Nuts & Volts

The White Knight launch aircraft
carries the spaceship, followed by Bob
Scherer’s Starship chase aircraft.
Paul Allen and Burt Rutan discuss
the results of a recent SpaceShipOne test
flight.
SpaceShipOne shown underneath
White Knight during flight 15P. Photo
courtesy of Jim Campbell/Aero-News
Network.
want to be remembered for helping
make affordable space tourism
happen, so my kids and hundreds of
thousands of people can experience
the magic of space.”
Richard Branson is famous for
spending his fortune on testosteronepumping
adventures, such as his
giant hot air balloon, the first to
successfully cross the Atlantic. And
his boat, “Virgin Atlantic Challenger
II,” which crossed the Atlantic Ocean
in 1986, in the fastest-ever recorded
time.
And if there is any man who can
rival, and perhaps surpass Branson
in the “never outgrow your boyhood
fantasies” department, it’s Paul
Allen. He owns the Seattle
Seahawks, and turned his interest in
and love for music into Seattle’s
multimedia Experience Music
Project Museum, complete with a
Jimi Hendrix wing. He’s turned his
fascination with science fiction into
the Science Fiction Museum and
Hall of Fame.
With a combined net worth of
well over $27 billion, as well as
the track records of several highly
profitable businesses behind them,
the Rutan-Allen-Branson team seems
well poised to pull off making a commercial
success out of their collective
inner-child’s love for sci-fi.
In contrast, NASA’s manned
spaceflight efforts appear to be largely
stuck for the foreseeable future,
with the Space Shuttle, an early
1970s-design that’s become known
as the DC-3 of space — or “the DC-1
and a half,” as Arthur C. Clarke once
sardonically quipped after the
Challenger explosion of 1986. While
NASA has successor designs on the
drawing board, its bureaucracy poses
deep structural problems that prevent
much of a return to the glory
days of Neil and Buzz. “Its fixed costs
are actually very, very high,” Reynolds
says. “If you actually look at the
NASA budget, nearly all of it goes to
just keeping the lights turned on and
the paychecks flowing, and there’s
not a lot of money left to actually
do stuff.”
Suborbital
Bootstrapping
The current priority of Virgin
Galactic is sub-orbital touristoriented
flights. Their preliminary
travel brochures picture the flights as
part of a luxurious and expensive
experience, including transportation
to the New Mexico spaceport,
lectures, “meet the astronaut” events,
and world class dining. But just as
in the days of Project Mercury,
suborbital space travel is a way of
bootstrapping towards orbital flight
— a far more significant goal.
Reynolds is not surprised that
tourism is driving the initial
commercialization of space travel.
“People laugh at tourism as an
industry, but it’s something like the
third biggest industry on the planet
— it’s huge! If space tourism were
only as big as terrestrial tourism, it
SpaceShipOne glides down for approach to the Mojave airport.
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