The Siren Call of Space--Free to Fly

The future of human exploration, development, and recreation in outer space, appears more dependent upon private space launch companies than on NASA, ESA, or other government agencies. Beginning this year, the pace of private space launches and launches of other private space ventures, will begin to pick up. According to Technology Review:

Last week saw the successful launch of the Space Shuttle, but this week may see something far more relevant to the future of space travel: the launch of a prototype piece of a future orbiting hotel. It comes amid an expected flurry of private launches of small, innovative, and reusable rockets that will make 2006 a watershed year for privately financed rockets.

Taken together, these expected launches could usher in an era of relatively inexpensive space travel. "Even as the shuttle sweeps overhead, we have new items on the real road to practical spaceflight -- private market development -- popping up," says Boston-based aerospace engineer and consultant Charles Lurio.

The first of the new companies to launch this year is developing a potential new destination: a hotel in space. Using a design originally conceived as an add-on module for the International Space Station, Las Vegas hotelier Robert Bigelow is planning his first test flight of a subscale version of an inflatable space station module, scheduled to take place by July 14 at a launch pad in Russia. He hopes to have a full-sized orbiting hotel open for tourism by 2012. While some have been skeptical about Bigelow's plans, partly because of his relative secrecy, Lurio says "by all accounts...this is a serious, technically careful project."

But the Bigelow launch is only the first in a series of expected private launches. Some of the loudest roars will be heard this fall in New Mexico, at the X Prize Cup. That's an exposition to showcase developments in new rocket technology, following the 2004 awarding of the $10 million X Prize for private manned rocket launches that reached suborbital altitudes and returned safely. The X Prize Cup will kick off with multiple launches and takeoffs of rocket-powered vehicles.

The Cup will see at least two launches of prototype vertical takeoff, vertical landing rockets that might evolve into a vehicle that could someday land on the moon. These will be made as part of a NASA-sponsored lunar challenge -- a challenge that includes a $2.5 million prize for demonstrating a rocket's ability to take off and land vertically, and move sideways while aloft. Fifty teams have registered for the contest and two are considered almost certain to compete: Armadillo Aerospace of Texas, which was a competitor for the original X Prize, and startup Masten Space Systems of Mojave, CA.

Meanwhile, Space Exploration Corp., or SpaceX, founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk, this October expects to make a second launch attempt of its Falcon 1 rocket, at the Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, after an attempt last spring that failed less than one minute after liftoff (see "Space Tourism or Bust"). When it comes to putting satellites or astronauts into orbit within the next couple of years, as opposed to suborbital flights, SpaceX may be the only real contender.

If the Falcon 1 launch works as expected, the company plans to begin test firings of a much bigger craft, the Falcon 9, as early as this November. Using nine rocket motors identical to the single motor in Falcon 1, the huge rocket could deliver payloads and humans to the International Space Station (ISS), or anywhere else in low Earth orbit. The tests slated for this fall would be static firings -- engine tests while strapped to the launch pad -- but after a series of tests next year, actual commercial flights could begin in 2008, Musk said.

Finally, Virgin Galactic, a partnership between Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan -- founder of Scaled Composites, whose SpaceShipOne won the X Prize in 2004 -- is getting close to test flights of a suborbital tourist spaceplane (although Rutan never announces a schedule for his test flights until they happen).

More at Technology Review. Hat tip Keelynet.com.

This is exciting news for space enthusiasts. Some readers may remember watching Neil Armstrong first step onto the moon's surface in 1969. For them, the past few decades must have been very frustrating. Certainly well known writers, scientists, and personalities such as Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Hans Moravec, Eric Drexler, and many others must have been pounding their fists in frustration over the slow progress of space development. Certainly Gerard O'Neill and Robert Heinlein would have been extremely excited to see the uptick in private space activity, had they lived.

Nothing worth doing is without risk, and certainly involvement in outer space will be risky in many ways. Despite the risk, some of the age's most successful entrepreneurs are getting involved. Persons who made billions of dollars from the growth of Microsoft, Amazon.com, Paypal, and other companies, are risking significant chunks of cash on new space launch companies and technologies. These are people who are used to getting things done. Bureaucratic paper shuffling and bowing to Slavic stonewalling are not in their style of doing things.

Humans should not keep all their eggs in one basket. Stray comets and asteroids have destroyed dominant life on earth more than once in the past few billion years. Sooner or later it will happen again. Further away from the sun are materials and life-sustaining volatiles many times the amount of what are present on earth. If humans decide to utilise the resources of their own solar system, many times the population that presently lives on earth could happily inhabit the outer system.