Beyond: Our Future in Space

by Chris Impey

  The core of the analogy is that the government and the military have deep enough pockets to develop technology with no eye on profit or return on investment. Once the field has been prepared and tilled, the private sector can scatter seed and see what grows best.

  With too much government and military control, technologies can’t reach their full potential. President Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”22 It’s ironic that this five-star general and two-term president—the quintessential Washington insider—issued such a clarion call against concentration of influence within and around the government. He said: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for disastrous use of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”23 The analogy between access to space and access to information seems to break down. However, the connection is uncanny when we recall the current controversy over the highly sophisticated and intrusive harvesting of personal data over the Internet by the US Government.

  To understand the potential of space tourism, it’s helpful to look at the growth of the Internet. Since the Internet entered commerce and culture, its rise has been meteoric. It accounted for one percent of two-way telecommunication traffic in 1993, but that rose to 50 percent in 2000 and 99 percent today. In 1993, there were a million Internet hosts; now there are a billion. Space travel is poised to follow the trajectory of the Internet, becoming demilitarized and then massively commercialized (Figure 17). Leaving Earth may soon be cheap and safe enough that it becomes an activity for the masses rather than the experience of a privileged few. Some of the recently formed space companies will be like Netscape and Altavista—the web-browser and search-engine leaders in 1995 and now long forgotten—and some will become behemoths like Google. The next decade promises to be very interesting.

  Figure 17. The space program also had visionaries who aimed for a permanent human presence in space. Progress was spurred by a military superpower rivalry and fostered by NASA. Private investment has recently begun so the space industry sits now where the Internet was in the early 1990s.

  5

  Meet the Entrepreneurs

  _______________________

  The Radical Designer

  Entrepreneurs are like the high-octane fuels needed to take space travel to the next level—volatile and sometimes hard to handle, but capable of unprecedented performance. Technical pioneers work best when they’re unfettered by conventional wisdom or institutional constraints. They have their eyes set on ambitious goals that might sound quixotic, but they pursue those goals with breathtaking passion and relentlessness. If they’re outsiders with modest means, they need deep pockets behind them to achieve their goals.

  We’ve seen this combination of ingredients with Robert Goddard. He did his pioneering experiments while being shunned by academia and scorned by the military. His early work was sponsored by a modest grant from the Smithsonian Institution. Then came Harry Guggenheim, son of Daniel Guggenheim, who owned mining companies and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had one of the largest fortunes in the world. Harry, a former Navy pilot and president of the family foundation, was a friend of Charles Lindbergh, who introduced him to Goddard. In 1930, Lindbergh received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $100,000, which would be worth $4 million today.1 This support helped launch the Rocket Age.

  Goddard was so far ahead of his time that his work was unregulated. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was formed in 1926, and it wasn’t until 1984 that the agency had a division to oversee rockets and commercial space travel.

  Burt Rutan has an entrepreneur’s impatience with red tape.

  When asked how he approached the Federal Aviation Administration about launching into space from a remote new site in the Mojave Desert, Rutan said, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” A lifelong pilot, he’s now in his early seventies and has heart problems. He calls the defibrillator implanted in his chest a “standby ignition system.” Alluding to his health issues, he said he’s discovered that when you’re in an airplane and you push the throttle forward and pull the stick back, it will take off even without a medical certificate.2 So far, he’s never been grounded for these infractions of regulations.

  Rutan has worked his way into space from the ground up. He grew up in rural Oregon in a house with no plumbing, and his parents followed a religious sect that prohibited activity on the weekend. Unable to play sports, he started making his own model planes at the age of eight and developed an intuitive feel for design. “I never built from a kit,” he recalled. “I bought balsa wood and invented a new airplane.” He felt that keeping his creative side in the foreground made him a better engineer later in his career.

  Rutan was hired straight out of college in 1965 as a civilian flight test engineer for the US Air Force. His job was to solve stability problems with the F4 Phantom jet fighter, which had suffered sixty-one crashes. The work became personal when he witnessed the death of his friend Mike Adams in an X-15 crash, also because of stability problems. Rutan invented a spin recovery system that prevented the F4 fleet from being grounded. Many of his homebuilt designs would use canards—small wings located ahead of and slightly above the main wings to give greater control and stability. Rutan also liked to employ a second, “pusher” engine at the back of the airplane, and he was an early adopter of light, composite construction materials.

  At thirty, he started his first company, the Rutan Aircraft Factory. The two-seaters he designed were used by everyone from hobbyists to NASA. Instead of metal, his kits used foam and fiberglass. When asked how long it took to build an airplane, his pithy response was “one and a half wives.” His recreational planes are masterpieces of efficiency and sophistication, but Rutan was looking for a bigger challenge. In 1982, he founded a new company, Scaled Composites, and for thirty years the cutting edge of aircraft design was located “under his wing” in the arid, lunar landscape of Mojave, California.3

  Rutan caught the world’s attention with Voyager, the first airplane to circumnavigate the world without refueling, which was considered impossible by many aeronautics experts. Flying around the world without refueling is like getting to orbit in one key aspect: most of the weight is fuel. The Saturn V rocket was 90 percent fuel as it launched and Voyager was 73 percent fuel when it took off. There was barely room for a pilot and copilot, and the ability of the crew to endure the flight was considered the biggest risk of failure.

  Voyager looked like a dragonfly, and it was effectively a flying gas tank, with fuel filling the wings and the spars. Rutan used a radical design for the airframe and wings, where paper honeycomb was sandwiched by graphite fiber composite. Weight was reduced ruthlessly. The most important statistic in aerodynamics is the lift-to-drag ratio: the higher the better. Voyager had a lift-to-drag ratio of 27, better than a jumbo jet (17) or an albatross (20). He came up with the concept while having lunch with his brother Dick in a Mojave diner, sketching it on a napkin. Rutan told his staff to throw every new part up in the air for a weight test, and “if it comes down, it’s too heavy.”

  Rutan had no capital behind him, so he built the plane on the cheap.

  Company after company turned him down for sponsorship. The owner of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was willing to fund him, but only if the plane took off and landed from the casino parking lot, which was far too small for the job. One firm wanted to charge him $50,000 to fabricate the wings, so the team figured how to do it themselves for a few hundred dollars. Instead of wind-tunnel testing, Rutan flew a model on top of his Dodge Dart station wagon. He said that wind tunnels only tell you what you already know. He used his own money to finish the project. In December 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, daughter of famed test pilot Chuck Yeager, took off on their perilous journey. They landed nine days later with just 100 of their 7,000 pounds of fuel left.4

  For his next challenge, Rutan was slig
htly better funded.

  He was drawn to the challenge of suborbital space flight because, as he put it in a 2010 interview, “We can achieve some breakthroughs by making such flight orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.”5 He has noted that in 1961 Alan Shepard flew into space in a small capsule and ten years later was golfing on the Moon. Progress in that decade seemed unstoppable. He thinks that if you’d told someone in 1971 that now we’d be buying rides into space from the Russians, it would have seemed like heresy.

  In the late 1990s, Rutan approached the billionaire Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen with the idea of competing for the Ansari X Prize. A California foundation had offered $10 million to the first organization to fly a manned spacecraft 100 kilometers high twice in a two-week window. Rutan wanted to avoid the complications of a rocket launch from the ground by using a large airplane to carry the rocket to a moderately high altitude and then letting the rocket do the rest. Landing, however, was a challenge. He wanted to avoid an unguided parachute descent and he preferred not to use the heavy heat shields employed by the Space Shuttle and Soyuz vehicles.

  His clever solution was inspired by the way a badminton shuttlecock automatically orients itself correctly with the direction of flight. Allen and Rutan became partners, and SpaceShipOne started taking shape in the California desert (Figure 18). In keeping with his ethos of intuitive, hands-on engineering, Rutan tested the stability of SpaceShipOne by throwing a model off a tower. In June 2004, a crowd of 10,000 people watched Rutan’s mother ship, White Knight, haul SpaceShipOne up into the sky. It became the first manned civilian vehicle to reach an altitude of 100 kilometers. In September of that year, SpaceShipOne won the X Prize with two flights five days apart. The only sour note came with an argument between Rutan and Allen—the investor wanted the press but not the public to see the launch. Rutan wanted to inspire the next generation to do great things. He prevailed, and sixty school buses loaded full of kids saw the historic flight. Perhaps this provided the spark for the next generation of space entrepreneurs.6

  Figure 18. Spaceplanes over the past half century. The X-15 was an experimental jet of the US Air Force; then the 1980s saw the US and Russian versions of a rocket-borne shuttle. Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne was a landmark, the first successful private venture into near space, and the Boeing X-37 is a new rocket-borne spaceplane.

  Unassuming and soft-spoken, Rutan is one of the foremost space innovators of our time. He’s created nearly 400 aircraft designs. His planes have broken dozens of records and five are displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. In 2008, he took another step in his progression as a space pioneer when he formed an alliance with a British billionaire who is as expansive as Rutan is self-contained.

  The Media Mogul

  Richard Branson owes a lot to his mum. To her dismay, he was dyslexic and withdrawn as a child, refusing to talk to adults and clinging to her skirt. To break him of these habits, she once stopped the car three miles from home and let him out. At age seven, he had to talk to strangers to find his way home. He made it, though it took him ten hours. This harsh treatment made him more comfortable talking to adults.

  Then she stepped in again when he was twenty-one, to save him from significant jail time. Branson started a magazine called The Student just before he dropped out of school and then began a mail-order record business he called Virgin, running both operations from the crypt of a church. He opened his first Virgin record store on Oxford Street in London in 1976 but had major cash-flow problems. To pay off a bank loan, he pretended to buy records for export to evade an excise sales tax. He was arrested, spent a night in jail, and was able to avoid a trial after his mother remortgaged the family home to pay the settlement. He emerged from the episode chastened and emboldened to do better. As he noted in his autobiography, “It is unlikely, not to say impossible, that someone with a criminal record would have been allowed to set up an airline.”7

  Meet Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, disarming yet self-serving, humble yet acquisitive, charming yet brash, founder of an empire of 400 companies, and the fourth wealthiest person in Britain. He has all the hallmarks of ADHD and it’s a good bet he has the explorer gene.

  Branson cut his teeth selling records, but he operates like a butterfly collector, or a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower. He’s dabbled in everything from condoms (his Mates brand failed) and mail-order brides (he couldn’t get any customers) to booze (Virgin Vodka) and pulp fiction (Virgin Comics). He’s evolved a clever form of branded venture capitalism where the Virgin Group acts as a loose umbrella and the brands are all leveraged by his gift for marketing, yet each one is free to experiment and fail. He’s even branded his intuitive, freewheeling management style, expounded on it at length in a 600-page autobiography titled Losing My Virginity. Branson laughs when he says, “I don’t complicate my life with financial reports,” and he claims not to know the difference between net and gross profit.8

  Branson has eclectic interests, but he recognized the aviation and space industries as particularly ripe for innovation. He left the safe harbor of a highly profitable music selling and recording business to go into the risky commercial airline business. Virgin Atlantic started in 1984 with a single jumbo jet leased for a year. He nearly failed at the outset when birds flew into one of the engines during a certification flight and he didn’t have the million dollars needed to replace it. He managed to borrow the money and a few days later had an inaugural flight that became a transatlantic party with free-flowing booze and topless models. He stuffed the flight with journalists to guarantee good publicity and to burnish his reputation as capitalism’s fun-loving wild child. Then he had to cope with a long and brutal fight with government-subsidized British Airways. His adversary used such dirty tricks as impersonating his staff, hacking his passenger lists, and spreading lies about him and his company.9 Branson sued for libel and won a billion dollars in an out-of-court settlement, but rising fuel costs and an economic downturn made running an airline in the early 1990s difficult. In a decision that he said broke his heart, he sold his music business to keep the airline afloat. Characteristically, he reacted to his troubles by reaching even higher, getting into a challenging business that had no track record at all—space travel. He said he was inspired to think about space travel by a question he was asked on a BBC children’s TV show in 1988.

  Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 and then commissioned Burt Rutan to scale up his SpaceShipOne design to be suitable for space tourism. Whereas SpaceShipOne had one pilot, SpaceShipTwo carries two pilots and six passengers. The carrier aircraft, White Knight II, will take off from a custom-built facility in New Mexico, with a 10,000-foot runway and a suitably “space age” terminal building. At an altitude of 52,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo will rocket upward to just over 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, where the curved limb of the Earth will be visible and the sky will be jet black. The total flight time will be two and a half hours, with just six minutes of parabolic weightlessness at the top of the arc of its trajectory. For this experience, Virgin Galactic is asking a cool quarter of a million dollars (Figure 19).

  They’re getting it. As of late 2013, more than 650 people had paid deposits totaling $80 million. The list of people on the reservation list included Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and Stephen Hawking. Branson, a diehard Trekkie, named his new spacecraft the Enterprise. He asked William Shatner to go up but said Shatner declined because he was afraid of flying. Shatner’s version is that Branson asked him how much he’d pay to go on the inaugural flight and he replied, “How much would you pay me to go on it?”10

  Figure 19. The timeline of Virgin Galactic begins with Burt Rutan’s victory in the X Prize competition with SpaceShipOne in 2014, and the selection of a site in southern New Mexico as the launch facility for SpaceShipTwo flights. Progress was put on hold by a fatal accident and the loss of SpaceShipTwo in late 2014.

  Branson has said that White Kn
ight II represents “the chance for our ever-growing group of future astronauts and other scientists to see the world in a new light.” He thinks humanity will have to spread beyond the planet in order to prosper.

  However, even for pioneers with the magic touch like Branson and Rutan, the space business is risky. In 2007, three people were killed and another three injured in an explosion at Rutan’s Scaled Composites factory, and a year later Rutan said, “Don’t believe anyone who tells you the safety will be the same as a modern airliner’s.” SpaceShipTwo reaches a top speed of 2,500 mph and passengers pull 6 g’s on the way down. They wear helmetless spacesuits, which could be a problem if the spacecraft loses pressure at 300,000 feet. In more than thirty test flights, only three have been at supersonic speed. Early in 2014, Virgin Galactic switched to a new, plastic-based, solid rocket fuel, and in October a pilot was killed and another seriously injured when the SpaceShipTwo rocket malfunctioned. This will add to the delay of the first commercial launch, already totaling five years.

  Branson’s never been stuck behind an executive desk—he’s a hands-on adventurer. In 1986, he raced a boat across the Atlantic faster than anyone had before. The next year, he was first to fly a hot-air balloon across the Atlantic. In 1991, he broke both distance and speed records crossing the Pacific, also in a balloon. When SpaceShipTwo finally has its inaugural flight, Branson and his two adult children, Holly and Sam, will be on board.

  The Space Futurist

  “Over the next 20 to 30 years, humanity will establish itself in space, independent of Earth.” Peter Diamandis is sublimely confident that the teething problems of the private space industry will soon be over and we’ll be on our way to becoming an interplanetary species. This isn’t a goal mentioned anywhere in the Space Act that guides NASA. As he put it, “Not since lungfish crawled out of the oceans onto land has this happened!”11