__ Do-it-yourself astropreneurs are bucking the system to put a schmo in orbit. __
Peter Diamandis sits in an office near St. Louis' Gateway Arch, impatient, a man who has aimed his life at one big moment. The view that surrounds him: a city deservedly proud of its history as a portal to adventure. Lewis and Clark vanished into the Louisiana Territory from here, and reappeared. Charles Lindbergh, whose pioneering solo transatlantic flight was sponsored by city fathers, helped galvanize an aviation hub here. The Mercury and Gemini capsules - the black cans that carried the first two waves of American astronauts - were built here.
St. Louis courted Diamandis, persuaded him that for a man yearning to launch humans into the next great era of aeronautics, this was the place to be. So it was here that he established the X Prize Foundation, an organization with a clear mission: to spur space travel for the rest of us. The X Prize itself is a $10 million award that will go to the first group to build a vessel capable of taking three 6' 2", 198-pound adults to an altitude of 100 kilometers twice in 14 days. The prize was Diamandis' idea, but it was jump-started by St. Louis businesses, which donated the first $2 million.
Like any boomer, Diamandis, 38, can tell you where and when the cosmos imprinted his imagination: grade school, late in the Apollo era. More and more routinely, crews rocketed to the moon and walked, hopped, golfed, and dune-buggied across its surface. For most kids watching it all on TV, the thrill quickly softened into nostalgia. But not for Diamandis: "I was in fifth grade, and it hit me that the space frontier was my purpose in life."
While studying biology at MIT in 1980, he cofounded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and modeled himself on members of the astronaut corps. NASA wanted a medical-research background? Diamandis would give it to them, by way of Harvard Medical School.
At Harvard, he met astronauts. The reality of their career path - a marathon of training and toeing the space-agency line in the hopes of achieving, at most, a shuttle flight or two - sobered him. He was convinced there had to be an easier way to reach the Great Beyond than up NASA's ladder.
After getting his medical degree, Diamandis went back to MIT to do graduate work in astronautical engineering. In 1988, he started his own firm, International Microspace, to develop a satellite-launch vehicle. He managed to land a deal to fire off up to 10 payloads as part of the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative, but the contract died when the Clinton administration took office and dismantled the Star Wars program. Diamandis sold his firm, but his failure to launch a rocket heightened his intuition that something was wrong with the system.
In 1996, he founded the X Prize with a modest goal: to back the launch of one suborbital flight - something more like the Coney Island Cyclone than a full-on, 17,500-mph orbital cruise. The idea is that the event will begin an age of aircraft development and barnstorming competition like the one the Wright brothers touched off at Kitty Hawk. And when it does, Diamandis will go down in history as the man who made it all happen.
"I'm sick and tired of waiting - that's the bottom line," Diamandis blurts out during an otherwise low-key interview. His words could be the motto for a whole generation of establishment-fatigued aerospace engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs frustrated by the barriers that have kept nonastronauts out of space: the Cold War, NASA's reluctance, the limits of technology and money, or anything else that stands between dreamers like Diamandis and their prize in the sky.
If the $10 million jackpot sounds puny compared with the cash one might need to build and launch a space vehicle, it is. But Diamandis believes in the prize model enough to have solicited much of the kitty himself (he's about halfway there) from corporate and private donors, along with funds raised via the X Prize Visa card.
The X Prize is rooted in a faith that a reward is only the last bit of motivation needed to make a flight happen. Fact is, our collective impatience-to-fly quotient is soaring. Sure, adventure travelers can cruise the submerged deck of the Titanic and tempt the fates on Everest - but they want more.
And it's not just the daredevils. A 1997 Space Transportation Association survey suggests that more than 40 million Americans are interested in a two-week shuttle trip. Three million would spend $100,000 on such a flight. And plenty are going beyond talk. Zegrahm Space Voyages, one of two US companies taking reservations for suborbital flights that could launch as early as 2002, has fielded inquiries from 10,000 people in 77 countries - and has received 75 deposits on the 2.5-hour trip's $98,000 fare.
Meanwhile, 17 teams are vying for Diamandis' X Prize, and many others are building their own space-tourism dreams, from moonwalker Buzz Aldrin's plan for developing big, reusable rocket planes that will evolve into commercial space liners, to Las Vegas real estate tycoon Robert Bigelow's promise to spend half a billion dollars developing a lunar orbiting cruiser. (Go to 2030: Space Tourism, page 132.)
The astropreneurs are approaching the task of hurling passengers into a heavenly parabola in two ways: One, you'll be strapped into a minishuttle with several fellow voyagers. To avoid the weight and cost of a ground launch, the spacecraft - after being carried or towed to a release point - will ignite its rocket engines, burst through the top of the atmosphere, and fly back to Earth. Two, you'll climb aboard a rocket that will rise on a ball of fire and carry you into the wild black yonder. It'd be a round-trip ticket: Some schemes foresee parachuting a capsule back to Earth; others depend on a rocket body that can fly home, like the space shuttle.
So what's keeping us earthbound? Economics, for starters. A satellite-style ride, sans the niceties of, oh, life support and a return trip, runs $3,500 a pound. For a ride on a craft like the space shuttle, it's more like $10,000 per pound. These numbers are a crushing weight both on well-funded projects like the Iridium global mobile-phone system, now famous for its bankruptcy, and on small-player dreams of putting payloads into space.
The exorbitant costs are doubly vexing because they keep the launch market tiny. In the first nine months of 1999, the worldwide total of all orbital launches for every purpose - civilian, military, and commercial - was 55. That's a marked fall-off from the industry's busiest year, 1984, during which there were 129 launches. The annual average has fallen from 116 in the 1980s to 81 in the last 10 years. At the millennium, the only ready customer for commercial launches is the telecommunications industry.
Another reality: Gigantic firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin or government entities - NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese military, and the Russian space establishment - dominate the launch industry. The space-industrial complex relies on government contracts to build very big, very expensive, labor-intensive systems. And with a lock on the business, the old guard has shown little interest in making access to space less expensive. So the tiny market discourages investments in cheaper launch systems, which in turn keeps the industry noncompetitive.
What will change that? Astropreneurs feel that building relatively inexpensive vehicles will spur interest from an array of new customers - package-delivery companies, adventure tourists, scientists. But first, those astropreneurs need investors who dream big. Pat Kelley of Vienna, Virginia-based Vela Technology Development, prospective builder of the tourist-trade ship that will fly Zegrahm's customers, says he has had no luck with the investment banks. "Sometimes I hardly get the time of day," he says. "A couple have said, 'Oh wow, what a neat project,' but there's no way we'll ever get anyone interested in that."
Although interest from the VC crowd has also been sparse, astropreneurs have found a few angels: Walt Anderson, an independent telecom mogul, who some say has donated $30 million to Gary Hudson's Rotary Rocket Company, is the chief sponsor of two space-commercialization groups: the Space Frontier Foundation and the Foundation for the International Non-Governmental Development of Space. Steve Kirsch, founder and chair of Infoseek, gave $100,000 to the Mars Society to help fund its Mars Arctic Research Station, an experiment to simulate colony conditions on the Red Planet. And novelist Tom Clancy has invested $1 million in Rotary Rocket and is on the roster of donors funding the X Prize.
But Kelley believes that to garner the real money they need, the astropreneurs themselves will have to start thinking like businesspeople. "You might have to come up with revenue paths that are related to but not directly involved in your project, like flight software or vehicle tracking," he says.
To their credit, the astropreneurs know it. They talk in practical terms like revenue possibilities and market potential, and think with the customers in mind, generating ideas ranging from space hotels to a global mail service that skips across the top of the atmosphere. If money is the only real barrier to space, and the only real barrier to money is a sound business plan, then investors will get exactly what they're looking for.
Mike Kelly is gunning for the X Prize. Like Diamandis, he knew early in life that space was his destiny. But he emerged from Purdue University's mechanical-engineering program in 1980 to find "there was nothing going on in space." The shuttle was America's manned space program, period. So he took a job in TRW's ballistic-missiles division, working on the MX missile, where he learned about launch technology. The experience emboldened him to conspire to nudge the company into the launch-vehicle business.
When future NASA administrator Daniel Goldin took charge of TRW's ballistic-missile shop in 1989, he wondered aloud whether the company could build and market a rocket for space missions. Kelly and a colleague stepped up. "We raised our hands and said, 'We're ready, boss,'" recalls Kelly. The team eventually tested a booster, but when Goldin left for NASA in 1991, the firm shut down the rocket business and sold it.
In 1993, Kelly left TRW to start Kelly Space & Technology in Southern California, and set out to build and launch a reusable rocket ship. The result is the Astroliner Express - essentially a plane with rocket engines, expected to take passengers on suborbital trips within five years. The craft avoids the cost of a launchpad by using runways; it will be towed, like a glider, by a 747. At 20,000 feet or so, the engines will ignite, the towrope will release, and the craft will begin a steep climb during which it will attain a speed of Mach 8 - a little over 6,000 mph - and depart the atmosphere to 180 kilometers. A larger version, the Astroliner, would be capable of lugging 10,000 pounds, enabling it to carry a satellite and a disposable second-stage rocket. But one thing at a time: Kelly figures the Express alone will cost $1 billion to develop.
And Kelly has broadened his thinking beyond satellites. "I'm asked to make public speeches a lot, and I never talked about space tourism - only low Earth orbit satellites," he says. "But after every speech, people ask, 'When can I go?' That shows me where the real market is."
Kelly argues that one successful suborbital barnstorming flight - just one, no matter who pulls it off, even at $100,000 a passenger - will light the fuse. "This is the same way other industries progressed," he says. "The wealthy paid for the prestige of going first, then clever people figured out how to reduce the cost. At some point, this business will catch the attention of the financial community and other ideas will start to emerge."
Four hundred miles north of Kelly's San Bernardino outpost, Preston Carter sits in a spartan office behind a security gate in the middle of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Before he can start talking to me, he's obliged to set out signs on sawhorses in the hallway, signaling that there's an uncleared visitor inside. A flannel-clad, bespectacled, balding bear of a man, he's the visionary, engineer, chief publicist, and wannabe test pilot for a rocket-plane concept called HyperSoar.
Carter's office model of the HyperSoar craft suggests a kind of radical Boogie board - a flat, deep, gray wedge with a rectangular air-intake slit just below and behind the leading edge and two vertical fins in the rear. Its body conceals a hybrid ramjet/rocket engine designed to allow the plane to take off from a runway, climb, and accelerate to Mach 10 and an altitude of 40 kilometers. HyperSoar, an update on space-plane ideas going back to the '70s, would rise out of the atmosphere another 20 kilometers, then drop in along a shallow parabola and skip off the upper atmosphere; the pilot would fire the engines briefly to launch the craft into another parabola and repeat the process as necessary (about one skip per 400 kilometers) to reach its destination. The flight would end as it began, on a runway.
HyperSoar could one day carry ordinary people (or troops, or military ordnance, or satellites). But not at first. Carter identified a paying market before he began designing the plane: global express mail. The idea is to serve an existing market that other aero and astro technologies - heavy-lift rockets on one side and conventional commercial aircraft on the other - can't satisfy.
"We said, 'Let's not worry about getting to space. That'll be step two. Can we identify a large-scale terrestrial market that will benefit from getting to space?'" Carter says. "Back in the mid-'80s, Federal Express was exploding. So we said, 'How about intercontinental express mail?' So we wrote a letter to Federal Express and said, 'Here's our idea. We looked at different ways of solving this problem and this is what we came up with: HyperSoar. We're not asking for anything. We're just asking you: Are we full of it?'"
FedEx thought not. The company had already approached Lockheed with an offer to invest $100 million for R&D of a high-speed aircraft for the intercontinental trade. But Lockheed, with big Reagan-Bush military contracts to fill, said no thanks. "Fred Smith told us, 'We perceive the same thing you do - domestic express mail is chicken feed compared to the global market,'" Carter recalls. "'You should develop HyperSoar further.'"
The practical focus on package delivery puts the plane in a market before anyone cuts metal on the project. Then there's the almost whimsical flight profile: Who wouldn't want to go on a two-hour coaster ride with a head-in-the-stars view of Earth? Yes, it'll cost a bundle, and no, people won't climb on HyperSoar at Kennedy or O'Hare (because the plane's rocket engine would be thunderously loud, passengers will be shuttled to remote airstrips). But the plane makes any point on the globe a two-hour flight away.
The barriers? Total cost: $500 million to build and test a prototype and perhaps $1 billion to launch a production model. The good news, Carter says, is that airframe heating, a limiting issue with all very high speed aircraft, won't be a problem, because HyperSoar will spend about two-thirds of its flight time in the cold of space.
That leaves only the source of the Mach 10 speed, an experimental engine called an RBCC (rocket-based combined cycle), which incorporates phases of ramjet (air is taken in, compressed, and mixed with fuel, then blasted out the rear), scramjet (essentially the same process adapted for speeds of Mach 6 and higher), and rocket propulsion. Several companies - some working with the Defense Department and some in collaboration with NASA - are developing experimental RBCCs, but none has a working power plant. So it's much too early to set a countdown clock.
Countdown clocks are of little concern to the Mars Society believers - a cadre of new-world conquerors who, judging from the fervor permeating their August convention at the University of Colorado, see themselves as strapped in and on the pad, ready to go. The impatience-to-fly quotient in Boulder is off the charts.
The 700 attendees have paid $180 each for four days of 9 am-till-you-drop workshops and panel discussions - and to be part of a movement still far enough from the mainstream to prompt worried questions from relatives. "I told my mom I was coming, and she asked whether I'm in a cult," says Dennis Hoey, 45, who runs a microscope-repair service in Sacramento, California.
There's an impressive lineup of the most serious of Mars scientists, who try to answer questions like, How do you tell time once you're there? Could a Martian funeral industry help fund the planet's settlement? What impact does Martian colonization have on Christianity? And just how can the Mars Society go about launching a 66-pound payload on the cheap?
As at most memorable parties, the real force here is the host - Bob Zubrin, a 5' 9", dark-eyed, knit-browed astronautical engineer with a whorl of black hair in a Van Allen halo over his balding head. He's a veteran of Martin Marietta and architect of a now-famous plan for an affordable mission to Mars. He has the credibility to get the Mars Society linked with the NASA Arctic Mars base and the clout to draw stars: Filmmaker James Cameron talks up two Mars film projects. Buzz Aldrin offers a taste of off-planet color. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars trilogy, and - next to Zubrin - the movement's biggest icon, shows up to say that yes, getting to Mars is good, but only for the right reasons.
But Zubrin goes on first. He grabs the ballroom podium with a glower, rocks into the microphone, and introduces nearly every point with an exasperated, "Look ...," a sign of irritation a touch out of place with an audience just aching to erupt at his one-liners.
"Look! This isn't rocket science!" They leap to their feet. "Mars, in fact, is not really a new challenge," he proclaims. "It's been staring NASA in the face since the day the first person set foot on the moon. The target was never the moon. It was Mars - even before the space age." More cheers.
Zubrin promises not to rest until those in charge - in NASA, in Congress, in the White House - see that only a Mars mission will realize our destiny. His blueprint, Mars Direct, was developed as an alternative to NASA's $450 billion Reagan-Bush era Mars proposal. His principles could be summed up, simply, as "Do the job now with what you have."
The plan suggests using space-shuttle rocket technology and a cycle of launches to send first a return vehicle and supplies and then crews and more supplies. The hope is to circumvent the problem of transporting the immense amount of fuel required for a return trip by manufacturing it out of raw materials readily available on the Martian surface. The predicted cost: as low as $20 billion. When? Assuming the next president and Congress can be cajoled into committing money, assuming NASA and its contractors can move: Humans on Mars by 2010!
Zubrin gets his ovation - the speaker-audience interaction is like the give-and-take at a rock concert. The crowd practically mouths the words to his speech. He's followed the next day, though, by Kim Stanley Robinson, a serious environmentalist who seems to have landed in the libertarian-tinged Mars-or-bust crowd despite himself.
Robinson shudders at Zubrin's suggestion that a Mars mission is an opportunity for a new generation of American pioneers. "In four words," he says, "here's why you shouldn't speak of Manifest Destiny: It reeks of murder."
Robinson dismisses the common motives for travel to Mars - saving the aerospace industry, creating a safe nonterrestrial haven for humanity, et cetera. He argues that the only compelling reason for a mission is to gain insight into Earth's physical crisis - "Going to Mars is an environment project," he says, closing with a plea to the Mars Society to forge links with green groups and shift its vision. "Frontier is a bad word for it," he says. "Wilderness is good - wilderness is a sacred space."
The Zubrin/Robinson disconnect is part of the usual fare. But what has people talking is the Mars Arctic Research Station, a collaboration between the Mars Society and NASA set to break ground later this year. Among the most sought-after attendees milling about are members of a NASA team that has spent the last three summers exploring the proposed training site in the Canadian Arctic.
The first phase of the project is scheduled for the summer 2000 and involves setting up a two-story cylinder housing habitat, lab, and workshop in Haughton Crater, a nearly barren 12-mile-wide meteor-impact site on Devon Island. The crater was chosen because the cold, dry spot at 75 degrees north latitude is thought to be analogous to a Martian landing base. The Mars Society will pay for the building and operation of the base - though the station's NASA researchers will be funded on the taxpayers' dime. The five-year cost is estimated at $1 million; to date the society has raised $250,000, which Zubrin says is more than enough to get things going.
If anyone was inclined to head home from the conference early, Buzz Aldrin's scheduled appearance on the last day squelches it. While he talks of plans for a transworld shuttle that could orbit Earth and Mars, it matters little what he says about the Red Planet. What matters is the place he occupies in the space movement. Aldrin embodies the point where the spectacular success of the Apollo program intersects with the dreams of mass spaceflight and the growing frustration with the inefficiency in the space-industrial complex. No one - not even Zubrin - is more frustrated with NASA than Aldrin.
He says he can build a reusable rocket booster that will lead to airline-style tourism while taking care of future launch needs for NASA and the Pentagon. What he doesn't know - even after half a century as a pilot, 290 hours in space, and a lifetime as a military commander, scientist, and entrepreneur - is how to get power players to act on his advice.
Aldrin, who turns 70 in January, is a white-haired, heroically chiseled workout fiend - trim, hard looking, given to running steps, lifting weights, and swimming several times a week. He's also a veteran of aerial combat, aviation's ultimate reality test. Trained as an astronautical engineer at MIT, he helped develop NASA's techniques for spacecraft docking and worked on the Apollo navigational displays. After walking on the moon with Neil Armstrong, and a stint as commander of the Edwards Air Force Base test-pilot school in the late '70s, he began thinking about space again.
In the early and mid-'80s, Aldrin focused on how to get regular citizens to the moon as a way to drive a more aggressive national space program. In the late '80s, he founded Starcraft Boosters to develop launch vehicles and ShareSpace, a sister company, to promote space tourism.
The special cross Aldrin bears is that - despite a lifetime of achievement and willingness to play by the rules - neither NASA nor the big contractors has given him more than a polite hearing. So it's not surprising that he criticizes NASA for remaining an inefficient ostrich of an operation - even while having suffered a decade of budget cuts - and for keeping a stranglehold on space. "NASA doesn't want to be bothered to help open the doors to a paradigm shift in access to space," he grumbles.
In Aldrin's view, shifting the power structure means moving away from the model of the expendable launch vehicle (ELV), which has been used since before World War II, to that of a reusable launch vehicle (RLV). Returnable first-stage RLVs could launch in combination with second-stage boosters, or they could be single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicles, such as Lockheed Martin's proposed VentureStar or Rotary Rocket's privately funded Roton.
Aldrin's crusading is more than philosophical. Starcraft Boosters is promoting its own RLV, StarBooster. An unmanned rocket that, in its first generation, would consist of an airframe encasing a powerful first-stage engine, StarBooster is designed to slam cargo into space and release it there, at which point second- or third-stage rockets would take the payloads to other destinations. StarBooster would then be guided back to Earth and prepared for its next trip. In Aldrin's view, the craft would serve as the template for space liners that would carry tourists into the void a hundred at a time.
Many developers and customers are aiming for the same goal. The problem, as Aldrin sees it, is that Lockheed and Boeing, which dominate the US launch business, avoid research into any launch mechanism that would undercut their current structure, and their deep pockets give them the inside track on big-ticket NASA development projects.
Take Lockheed's work on the X-33, a program designed to develop a big, commercially viable single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. To date, Lockheed has spent nearly $1 billion in government funds (and $280 million of its own) to develop the X-33 - which is only a two-thirds scale model of an SSTO. The company hopes to use the test craft as a stepping-stone to a reusable vehicle called VentureStar. NASA and Lockheed swear, amid skepticism, that the vehicle will get off the ground by 2010. Meanwhile, competing plans like StarBooster get little or no government support.
Still, Aldrin hopes that the space establishment will give way, that he'll build StarBooster without having to slog through Wall Street and VC circles looking for money. "Most of the entrepreneurs want to do their work outside the government," Aldrin says. "Our purpose is to better the civil space program - NASA - and to better the Defense Department space program. We also want something that's immediately competitive in the commercial market. Only through joint cooperation will we be able to really succeed."
What will break the logjam? "Beats me," Aldrin says. He sighs, pauses, and ticks down a list of pioneer virtues: perseverance, patience, awareness.
Ultimately, Aldrin wonders whether society has the attention span for the developments necessary to get to space tourism. "In the past, things didn't happen so fast," he says. "Now, the public gets enamored with one thing, and then, 'What's next?' It's hard for people to understand the steps we need to take. But the government isn't going to do anything until the people understand and insist that they do it."
Someone will win the X Prize and take tourists to space. Orbital cruise ships and space hotels and the rest will happen, too. The when is easy enough - the day someone sees money in the enterprise - but putting a specific date on that epiphany is the tough part.
One key to breaking down barriers to commercialization, according to activists like Space Frontier Foundation president Rick Tumlinson, is getting NASA to quit low Earth orbit, the near frontier, and move to the far frontier - everything else up there in the sky. Tumlinson espouses a vision in which private operators run the show in Earth's immediate environs - the International Space Station, shuttle flights - everything but sensitive government missions like lofting spy satellites. NASA's job? Exploration: getting a toehold on the moon, Mars, asteroids, and the rest of the solar system's array.
The private sector has found a sympathetic ear in Congress, which has passed one bill and is considering others that require the space agency to cooperate with astropreneurs. And NASA has been edging that way, too. It has turned most space-shuttle operations over to a private consortium operating as the United Space Alliance. It has invited small players like Kelly Space & Technology and Starcraft Boosters to participate in writing the blueprint - the Space Transportation Architecture Study - for the next generation of shuttles. And in a speech to the Space Frontier Foundation in September, Daniel Goldin signaled that NASA is willing to surrender its role on the near frontier - if and when entrepreneurs show they can take up the slack.
After the Mars conference, Mike Kelly said he felt that the space business had "changed in a fundamental way. The stage is now set for the transition from the wartime-economy model of space to commercial space. I mean mass-market, Joe Six-Pack, consumer-oriented, kid's-market commerce, the kind that delivers rivers of money instead of the trickle that launching satellites for NASA or Motorola would bring in."
The next few years will tell whether the firmament has really been altered, how much the investment equation will shift, how fast the engineers and astropreneurs can make concepts flyable. In his high-security office, in a schmo uniform of jeans and flannel shirt, Preston Carter can practically feel HyperSoar's controls in his hands and see the first payload of mail in the cargo bay. He's had practice flying - conventionally, in small planes, and unconventionally, writing and piloting flight simulations for Mars landings.
A big who-knows factor surrounds new launch vehicles: They all look so achievable, and yet no one anywhere has so much as welded a seam on such an aircraft. And still, Carter, when asked when he expects to see a version of HyperSoar take flight, answers with a look that might laser through aircraft aluminum itself. "Three years? It's possible," he says. "But there aren't enough people in the country to stop me from flying in five."
MORE
- X Prize Foundation www.xprize.org
- Space Transportation Association www.spacetransportation.org
- The Space Frontier Foundation www.space-frontier.org
- The ShareSpace Foundation www.sharespace.org
- The Mars Society www.marssociety.org
