOne has become the first vessel of these pioneers, but it won’t be the last.
The potential for profit in space is incomprehensible. Near earth orbit is a potent manufacturing environment, offering one resource, microgravity, which can be found nowhere else on Earth. Microgravity allows production of pharmaceuticals and advanced materials that are difficult or impossible to make on earth. The moon, too, offers many resources. Helium-3, a potent nuclear fuel, may be present in large amounts. Also, the moon is the first world beyond our earth. Either as a springboard to the solar system or the first world to relieve earth’s resources of the ever increasing burden of the human race through colonization, it is an invaluable objective.
The potential for commercial development in space is largely beyond knowledge. As space is an environment completely different from earth, we can only learn its potential by trying. Likely, we will find that the resources available in near earth space and beyond exceed those of earth itself. In making space accessible and exploitable, SpaceShipOne has taken the first step to opening these resources and perhaps the stars themselves to humankind.
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].