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Where there's space, there's hope - and
$10m
By Raja M
MUMBAI -
Near a graveyard for mothballed Boeing and Airbus
jetliners in California's Mojave Desert, Burt Rutan,
legendary aviation pioneer who designed the Voyager, the
first aircraft to fly around the world nonstop without
taking on fuel, is breathing life into the idea of
passenger space ships. His SpaceShip One craft, which
he unveiled
this summer, is chasing the X Prize, a US$10 million
incentive to make sub-orbital passenger flight as common
as air travel.
If someone wins it, the
faithful expect, the next steps in the hyped, hoped and
debated holy grail of space commerce are orbital
passenger flights, space hotels, asteroid-mining and
space-resourced energy to keep the earth happy and clean
for centuries. And of course, Buck Rogers and Swiss
Family Robinson yarns for human settlements outside the
planet.
The X Prize is the brainchild of Peter H
Diamandis, 42, now of St Louis, a maverick space
entrepreneur who founded Space Adventures, the company
that organized the space trips of Denis Tito and Mark
Shuttleworth. He established the X Prize Foundation in
1996, and it was in St Louis that businessmen came up
with $2 million in seed money for the prize. Diamandis,
who studied biology at Harvard Medical School and
engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, told reporters that in fifth grade, "it hit
me that the space frontier was my purpose in life".
The X prize is to be awarded to the best
privately-funded spacecraft flying three 90-kilogram
passengers 100 kilometers above Earth, twice in a
fortnight. If a winner appears by the year 2005
deadline, and market surveys stick to script, the
Japanese could be the top consumers in a global space
tourism business annually worth $70 billion.
Whether the long-term windfall materializes or
not, the privately funded, non-profit X Prize Foundation
has already concentrated earlier sporadic
non-governmental attempts at space tourism. For
instance, The Japanese Rocket Society, a private
organization, has been plodding through 50-passenger
Kanko-Maru space vehicles since the 1990s. They would
like to see commercial rides start on their $628 million
reusable Kanko-Maru rocket start in 2016 after 1,200
test flights over three years.
"The first
trillionaires will be made in space," says Dr Patrick
Collins, 53, a professor of economics at Azabu
University, Japan, and author of more than 100 space
economy-related papers. He predicts a new breed of
"astropreneurs" ... "Space tourism could lead to a
genuine aerospace industry and a renaissance of space
activities."
For decades, of course, space
tourism conferences galore have thrashed about with
estimates, technology, projections, market surveys and
hot air. But for the first time, through the X Prize,
private companies have put their money where the risk
is. X-Prize contestants each are expected to invest $2
million to $20 million in developing low-cost
spacecrafts for sub-orbital flights. Besides Rutan's
SpaceShip One, Canada's Arrow and Britain's Starchaser
industries have already test-fired rockets.
Diamandis expects the X Prize to be won in 2004,
for sub-orbital markets to mature by 2008, orbital
markets to peak by 2012 and the first private asteroid
missions by 2020.
Asia is trying to keep pace.
Dubai hosted a space tourism conference in May for
travel agents in the Middle East. The Indian Space
Research Organization, ISRO, is focusing on building
low-cost Reusable Launch Vehicles, RLVS, that can lead
to building passenger space ships. China has an advanced
space program.
"Asia can play a critical role by
providing much needed investment capital for space
tourism," Diamandis told Asia Times Online. "And also in
providing a very large market of wealthy, educated and
willing consumers interested in traveling into space.
Space flight will also lead to a future rapid
point-to-point rocket travel. You can fly from New York
to Tokyo in less than one hour." Fedex and same-day
couriers could get excited.
Given its growing
appeal, the X Prize seems settled towards what experts
acknowledge as an inevitability: an overcrowded,
resource-depleted Earth drawing energy, metals and
minerals from nearby asteroids and planets. Researchers
estimate Earth could need more than 45,000 billion
kilowatt-hours of power by 2050. The average
half-kilometer diameter, nickel-iron asteroid is said to
contain more than $20 trillion in platinum-group metals
alone.
"Private companies already are planning
expeditions to chart, capture and eventually mine these
enormous rocks," Diamandis says. "The implications for
the financial markets on Earth are profound." Given the
increasing heat from environmental groups, relieved big
industries might love to bolt from Earth and ravage
planets where Greenpeace is yet to set up branch office.
But getting there is a journey strewn with major
technological challenges, failed tests, slow funding and
a dime-for-two dozens skeptics. Diamandis tells his
favorite story, a conversation with author Arthur C
Clarke at the Vienna Intercontinental Hotel during a
United Nations conference on space. It was Clarke who
wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"Truly
revolutionary ideas," Clarke told him, "go through three
phases. In the first phase, people will tell you that
your idea is crazy, it will never work. In the second
phase, your critics will tell you that it might work. In
the third phase, they'll claim that they were believers
all along."
Clarke's first-phase club snorts at
the idea that X Prize type of sub-orbital rides can
drive a new era in space exploration and commerce.
Critics point to the missing step between sub-orbital
and orbital. Reaching 100 kilometers (62 miles) requires
speeds up to 2,500 m/ph. But going orbital requires
17,000 m/ph. With it come complex challenges like the
extreme heat when a craft exits or re-enters the
atmosphere at high speed.
Sub-orbital space
tourism could fund the way out of technological
barriers, say X Prize supporters. "The sub-orbital
flight will enable hundreds or thousands of manned
flights each year," Diamandis says. "Such a flight rate
will allow designers, manufacturers and operators a
chance to learn and make improvements." He has a sequel
planned: an X Prize for orbital flights.
A
NASA-funded study found 19 percent of 450 American
millionaires ready to pay $100,000 for a space ticket.
Diamandis expects that figure to dip to $10,000 in the
next phase before hitting mass-market prices. In 1996,
the 9th European Aerospace Congress compared space
tourism market surveys in Japan, Germany and the US. The
Japanese registered highest interest at 70 percent. The
market exists, only the mindset to use it is missing.
Collins, Diamandis and Rutan belong to an
increasingly vocal tribe disgusted with the lack of
initiative from G7 governments-backed space
organizations to bring space tourism to the general
public. The US's National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) is their favorite whipping boy.
They accuse it of wasting $1 trillion over 45 years on
useless space projects. Rutan, an aviation legend who
has successfully designed, built and flown 38 different
aircraft, called the Space Shuttle the most dangerous
and most expensive system ever developed.
Collins is more scathing than Rutan.
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, he calls "G7 space
agency cost estimates .. a scandal wrapped in a sham
inside a farce. In truth, NASA's cost estimates are
economically meaningless." A five-day, six-member Space
Shuttle flight mission, they estimate, costs a whopping
$16.5 million of taxpayers' money per minute, per
person. Or, $500 million for every Space Shuttle ride.
The X Prize is their banner of revolt against this
cuckoo Old Order.
Inspiration for the X Prize
popped from Diamandis reading about hundreds of aviation
prizes offered between 1905 and 1935. In 1927, Charles
Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight in his Spirit of
St Louis was for the $25,000 Ortig Prize offered for
non-stop flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh's
flight broke psychological barriers. Applications for
pilot's licenses increased by 300 percent the same year
in 1927; Air travel grew to be a $300 billion industry.
Diamandis wanted a similar kick-start for space
travel when he based the X Prize in St Louis. Its
citizens backed him just as their forefathers had
supported Charles Lindbergh. Twenty-five contestants
registered from Argentina, Canada, Israel, Romania,
Russia, the UK and the US.
X Prize might have
turned its back on governmental space agencies, but its
universal goals find support there too. "Space tourism
is a logical extension after human exploration of land
and sea," says Dr George Joseph, director of India's
Vikram Sarabhai Space Applications Center and the man
behind India's moon mission by 2008. "Fifty years before
the first aircraft not many believed we could fly. We
are by nature a race of wanderers. Space exploration is
inevitable. "
Raja M is an independent
writer based in Mumbai.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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