It's a tiny drama in the history of space flight – an argument between a do-it-yourself Canadian astronaut and doubters alarmed he's about to foolishly expose himself and others to harm by blasting off in a largely untested rocket ship.
But the debate surrounding Toronto's Brian Feeney and his planned space launch raises important questions: How much freedom will the new generation of space explorers have as they search for cheap ways to fly people into the heavens? In trying to break away from costly, slow, government-run methods of developing manned flight systems, how much risk will we tolerate?
For the better part of the last decade, Feeney's life has been the da Vinci Project. It's a volunteer effort, based in Toronto, to build a spacecraft and fire a man – Feeney, actually – into space. Right now, Feeney and his da Vinci volunteers are locked in a race with aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan and his SpaceShipOne crew, financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, to grab the $10 million Ansari X Prize for carrying out a private manned space launch.
The da Vinci team's plan for going to space involves launching an immense helium balloon from the high prairie of western Saskatchewan. Suspended beneath the balloon will be a 25-foot-long, 8,000-pound rocket ship called Wild Fire. Feeney will ride in the ship's capsule, and when he reaches 70,000 or 80,000 feet, he's supposed to light up his engine and go screaming to the edge of space, 100 kilometers up or even higher. After a few minutes of weightlessness, Feeney's capsule will plunge back into the atmosphere, then float back to Earth beneath a parachute.
There's nothing inherently crazy about the idea. Space scientists have been launching rockets from balloons for decades. By its own account, the da Vinci Project has performed exhaustive computer modeling of Wild Fire's systems and its mission. Although Feeney is only a novice pilot, with just 25 hours in small planes, he says he's put in lots of grueling flight-simulator work and points out that flying a plane is nothing like piloting a space capsule. The capsule itself has also been designed to remain stable even if Feeney becomes impaired during his flight.
But there's one huge unknown: Unlike Rutan's well-planned, systematic and largely public program to prove the capabilities of SpaceShipOne, the Canadian team has never run an integrated end-to-end test of the launch system that Feeney's life will depend on. That fact has stirred mocking skepticism in rocket-geek discussions online and drawn scathing criticism from a veteran Canadian space scientist living in the province from which da Vinci will launch.
Ted Llewellyn, a University of Saskatchewan space and atmospheric scientist who has conducted more than 130 rocket launches, questions da Vinci's apparent reliance to date on modeling the launch.
"Computer models can do some wonderful things for you, absolutely no question," Llewellyn says, pointing to his own experience. "But when you go into new areas, you really need the experimental proof that something works."
Llewellyn doubts the da Vinci team is truly prepared for the challenge posed by the mission's very first step: launching its 8,000-pound rocket ship by balloon. He also questions why so little information has been made public about da Vinci's other systems, including its rocket engines, navigation and safety hardware.
"I don't mean to sound negative. I'd like nothing more than for him (Feeney) to succeed – that would thrill me," Llewellyn says. "But please, don't make a fool of yourself."
Feeney won't discuss past tests, arguing that details like that give away too much to his well-funded competition. But it appears that the da Vinci team will conduct its first test of how its balloon will handle the payload weight on Sept. 4, just four weeks before Wild Fire's first planned flight, Oct. 2. The team is also doing a month of testing on its rocket engine, concluding just days before the launch.
What Feeney will talk about at some length is how he feels about skeptics.
"We don't have anything to defend or to prove to anyone," he said in an interview just after announcing his launch date. "People are, pardon the expression, pissing in the wind."
Feeney says the real issue is not how much testing the da Vinci Project has or hasn't done, but developing "a new paradigm" that makes it easier, quicker and cheaper to build new manned spacecraft. And that, indeed, is the theme underlying the entire X Prize competition.
"The fact that in 40 years the cost of traveling into space hasn't changed, or has arguably gone up, is a testament to the fact we need to do something different," says Peter Diamandis, founder and president of the X Prize Foundation. "In order for us to allow for real breakthrough technologies and approaches, we have to allow people to try different ideas, ideas that to the public or to the status quo may appear to be dangerous or nonsensical."
Diamandis adds that while he's a strong advocate for "the right of explorers, even in this day and age, to risk their lives for something they believe in," the explorers themselves "have no right to risk the lives of those standing by."
To limit the potential for reckless stunts, suborbital launches like the ones planned for SpaceShipOne and Wild Fire are governed by rules set up by national aviation agencies. SpaceShipOne is launching under a license granted earlier this year by the Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Space Transportation office. The da Vinci Project is still awaiting approval for its space shot from Transport Canada's Launch Safety Office.
Where should the line be drawn between prudence – doing enough testing to prepare for problems during a push-the-envelope flight – and daring exploration?
Mark Lewis, a University of Maryland aerospace researcher, says, "There's a happy medium somewhere" – though finding it is a challenge. He points to the history of aviation, noting that test pilots in the 1950s "were being killed right and left" to prove new concepts.
"That was kind of accepted as risk," he says. "Today, we've gone to the other extreme."
Testing has to be done, he says, especially when human lives are at stake. But at some point, he adds, you have to accept risk to make progress.
"We have to understand that in any human event – if I build a bridge, chances are I'm going to lose someone building it," Lewis says. "And that's something in aerospace we're not allowed to have happen."
