Another kind of off-world settlement lies much closer to home. Two thirds of the planet’s surface is covered by water, and yet we have barely begun to explore the oceans. Indeed, we have so far done little but dirty and damage this great and mysterious resource. The Chinese, Russian, and American military lead the world in undersea exploration, yet their manned subs cannot descend below a depth of 20,000 feet, and their explorers can barely see out of their craft, let alone interact with the fascinating world they have entered.
A new Virgin company called Virgin Oceanic is currently looking for investment opportunities in the field of deep-sea submersible exploration. Already we’ve developed good relationships with the “Burt Rutan of the sea,” British inventor Graham Hawkes, whose fourth-generation reef-exploring sub DeepFlight Aviator has (as the name implies) adopted avionics for an underwater environment: it literally flies through the sea, providing its pilots with a complete wraparound view of what surrounds them!
Graham believes a similar layout could be adapted for deep diving, and he does mean deep: the craft Graham is talking about will reach depths of 35,000 feet! Carbon fiber and metal will not stand such pressures; but glass will. Glass is, oddly enough, not a solid; it’s a liquid that flows very, very slowly. This gives it extraordinary strength under high pressure. Virgin Oceanic’s glass sub is, we hope, the SpaceShipOne of our oceanic future. On top of all that, we’re talking to Graham’s fiercest competitors: his ex-wife and her son, each of whom runs an independent company! I can’t wait to see how all their efforts play out over the coming years.
Our period of weightlessness is almost up. Mother Earth begins to tug at us, urging us back into our seats. SpaceShipTwo prepares to whirl its way, like a sycamore seed, back down into the thick, flyable regions of the earth’s atmosphere. Set against our visions of the future, Virgin Galactic’s ride seems modest indeed. But we should never be embarrassed out of our dreams. Long before planes left the ground, Henson and Stringfellow were pricing international air routes for their civilian airline. In the 1920s, biplanes carrying U.S. mail laid the routes for today’s domestic passenger services. One of Virgin Galactic’s long-term goals is to fly commercial passenger vehicles from continent to continent through suborbital space, reducing travel times and carbon emissions to a fraction of their present levels. To achieve anything at all in this world, your reach has to exceed your grasp.
Wherever we go in the solar system, and however far we reach into the cosmos, we will constantly be inventing new forms of travel for ourselves and for our machines. The birth of the Age of Space doesn’t spell the end of aviation. On the contrary. Every planet and every moon will present aviators of the future with unique challenges. New flying machines will be invented, and old ones rediscovered and reimagined. The great charm of aviation—and I imagine this is true of other kinds of engineering, too—is that good ideas never go out of date, and forgotten plans can always be dusted down and repurposed.
Work has already begun to conquer the skies of Mars. Mars has a pitifully thin atmosphere. Ordinary planes will have a hard job riding such sparse “air,” and plans for novel aircraft include inflatable wings and machines that imitate the flying behaviors of insects. But existing balloon and airship designs can be made to function just as well, especially now that their envelope fabrics can be made photovoltaic, to gather power from sunlight. NASA is funding a company called Global Aerospace Corporation to research a Mars “aerobot”—a robotic airship that will carry a gondola of scientific equipment and a set of small probes that can be dropped onto the Martian surface.
Venus gives aircraft designers quite different challenges. The planet is smothered in clouds, and above this layer aircraft manage well enough. We know this because in 1986 a joint Soviet-French mission successfully dropped two helium balloons into the Venusian atmosphere. The balloons settled 34 miles above the planet’s surface and sent back weather data. Since Venus is closer to the sun than we are, we know that future aircraft might be comfortably powered by solar cells. Designs for Venusian airplanes range from the prosaic to the positively outlandish. My favorite of these is a “solid state” airplane—essentially a single photovoltaic wing made of artificial muscle that would fly through the upper reaches of the Venusian air like a hawk or an eagle!
Getting closer to the planet’s surface is difficult. Venus’s clouds are pure sulphuric acid. Most of Venus’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide—and there’s so much of it, the atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface is a staggering 92 times that of the earth. There’s so much atmosphere weighing down on you at ground level, it would flatten you to the floor and spread you out like jam. The other effect of all that carbon dioxide is heat—lots of it. On a cloudy day—and it is always a cloudy day—the planet’s surface reaches 860 degrees Fahrenheit: hotter than the surface of Mercury. Getting there—and surviving the experience—requires much new thinking. Pasadena’s NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is drawing up an aerobot that simply drops probes onto the surface and listens to what they have to say before the temperature and pressure put them out of action. Another idea involves a reversible-fluid balloon, filled with helium and water, that drops to the surface of Venus to pick up samples, then rises and launches the samples it has gathered aboard small rockets for pickup by an orbiter.
Happily, most alien environments we’re interested in are a lot less challenging than Venus. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a nitrogen-and-petrochemical atmosphere twice as dense as Earth’s. An airship would have no trouble negotiating the smog to study the moon’s surface and search for the complex organic stuff we suspect may be hiding down there. Julian Nott—the balloonist who flew above the Nazca Plains in 1975—reckons conditions there are perfect, enabling balloons to stay aloft for decades. This is no idle speculation, either: for the past five years, Julian’s been working with JPL on the detailed design of Titan inflatables!
Jupiter also lends itself to airship exploration. Jovian airships will be quite unlike their Martian cousins. For one thing, Jupiter is too far away from the sun for them to rely on solar power. Instead they’ll need to gather their energy from the infrared rays emitted by the planet itself. Also, Jupiter’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, so obviously the balloons couldn’t use hydrogen or helium for lift. Jovian airships will have to be of the hot-air type. They will be montgolfières. How wonderful that a technology first developed in 1783 might one day prove its worth here, in the outer reaches of our solar system!
We’re heading home now, falling slowly toward the earth, spinning like a sycamore seed through the stratosphere. There are no storms here—no warm fronts or cold fronts; no weather. In the stratosphere, warm air rides over cold air, and the temperature drops steadily, down to a bitter minimum of around minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit. At this cold distance, it’s easy to imagine that life on Earth is equally calm, constant, and predictable.
Between five and ten miles from the ground, however, something odd happens. The farther down through the air we go, the hotter it gets. The bottom-most layers of the atmosphere are warmed by the earth. Heated from below like water on a stove, they tumble and spin. Bodies of warm air thump their way through layers of cold air, while great sinks of cold air plug-hole toward the planet’s surface. The rolling winds rub against each other, charging the atmosphere. The night side of the earth sparkles with lightning. This boisterous bottom part of the atmosphere is the troposphere. It’s where the weather lives—and so, most of the time, do we. In this thick and boisterous air, our wings unfold: SpaceShip Two becomes a regular glider.
We’re making our final approach now.
Back in the weather, steeped in the rain, fog, and ice of the uncertain, everyday world, you can’t help but wonder: What will happen? Will any of our dreams come true? Will we truly map other worlds, mine asteroids, tap unlimited power from the sun? Forecasting the future is a fool’s errand. The weather itself is hard enough to fathom. Meteorologist Bob Rice can remember a time—as recently as
the 1970s—when the weatherman could do little more than predict the next day’s forecast. “It took us so long to build a 24-hour forecast that we almost didn’t have time to do a 48-hour forecast,” he remembers. “By the time we got to the 72-hour forecast we might just as well have been throwing darts at a board.”
Predicting the air has not come very far since then. Human weather, though—for all our thought and study and science, we’re no closer to understanding its workings. We remain magnificently mysterious to ourselves. Will we, in Joe Kittinger’s words, learn to live with space? Will we learn to live in space? Or will we remain grounded, collapsing under the burgeoning weight of our own population? Will we break out of the earth’s egg—or die in the shell?
The world does not pull its punches. If we get the next 100 years wrong, we will crash, as surely as this spacecraft would crash, were our pilot not clever, committed, and awake; were the landing strip not laid out below us, well lit, well maintained, and well prepared.
The Spaceport is like a great blue, unblinking eye below us. Day and night, it stares up at the stars.
In a hundred years, what will it see?
[I]n this age of inventive wonders all men have come to believe that in some genius’ brain sleeps the solution of the grand problem of aerial navigation—and along with that belief is the hope that that genius will reveal his miracle before they die, and likewise a dread that he will poke off somewhere and die himself before he finds out that he has such a wonder lying dormant in his brain. We all know the air can be navigated—therefore, hurry up your sails and bladders—satisfy us—let us have peace. And then, with railroads, steamers, the ocean telegraph, the air ship—with all these in motion and secured to us for all time, we shall have only one single wonder left to work at and pry into and worry about—namely, commerce, or at least telegraphic communion with the people of Jupiter and the Moon. I am dying to see some of those fellows! We shall see what we shall see, before we die. I have faith—a world of it.
Mark Twain
Letter to the San Francisco Alta California, 1869
Afterword
It’s taken six years to get our spaceship built, and the blood, sweat, and tears of some of aviation’s most creative engineers and designers. On Sunday, October 10, 2010, VMS Eve, our WhiteKnightTwo launch vehicle, carried the VSS Enterprise to 45,000 feet over the Mojave Desert—and dropped it.
On the ground, I was joined by Virgin Galactic’s new CEO, George Whitesides, previously chief of staff of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Together we competed to see who could fry his eyeballs first, as we strained for a glimpse of the craft as it soared through the blistering blue of a perfect California day in fall.
Inside the VSS Enterprise, Pete Siebold and Mike Alsbury gripped the controls and found out for themselves just how well Burt’s SpaceShip Two was cutting the air. Their experiences, once tallied with the numbers spilling through ground control’s computers, would tell us what was just right, and what was wrong, with the first commercial spaceship that’s ever been built to carry regular passengers.
Sensors were planted in virtually every part of the Enterprise’s skin. Glancing at the sheer quantity of data streaming back to ground control, you could see the ship feeling every moment, every nuance of its flight. For Pete and Mike, too, the spaceship seemed a living thing. Hold the controls of a SpaceShip Two, and you can feel its every nudge and shimmy. You can feel it trembling against your hands. The ship’s control surfaces are connected to your controls by cables and pushrods. There are no servos in the way; no computers. There is no backup. You’re as much in touch with this craft as you’re in touch with the bicycle you’re riding. The Wright brothers would have marveled at the sight of VSS Enterprise—but they would have understood it, and they absolutely would have had the skills to begin flying it.
The sun was so bright that day, when the Enterprise appeared, it looked as if it were burning. It floated steadily, gently, down to the airstrip, almost too bright to see. Peter and Mike brought it into land. I couldn’t focus on the thing. I was tearing up. You can call it pride, certainly—I’ve come to know these people really well, and I know they’ve worked so very hard for this day. There was relief, there, too. After all, no one has attempted anything like this before. And there was something else—something harder to name. I headed across the apron, trying to remember to breathe. The VSS Enterprise: it was just beautiful.
On a project like this, there are the milestones that history remembers and there are the milestones that only the engineers shiver to recall. The VSS Enterprise’s first drop test sat somewhere in the middle. The press celebrated with us, and naturally the journalists wanted to talk about “the big one”: our first flight into space, which now cannot be much more than a year away. The engineers, meanwhile, were reining themselves back a bit, as though we had caught them midstride. Which, of course, we had.
The project has come a long way. The most technically difficult part of our project has been to build the WhiteKnight Two launch vehicle. It’s the largest composite plane ever built. It looks like a scaled-up Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer—in many ways that’s exactly what it is—and it looks so fragile and unlikely, a child might have thrown it together. But it can pull six Gs, loop a training crew into zero G for minutes at a time, carry 35,000 pounds to high altitude, and has a range of 2,000 nautical miles. In July 2009, I was lucky enough to be aboard Eve as she made her maiden public flight over the skies of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
In comparison, the business of building the spaceship has been, if not easy, at least a bit more familiar. The VSS Enterprise is essentially a scaled-up version of the SpaceShipOne that won the X Prize. Its rocket motors are similar to those used in SpaceShipOne, and we’re very confident that it can reach space. Until Peter and Mike put their lives on the line and tried it, though, none of us knew how Burt’s creation would feel about coming down again.
Negotiating the atmosphere is always the most demanding and dangerous part of a spaceship’s flight. This is why the successful drop test in October 2010 was such a major milestone for us: gliding at up to two Gs through the air, the VSS Enterprise was proving its worth as an aerofoil. But this is only the beginning. Still to come is the test of its unique, air-braking hinged hull. We knew Burt’s crazy method of reentry—folding the spacecraft in half, to turn it into a gigantic airbrake—had worked a treat on SpaceShipOne. But this is a world of hard knocks: it’s not interested in what happened last time. When we put the Enterprise through feathered reentry maneuvers, we’ll be subjecting it to the hardest and most difficult test it will ever undergo.
For the people at Virgin Galactic, safety is really exciting. Safety, and the pursuit of safety, is what gets them up in the morning. This sounds like an advertisement—and not a good one, either—but let’s think about this: up until now, space travel has been wildly unsafe. The safety record for space travel is something like a hundred times worse than the safety record of the very first experimental passenger planes. Up until now, flying into space has been like flying into aerial combat: there really has been no sure expectation that you’re going to come down again in one piece.
Virgin Galactic’s launch system will change all that. Our launch system has to change all that, or space will be forever out of bounds. No ordinary people will ever go there. Most won’t want to. Those who do want to will never be able to afford it.
When the first barnstormers took to the skies, they took passengers. The first passengers were wealthy and well connected, but very quickly anyone with five bucks in his back pocket could afford a ride. Among the thrill seekers were scientists and engineers. Physicists. Weathermen. Biologists. Surveyors. Agronomists. Railroad executives. Mapmakers. Ordinary people with interesting regular jobs who wanted to see what aviation could do for them. These are the people who bankrolled the aviation industry. And unless we can offer these sorts of people a safe, regular service into space, neither they nor we will ever go there.
&
nbsp; Airplanes need airlines. My colleague and friend Will Whitehorn has spent years now building an airline that will carry people into space. It’s vital work. Virgin Galactic’s financial stability is essential. We’re not a government with a pool of public money to dip into. If we can’t offer regular flights, we can’t fly at all. Virgin Galactic now has 370 customers and over $50 million in deposits.
Building Virgin Galactic has required patience and determination. Will and his team have attracted major visionary investment from Abu Dhabi, while working tirelessly to satisfy U.S. regulations. The regulators, for their part, have been tearing their hair out trying to make this work: Virgin Galactic—a private company that will fly an international clientele around on rockets over U.S. territory—is a project to boggle the legal mind. The United States is the only country on earth where such a project could be made real. That’s why Virgin Galactic is now, from top to toe, a U.S. company—and I’m delighted to report that a handful of the British team have just earned their green cards!
What Virgin Galactic needs now is a place to live. Enter Governor Bill Richardson. A few weeks after the VSS Enterprise glided to rest in the Mojave, Bill realized a long-nursed and long-fought-for ambition, and inaugurated Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert. Richardson’s vision has turned a patch of desolation into a beacon of hope and excitement: one that, as this industry grows, will provide money and jobs, and fulfill a lot of dreams for the people of his state.
Reach for the Skies Page 25