Just weeks before the historic second flight of SpaceShipOne - a trip that won him the $10 million X Prize - Burt Rutan, the ship's designer and builder, sat down for a chat with WIRED*. Here's what he said.*
For nearly half a century, the government has held a monopoly on manned space exploration. Quite predictably, this approach has not served us well. NASA is clinging blindly to an embarrassingly expensive and dangerous space shuttle program that should have been scrapped years ago. Before SpaceShipOne, if you wanted to get to space you'd have to pay $20 million for a trip on a Russian Soyuz rocket. Now it's clear: Manned space travel's best hope is the private sector, not NASA. In the open market, entrepreneurs and space hobbyists will do in a decade what NASA couldn't do in 46 years: provide safe, reliable trips to the heavens for the cost of a Caribbean cruise.
NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation. After the Columbia shuttle broke apart over Texas during reentry, Sean O'Keefe, NASA's director, unveiled the agency's new no-risk policy, following the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Board report: All shuttle flights must permit the crew to bail out to the International Space Station in the event of irreparable damage to the shuttle. Consequently, NASA won't return to the Hubble telescope; it's just too far from the ISS. If the agency won't, as a matter of policy, send a manned mission to the Hubble, how is it going to send astronauts to Mars and beyond?
In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too. They have to be: The payload is passengers - space tourists, citizen explorers, thrill seekers, whatever. A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market. What I learned is that you don't really need government resources to achieve suborbital space travel.
The technology of SpaceShipOne is relatively simple and inexpensive. The hardware is almost entirely reusable. In fact, the only parts subject to real wear and tear are the bearings in the landing gear, which can be easily and cheaply replaced. The spacecraft can theoretically take off and land from any airport. You don't need a launchpad or an expensive base facility - just a 9,000-foot stretch of runway. With simplicity comes safety.
It's time for NASA to get out of manned space travel and concentrate on its core strength: basic research and development of space technologies. Recently it took a small step in the right direction by inviting experts from the private sector to review plans for a deep-space probe on a nine-year mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in January 2006. Human spaceflight, however, will start to flourish when we put individual pilots, space enthusiasts, and venture capitalists at the helm.
We've already licensed our technology to British entrepreneur Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, a privately held space tourism venture that plans to sell tickets to space for about $200,000 a pop and begin launches within three years. While that's not exactly cheap, it will only get cheaper. With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline. - as told to Joseph Portera
