“Did you forget?”
“What, Will?”
“You’d already registered the Virgin trademark signature logo for space!”
The first really interesting launch vehicle Will and I studied was a rocket-powered helicopter called the Roton, which was developed in the late 1990s. On paper, at least, the Roton had real charm. To understand it, take a garden hose up to the roof of your house and let one end of the hose dangle into your fishpond. Spin the other end around your head. Soon water will be gushing out all around you and your fish will be in trouble.
American inventor Bevin McKinney wanted to take a rotary pump into space. Roton was a space capsule with four rotor blades stuck on top. At the tip of each rotor was a rocket, fed from a tank at the bottom of the capsule. On liftoff, the rockets spun the blades, lifting the capsule into the sky. This is clever, because in the atmosphere, spinning a rotor is a much more efficient way of getting off the ground than merely blasting a rocket underneath you. Even better, the spin of the rotor siphons fuel from the tanks, doing away with the complicated and heavy fuel pumps that weigh down conventional rockets.
Eventually the capsule reaches heights where the rotors won’t work, because there just isn’t enough air to provide lift. At this point, the rotors swivel down and blast the capsule into space. A little of the thrust is used to keep the rotors spinning and the fuel flowing, and that spin helps stabilize the capsule as it rises. Before reentry, the blades are folded away, then deployed again once the air is thick enough to provide decent resistance. The capsule whirls down to the ground gently, like a helicopter. Beautiful. Only it didn’t work.
It was elegant and simple on paper, but horribly complicated to do. The Roton people—a company called, logically enough, Rotary Rocket—very kindly let Will take the controls of an early test capsule, to see how the thing handled in helicopter mode. One touch of the controls was enough to tell Will, an experienced and practical airman, that the project would never fly. It was very sad.
Good on paper: Rotary Rocket tried to send a helicopter into space.
Will wasn’t the only interested party on Rotary Rocket’s doorstep in 1999: the airplane designer Burt Rutan was there as well. I remember Will, Burt, and me chewing over the Roton project in the Voyager Restaurant at Mojave Air and Space Port. I’ve known Burt since the 1990s, when he was designing the capsule for the Earthwinds balloon project. But Will had never met Burt before, and was doing a passable impression of Walt Disney’s Tigger, scribbling these X-15-style rocket planes on napkins and waving them under Burt’s nose.
Three years later, Will and Burt got to play for real stakes when Virgin Atlantic agreed to share with Steve Fossett the cost of developing what would become the Virgin GlobalFlyer. By this time Will had been joined by Alex Tai, a captain in Virgin Atlantic and, yes, another rocket nut. On one occasion Alex and Will looked in at Scaled Composites to see how the GlobalFlyer was getting along and got more than they bargained for. Much more.
Will phoned me first. “With all due respect to Steve Fossett,” he said, “fuck the GlobalFlyer.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Burt Rutan is building a spaceship.”
When I saw Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, I thought: “This is only the beginning.” I was 19 years old and had grown up imagining that everyone my age would have the chance to travel into space. Obviously, seeing that historic footfall made a deep impression on me. Over the years, the people I have been most drawn to in my life—my best friends and closest colleagues—have revealed themselves to be closet (and not so closet!) rocket nuts.
Word for word, this is what Will Whitehorn has said about the matter: “The first thing I remember about space was when I was nine years old. I was sitting in front of a black-and-white television in Edinburgh watching Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon, and my mum said to me, ‘One day you’ll be flying into space, Willie.’”
NASA astronauts placed this plaque on the moon in 1969. Who will read it next?
Sounds familiar? Will and Alex and I are not alone. We are far from alone. An entire generation grew up thinking that space travel was just around the corner. Now, thanks to Peter Diamandis, it is.
In 1994, Dr. Peter Diamandis was given a copy of Charles Lindbergh’s book The Spirit of St. Louis. In it Lindbergh describes, in detail, how his team worked toward winning the Orteig Prize. Peter is another rocket nut. All his life he has dreamed of getting into space. For most of his life, his dream was just that: a fantasy—something not to make too much noise about over the dinner table or in front of the interview panel; something slightly embarrassing. (In many quarters, it still is.) Lindbergh’s book changed Peter’s life. He realized that his lifelong dream of traveling into space could be made real: what he needed was a prize similar to the one Lindbergh won when he flew a plane across the Atlantic.
On May 18, 1996, under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the first X Prize competition was announced: a $10 million purse for the first nongovernment organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.
Now, at this stage, the purse didn’t have any actual money in it. Peter’s innovation was to realize that anyone can fund a prize. His job—and the job of the X Prize Foundation—was to identify the best prizes: the ones that would inspire serious effort, transform or create a new industry, and change the world for the better.
The idea had legs: in May 2004, the X Prize was officially renamed the Ansari X, to reflect a whopping multimillion-dollar donation from the Iranian American Ansari family. The Ansaris, who’d amassed their fortune through their telecommunications business, were looking to move into space. For Anousheh Ansari, in particular, this was much more than a business decision: as well as backing the X Prize, in 2006 she became the first female space tourist, flying aboard a Soyuz spacecraft for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.
Big, international, headline-grabbing prizes like the Orteig and the Ansari X create hope and inspiration. The day a prize is launched, people stop asking whether something can be done; they start asking when it will be done. By the time the $10 million prize was awarded, later in 2004, more than $100 million had been invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize. Now that’s what I call a return on investment!
Burt Rutan had been tooling around with spaceship ideas since 1994. He had already built a fighter plane in his garage, adapting Saab’s 1962 Viggen design for the homebuilt market. From where he was standing, a spaceship didn’t seem a much taller order. He remembered X-15 flights from his time at Edwards; he knew whom to call to fit enough power into a light enough fuselage to get a vehicle into space. The only problem—and it was a problem that was going to take him years to solve—was how to get the blessed thing down in one piece.
Escaping the earth’s atmosphere takes speed: the X-15 flew at almost seven times the speed of sound. To get into orbit you need to hit Mach 25! However neatly you finesse your flight path, you’re always going to be coming back into the earth’s atmosphere at a good lick—and certainly faster than the speed of sound. If your own engines don’t push you past the sound barrier, gravity will. You’ve got a long way to fall and plenty of time to pick up speed.
Now, a spaceplane that can survive a Mach 7 ascent can cope with an equally fast descent—just so long as it’s pointing the right way. That, as the X-15’s test pilots discovered, was the difficulty.
Once the X-15 left the earth’s atmosphere, its control surfaces no longer had any air to work against, and the ailerons, elevator, and rudder became useless. Instead, small rocket nozzles were used to control pitch, roll, and yaw in the vacuum of space. So far, so good. However, it was imperative that when the X-15 reentered it was correctly aligned on all three axes. If it wasn’t, it could easily either break up or burn up. In November 1967, Mike Adams made a fatal error during reentry, and his X-15 entered a hypersonic spin at Mach 5 and 230,000 feet. Tragically, he was unable to recover, the X-15 broke up
at about 70,000 feet, and he was killed.
When I saw Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, I thought: “This is only the beginning.”
For years, whenever Burt thought about building a spaceship, he would remember Mike Adams, he would remember the complex systems that had been developed to inject a descending spacecraft back into the earth’s atmosphere—and his heart would sink. Such automatic systems were way beyond anything he wanted to handle. Hell, they were way beyond anything NASA or the Russians wanted to handle! Whether you flew Mercury, Gemini, Soyuz, or Apollo, you descended the same way: simply and crudely. You weren’t, God forbid, given any kind of plane. Instead, you sat strapped into a capsule that descended through the atmosphere blunt end first, picking up heat as it went. A thick, heavy metal shield absorbed the heat of reentry. Once the craft reached a thick enough portion of the atmosphere, it released a parachute. If the parachute held, you survived. If it didn’t, then neither did you. In April 1967, Yuri Gagarin’s friend and compatriot Vladimir Komarov died aboard Soyuz 1 when his parachute failed to open.
For all the work and design improvements that have gone into chutes over the past 200 years and more, parachuting remains a high-risk sport. A few years ago, I lost my good friend Alex Ritchie in a skydiving accident. And there was the one occasion when I damn near killed myself during a jump, when I somehow contrived to jettison my main parachute. Skydiving is a thrilling and worthwhile pastime; but you wouldn’t ever expose the general public to those kinds of risks, or carry civilians into space, if parachutes were their only means of reentry.
Burt Rutan was stuck. When Peter Diamandis announced the X Prize, in 1996, the best he could come up with on his own was a glorified capsule-and-parachute system. He did, though, build an experimental launch vehicle, called Proteus. This early version of a first-stage launcher—a launcher with nothing to launch!—tantalized the more far-sighted of Burt’s colleagues. Among them was Scaled Composites engineer Cory Bird, who remembers he spent the year 2000 bugging Burt almost constantly about how they just had to build a spaceship—somehow.
Bird came up with design after design in an attempt to create an air brake—some “feathery thing” that would slow a descending spaceship through the air in a way that wouldn’t rip it apart. Eventually, Burt caught the bug. He, too, would be caught doodling “feathery things” at every available opportunity. Shuttlecock-like air brakes covered restaurant napkins, charity-event programs, and any scrap of paper that passed within his reach—until one night, in the middle of the night, Burt shattered his wife, Tonya’s sleep, shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”
Burt had come across the solution to the reentry problem long before. As a kid, he used to fly model aircraft that operated without any remote controls. They just took off and flew. They had timers to bring them to Earth after a few minutes’ operation. The timers would lift the horizontal stabilizers on the tail to a 45-degree angle—and the models would stop flying and float to the ground. Tilting the stabilizers turned them into massively efficient air brakes.
As I mentioned earlier, there is no point at which the earth’s atmosphere magically stops and space begins. The air simply gets thinner and thinner, the higher you go. Now, if Burt could create an air brake efficient enough to slow his spaceship down when it was still at a very high altitude and passing through extremely thin air, the slower his spacecraft would be traveling when it started hitting the atmosphere proper. To put it simply, he realized how to turn a whole spaceship into a giant shuttlecock. Overnight, Burt Rutan knew he could win the X Prize.
These days, Burt’s SpaceShip series is synonymous with the Virgin brand: we share a vision of how the first commercial space operations will work (more on that in a moment), and Virgin has backed—to the tune of $100 million—the development of the WhiteKnightTwo–SpaceShipTwo launch system. Nevertheless, the man who first put up the money, some $26 million of it, to turn SpaceShipOne from a drawing on a napkin into firebreathing reality was Paul Allen, a rock guitarist and science-fiction fan who also just happens to be the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the most technology-minded philanthropists in the world. Getting somehow involved in the space race had been one of Paul’s longest-held ambitions. Even before the X Prize was announced, he had fallen in love with Burt Rutan’s hands-on, can-do approach and had agreed to back his “homebuilt” spaceship.
Burt Rutan’s launch system came in two parts. There was the first stage, WhiteKnight, a carrier aircraft designed to lift a payload up to around 53,000 feet and then drop it into the air. Then there was the payload, SpaceShipOne, a rocket plane that, once dropped from WhiteKnight, would blast out and up into suborbital space before twirling back to Earth.
SpaceShipOne’s propulsion system was designed by Tim Pickens, the son of a NASA physicist who worked on the Apollo rockets. Tim’s formal education is nothing to write home about, but his garage was crammed with old NASA engine parts and he knew, better than most, what plugged into what. Tim’s lifelong devotion to laughing gas as a propellant had first been realized in 1994, when he strapped a prototype rocket onto his bicycle. It worked quite well, so he built a new bike and a bigger rocket. That worked even better: the bike accelerated faster than a Porsche!
Tim’s hybrid engine for SpaceShipOne combines the best elements of the two species of rocket engine first developed by Robert Goddard at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is both a liquid- and a solid-fuel rocket. The solid fuel lines the case of the rocket. The liquid oxidizer is sprayed into the motor and ignited. The surface of the solid fuel reacts, combusts, and turns to gas. Because the propellants are stored separately, the only place they can ever mix is inside the engine. A leak cannot cause an explosion. Most serious systems failures on rockets over the years have been fatal. Tim’s engines are quite different, and very failure-tolerant.
They’re cheap: once all the designing and engineering has been done, cranking them out on a production line is a relatively simple business. Even better, they’re not dirty. A ride on the Virgin Enterprise (which uses the same kind of rocket motors) will generate fewer CO2 emissions than those generated by a return commercial London–New York flight. Ours is a clean spaceship!
Can we do even better? I don’t doubt it. We’re already working with WhiteKnightTwo’s engine manufacturers, Pratt & Whitney, to upgrade the engines to run entirely on a renewable jet-aviation fuel; and as far as the rocketry goes, the future is very promising. There are all manner of novel propellants out there, at early stages of development. An engine called Alice, for example, developed at Purdue University, in Indiana, burns aluminum powder in ice and promises one day to release nothing but hydrogen gas and steam in its exhaust. Imagine it: a steam-driven rocket filled with nothing more than firework powder!
A cross-section through the atmosphere (not to scale). Look how far we’ve traveled since the Wrights flew!
The X Prize required a nongovernment organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. That meant that two pilots would get a stab at earning their astronaut wings in SpaceShipOne.
Neither man was Burt Rutan’s first choice. Scaled’s pilot-engineer Pete Siebold, who’d test-flown SpaceShipOne to a height of 20 miles, had to bow out after his spleen became so enlarged it could have ruptured during the flight. (Pete’s cancer scare proved to be a false alarm. He’s back in the program, and in December 2008 he took WhiteKnightTwo for its maiden flight.)
With Pete out of the running, it was left to Mike Melvill to board SpaceShipOne for its first (pre–X Prize) stab at the Kármán line—on June 21, 2004. This was no small achievement for a man prone to airsickness and who only learned to fly in the first place because his family box-cutting business needed a traveling salesman! That, mind you, was 30 years before. By 2004, and at the age of 64, Mike had logged more than 7,000 hours of flying time in more than 100 kinds of aircraft, including test flights of ten Rutan planes.
Mike’s friend and fellow Scaled test pilot Brian
Binnie flew WhiteKnight to an altitude of 47,000 feet and dropped SpaceShipOne into the air. SpaceShipOne promptly rolled onto its side. Then one of its control surfaces jammed. Then there were a couple of loud bangs. Mike hung on—and, incredibly, the spacecraft sorted itself out. After 76 seconds, the rocket ran out of fuel and idled down. Mike was shooting upward at faster than 2,000 miles per hour. All he could do now was hang on and hope that this was enough to get him over the Kármán line before gravity finally curved him back toward Earth.
He made it—just. The internationally recognized boundary of space is 100 kilometers (100,000 meters), or 62 miles. The official altitude Mike Melvill set was 100,124 meters. Mike had traveled just 124 meters into space—less than the length of two and a half Olympic swimming pools!
WhiteKnightOne carries SpaceShipOne on an early flight.
On September 29, SpaceShipOne, tethered to its mother ship, WhiteKnightOne, took off from Mojave Airport’s Civilian Aerospace Test Center on its first official X Prize flight. Again, Mike was at the controls as SpaceShipOne fell from its mothership, ignited its engines, and blasted 103 kilometers into and out of the air, well past the Kármán line this time.
For the second X Prize flight, another pilot would be given the chance to earn his astronaut wings; and Brian Binnie just could not believe his luck.
Brian’s early years were spent in Aberdeen, Scotland. When he was 14, the family moved to Boston, and after college Brian spent 20 years as a naval aviator. He had always hankered to be an astronaut, and got his first taste of true rocket science when a friend hooked him up with the people at Rotary Rocket. From there, he moved next door to Scaled Composites, became one of Burt’s most trusted and well-liked test pilots, and got to take SpaceShipOne 13 miles into the air on its maiden powered flight, on December 17, 2003.
Reach for the Skies Page 22