ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Space entrepreneur Burt Rutan, whose company Scaled Composites sent the first private astronauts into space last year, opened the International Space Development Conference with a blistering critique of NASA. He said the agency is wasting taxpayers' money on a deeply flawed space shuttle and paper spaceships that never get beyond the planning stage.
According to Rutan, NASA should get out of the human spaceflight business and leave the flying to the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.
Rutan outlined his plan to fly tens of thousands of paying passengers into suborbital space within 12 years, and follow that up with commercial flights to Earth orbit and beyond. "I want to go to the moon in my lifetime," he said. "That's my personal goal."
Rutan thus set the tone for four days of schmoozing -- but mostly scheming and arguing -- among space entrepreneurs, NASA officials and aerospace executives gathered to hash out the future of commercial space flight.
Organizers of the four-day conference tried to unify these disparate groups under the banner "Your ticket to space," but discord was the dominant theme. Attendees, representing the major players in government and commercial spaceflight, could agree only on their mission to send people into space. After that, the gloves were off.
At stake is whether ordinary citizens will have a role to play on the high frontier.
With NASA's aging space shuttles grounded for the last two years because of safety concerns, and no replacement in sight, space startups have stepped in to fill the void. They have challenged the government order dominating human spaceflight since Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rocketed to orbit in 1961.
Part of the old order is NASA awarding open-ended contracts to big aerospace firms (the "primes") like Lockheed Martin. The manager of Lockheed's newly formed Space Exploration group, John Karas, capped the conference's opening day with a dinner presentation.
Attendees naturally expected Karas to illuminate the basic concept behind Lockheed Martin's bid to build a space shuttle replacement. Instead, Karas delivered a presentation called the "Evolution of Discovery" that seemed calculated to convey as little information as possible. When asked by an audience member to address Lockheed Martin's plans for human spaceflight, he replied with a flat "no."
With Lockheed Martin remaining silent regarding its shuttle plans, a space startup called Transformational Space stole the show with a full-size mockup of its proposed shuttle replacement.
Although Transformational Space, or t/Space, has chosen not to bid for the contract to replace the shuttle, the company nevertheless hopes to beat big aerospace companies to orbit with a four-person crew transfer vehicle, or CXV, that NASA can use to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.
Instead of bidding for the full amount ($500 million) it needs to develop the ship, as the primes will do, t/Space is asking NASA for small increments of development money in exchange for achieving significant milestones.
NASA is sitting up and taking notice; the space agency has already awarded t/Space $6 million for developing the CXV concept and building flight-test hardware that Scaled Composites will fly this week.
T/Space's ship differs from those proposed by the primes in one other important respect: it will fly paying passengers. After supplying NASA with the ships it needs, t/Space plans to offer flights to anyone who can afford them.
Space tourism is the prize most of the space entrepreneurs have their eyes on, and one of the biggest points of contention is how to safely fly well-heeled tourists and handle litigious relatives who don't take kindly to fatal accidents.
For Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company started by Richard Branson last year, the best technology is obvious: a spaceship powered by a non-explosive mix of nitrous oxide and synthetic rubber launched from a high altitude airplane. This is the approach Scaled Composites used to create the world's first commercial astronaut last year, and the one that t/Space also champions.
But other companies, including Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, plan to fly passengers on good old-fashioned, two-stage rockets fueled by explosive kerosene and liquid oxygen.
That prospect keeps Whitehorn awake at night. If some garage rocket scientist blows himself up trying to get into space, the U.S. government may well put the brakes on the whole industry.
If that doesn't happen, Virgin Galactic plans to begin the first regularly scheduled passenger service to space in 2008. The first 100 passengers have already paid their deposits on $200,000 tickets.
The names of the lucky six to fly the first flight will be drawn from a hat, though they won't be on the inaugural flight -- that's reserved for Branson, Burt Rutan and Branson's nonagenarian father. And if you don't have 200 G's to spare? Branson's launching a new TV game show in which contestants will compete for rides.
Perhaps space entrepreneur Bob Richards summed up the tenor of the new spaceflight industry best during the ISDC's closing presentation. He likened the squabbling of its participants to the cacophony of an orchestra warming up; once in tune, the noise will turn to music, and space will never be the same.
