by Chris Impey
Powered flight began modestly in 1903 when Orville Wright traveled 120 feet just a few feet off the ground at slower than running speed. The Wright brothers observed birds and conducted many experiments on wing shape and profile. A flat wing can provide lift, but modern airfoil design has led to a curved upper surface, echoing birds and boats. Their plane was built using spruce wood, a bicycle chain to drive the twin handmade propellers, and a custom-built engine, since no existing automobile engine was suitable. The brothers tossed a coin to decide who would make the historic first flight.
Throughout the twentieth century, airplanes traveled faster and higher. Thrust came first from variations on the automobile’s internal combustion engine, which was used to drive a propeller. Aircraft like this reached altitudes of 10 miles and speeds of 450 mph by midcentury, but they began to be supplanted by jets. The jet engine was the brainchild of RAF Officer Frank Whittle, who overcame significant physical limitations to become a pilot. His innovation was an engine that took in air, compressed it in a turbine, combusted the air–fuel mixture, and ejected the burning gas at high speed through a nozzle. This type of engine is most efficient at high speed and high altitude. Jets pushed altitude and speed records to the dizzying heights of 35 miles and 2,190 mph, or more than three times the speed of sound.9
The quest for space brings us back to the uneasy relationship between civilian efforts motivated by exploration and the shadowy world of the military. For example, the top speeds of military aircraft such as the SR-71 “Blackbird” are classified. The US Air Force has built a series of aircraft whose existence was not acknowledged by the government, military personnel, or defense contractors. Examples of these “black projects” include the Mach 3 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft, and the B-2 bomber. All of these are air-breathing jet aircraft, incapable of reaching space.
Figure 15. Schematic view of the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. Space is typically demarcated by the Kármán line at 100 km, where the atmosphere is too thin to support aerodynamic flight. Low Earth orbit is any altitude ranging from 160 to 2,000 km.
Jet engines can’t work beyond 100 kilometers or 62 miles, where air is two million times thinner than air at sea level. This boundary is called the Kármán line. At that altitude, an airplane would have to move at orbital velocity to generate enough lift to stay aloft (Figure 15). Space has no edge. The atmosphere thins out gradually into a perfect vacuum. Low Earth orbits start around 100 miles up, below which the tenuous atmosphere would create enough drag on a satellite to make it descend and burn up. The International Space Station orbits at the magisterial altitude of 250 miles.
However, the military did have a series of projects—some of which were secret—involving planes powered by rockets. The experimental X-planes began with the Bell X-1, which had its maiden flight in 1946. On October 14, 1947, Captain Chuck Yeager became the first human to travel faster than sound, flying in an X-1 over the Mojave Desert in California. When the embargoed news appeared in Aviation Week and the Los Angeles Times, the journalists involved were threatened with prosecution, although that didn’t occur.10 Yeager never went to college but he rose to the rank of brigadier general, piloted dozens of experimental aircraft, and set a speed record of Mach 2.4. Soon after reaching that unprecedented speed, his X-1 became violently unstable and tumbled 50,000 feet in fifty seconds. Yeager regained control just in time for a normal landing. His laconic, understated style was branded in the popular culture as “the Right Stuff.”11
In 1959, the Air Force rolled out the X-15, the fastest plane ever built. It was a spaceplane, a vehicle that worked like an aircraft in the Earth’s atmosphere and like a spacecraft when it was in space. The descent was an unpowered glide to landing. In 1967, Lieutenant Pete Knight took the X-15 to 4,520 mph (Mach 6.7), a record that still stands nearly half a century later. Like Chuck Yeager, he had his share of close calls; on one flight, he lost power to all onboard systems and had to bring the X-15 down from an altitude of 173,000 feet for an emergency landing.12
The Air Force and NASA collaborated on developing the X-15, but they diverged when the young space agency chose the Atlas and Redstone rockets for the Mercury program that put the first Americans in space. Eight Air Force pilots flew the X-15 high enough to earn their astronaut wings, including Neil Armstrong, who would later become the first man to set foot on the Moon.13 Only three X-15s were built. They flew 199 missions. One pilot was lost when his plane went into a hypersonic spin and broke apart at 60,000 feet, scattering wreckage over 50 square miles.
The only other spaceplanes so far have been NASA’s Space Shuttle, its Russian counterpart Buran (which flew once, in 1988), Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne (which flew seventeen times between 2003 and 2004 and is discussed in chapter 5), and the X-37. The X-37 is a project to demonstrate reusable space technologies. It began in 1999 under the Air Force and was transferred to NASA in 2004. Think of it as a more advanced but smaller and unmanned version of the Space Shuttle. Like the Shuttle and unlike the other American spaceplanes, the X-37 is a true orbital vehicle that can reach an altitude of at least 100 miles.14 It has flown just three times. In 2011, Boeing announced plans for a scaled-up version that would carry up to six astronauts in a pressurized compartment in its cargo bay.
Since the X-37 is a black project, there’s only speculation about what it does in orbit. In an amusing geopolitical irony, the Atlas rocket that launches the X-37 uses the sturdy Russian RD-180 engine for its first stage. Early in 2014, amid tensions over the situation in Ukraine, the Russian defense minister announced that Russia would no longer supply rocket engines for US military launches. Boeing will switch from the Atlas to the American-made Delta family of rockets, which also have more than a million pounds of thrust.
It sounds simple: Get a big and powerful enough rocket and you can escape the doldrums. But there’s a catch, which brings us back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
His equation says that the final velocity of a rocket depends only on the exhaust speed of the fuel and the ratio of the fuel mass to the payload mass. No matter how cleverly you design your rocket, no matter how ingenious your engine, you are governed by the rocket equation. The bad news is that the fuel-to-payload ratio is tucked inside a logarithm. If you increased the amount of fuel by a factor of a thousand, it would buy you only an extra factor of seven in the rocket speed. The more fuel you pack onto a rocket, the more energy the fuel needs to waste pushing the rest of the fuel. The highest exhaust speeds of chemical fuels are around 4,000 meters per second or 9,000 mph. So the rocket equation says that to reach orbital speed requires ten times as much fuel as payload. Many dreams have been dashed on the rocks of the rocket equation.
Space Tourism
By never sending a poet or artist into space, NASA missed a big opportunity to engage the public with the excitement of space travel.
Any creative spirit would be inspired by the experience of being weightless, or of looking in one direction at the gossamer-thin edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and in the opposite direction at the inky blackness of endless night. Poets have the ability to describe the indescribable, so they would have given those of us with feet rooted to the ground a sense of why we might want to leave Earth’s cradle.15
At the dawn of the Space Age, NASA considered sending acrobats and contortionists into space, as well as women, since they were smaller and lighter than men. But the United States was in the Cold War and President Eisenhower specified that astronauts must be military test pilots. This decision simplified the selection procedure because all of the five hundred men who applied were highly disciplined alpha males. Each member of the first group selected in 1959 was under forty, stood less than five feet eleven inches tall, had degrees in engineering, and had logged at least 1,500 hours of flying time as jet test pilots. The degree requirement excluded accomplished Air Force test pilots like Chuck Yeager, who had enlisted young and come up through the ranks. The result was good-natured but intense rivalry. Mercury astronau
ts were national heroes, while the test pilots pointed out that the astronauts didn’t actually fly the spacecraft so they were just “Spam in a can.”
The result was a monoculture of astronauts who were male, white, unflappable, and typically from the Midwest.16 Referring to the twenty-four astronauts from Ohio, TV personality Stephen Colbert asked Ohio congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, “What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?”17
The selection vise was loosened slightly for the second intake in 1962, when civilian pilots were included, letting in Neil Armstrong among others. In 1965, degrees in medicine and science were accepted and the flight requirement could be met after joining the corps. But by far the biggest change came with the eighth intake in 1978, when NASA divided astronauts into two categories: pilots and mission specialists. That group of thirty-five included six African Americans, one Asian American, and six women, one of whom was Sally Ride, America’s first female in space.
Meanwhile, the demographics of Soviet and Russian cosmonauts were also narrow, except for the textile factory worker and recreational skydiver Valentina Tereshkova. In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman and the first civilian to fly in space.
When NASA announced its Teacher in Space Program in 1984, Christa McAuliffe was selected from the 11,000 teachers who applied. There was also a Journalist in Space Program—applicants included Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. An Artist in Space Program was even being considered—but then came the stunning Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, which killed McAuliffe and her six colleagues. NASA quietly ended its civilian space program, although McAuliffe’s backup, Barbara Morgan, did eventually fly on the Space Shuttle, after she had retired from teaching and joined NASA’s astronaut corps.
As of late 2013, 540 people from thirty-eight countries had reached low Earth orbit or beyond. They ranged in age from twenty-five to seventy-seven. Being in space remains very special; for comparison, more than 4,000 have stood on the summit of Mount Everest. The vast majority of space travelers are employed by the military or government agencies, but the past decade has seen the emergence of a new industry: space tourism.18
After the loss of a second Space Shuttle in 2003, all remaining flights went toward NASA’s fulfillment of its commitments to finishing the International Space Station. Missions involving scientists or civilians were shelved. Meanwhile, the fall of the Soviet Union left the Russian space program debilitated and starved for cash. So the Russians eagerly agreed when the Tokyo Broadcasting System offered to pay them $28 million to send one of its reporters to the Mir Space Station in 1990. In 1999, MirCorp was formed to use the aging Russian space station for tourism. It was funded mostly by American entrepreneurs. MirCorp partnered with a Russian launch company to boost Mir into a higher orbit and it signed an agreement with NBC and Mark Burnett, who had recently produced the Survivor TV series. American engineer and millionaire Dennis Tito was announced as the first self-funded space tourist. NBC even ran ads for its upcoming Destination Mir reality TV show.
But trouble was brewing. NASA officials and members of Congress heavily criticized MirCorp for interfering with international space treaties and for trivializing space exploration. It was also awkward for NASA that the cut-price Mir program was exposing the enormous cost of NASA launches and the International Space Station. NASA pressed the Russians into de-orbiting Mir and tried hard to squash the nascent space tourism industry, but Tito ignored the furor and traveled by Soyuz spacecraft anyway, spending eight days on the International Space Station in 2001. He was followed by a South African, an American, and an Iranian American woman. In 2009, Hungarian-born businessman Charles Simonyi became the first repeat space tourist. By the time Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté became a space tourist later in 2009, the price had gone from $20 million to an eye-popping $40 million.19
We can admire astronauts, but it’s hard to empathize with them. They are so confident and accomplished that normal insecurities are hidden from view, and their sensibilities are analytic. The first space tourists have all been wealthy entrepreneurs—the 0.01 percent—and they’re not like us either.
NASA briefly gestured toward conscripting artist astronauts in 2003, when they selected performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson as the first (and last) Artist in Residence.20 It didn’t go well. On her first day, as she was sitting in the office of the director of the Johnson Space Center, she asked, “When do I go up?” He told her that wasn’t going to happen.
A Striking Parallel
Is there any way to predict the future of the space program? Its progression so far, with its fits and starts, iconic visionaries, and incubation during the Cold War, seems unique. But its history has striking parallels with an indispensable component of modern life: the Internet. Both were incubated by the military-industrial complex, both grew thanks to government investment, and both have gained striking new capabilities courtesy of the involvement of entrepreneurs from the private sector, whose investment potentially dwarfs that of the government (Figure 16).
Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun are to the rocket as Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider is to the Internet. His name is known only to the most passionate computer geeks, but he deserves a nod of appreciation from anyone who has effortlessly viewed a web page or sent an e-mail or an image halfway around the world in under a second. Known as J. C. R. or “Lick” by his friends and colleagues, he was a psychologist who liked to work on refurbishing cars in his spare time. Licklider was a professor at MIT in the 1950s, working on the physics of sound perception, when he became interested in computers. At the time, computers were rare, expensive behemoths the size of a bus that used as much electricity as a small town yet were far less powerful than your smartphone. The only way to transmit digital data was to write it onto bulky magnetic tape and send it in the mail.
Figure 16. The Internet had pioneers who foresaw a worldwide interconnected communications system. It was then incubated by the military and in research labs before it emerged into the private sector. Research by the private sector now drives the development and innovative use of the Internet.
Yet Licklider had an uncanny sense of the potential of the information age. He foresaw such capabilities as graphic displays and point-and-click interfaces, e-commerce and online banking, and digital libraries. The only mass media at the time were TV and radio, yet he visualized the two-way flow of data and information over a worldwide network of computers. And he predicted that software would be downloaded as needed from that network. Licklider wasn’t an inventor, but he was a prodigious source of ideas. He formed and funded research groups that began to develop the capabilities we now take for granted. Lick could project the worldwide potential of his primitive information technology just as Goddard could project the eventual capabilities of rockets, even though his first rocket flew less than 200 feet.
Like the space program, the Internet depended on investment by the military to mature. The US military establishment was particularly concerned about moving data efficiently between command centers and having redundancy and resilience in the case of a nuclear attack. In 1962, Licklider was hired by the Department of Defense to work at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. On October 29, 1969, a real-time link was established between research labs at UCLA and Stanford. Three characters were sent before the system crashed, but this simple transmission, reminiscent of the first phone message by Alexander Graham Bell almost a century earlier, was the start of a revolution.
DARPANET was the technical core of what would become the Internet. By the early 1980s, a new node was being added every twenty days. Many technical problems were solved in these pioneering years, such as designing protocols for chopping data into packets, sending them on diverse paths through the network, and seamlessly stitching them back together at the destination. The second phase of Internet development was carried out by universities and government labs. By the end of the 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) laid down the ph
ysical backbone of a high-speed Internet and NASA was providing connectivity to more than 20,000 scientists across seven continents.21
At that time, the public was unaware of the Internet. It was used by researchers to send data and e-mail. Commerce was forbidden.
The floodgates opened in the mid-1990s. Private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had sprung up to meet growing public demand for e-mail access. The US Congress passed a law that allowed the NSF to support access to networks that weren’t used exclusively for research and education. This created angst as researchers worried that the new Internet might not be responsive to their needs. The online world had always been a geeky place of text and equations, but in 1989 CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee released his hypertext concept for public use. In 1993, a team led by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois increased the visual appeal of the Internet by releasing the first web browser, called Mosaic. Encryption was added soon afterward to make transactions more secure.
In 1995, the NSF dropped all restrictions on Internet commerce and let private companies take over the high-speed “backbone.” That year also saw the founding of the Yahoo search engine, the auction site eBay, and the online bookseller Amazon. Huge new audiences adopted the technology and used it in unforeseen ways. As we will soon see, the space industry may now be where the Internet was in 1995, ready to soar.