AP Scaled Composites

IT IS early in the morning in Mojave, and a pink blush has appeared on the horizon. One by one the stars are fading, and to the south of the airport a line of car headlights snakes into the distance. There is, however, no chance of hearing birdsong during what would otherwise be a serene desert dawn, for rock music is pumping out of huge speakers along the runway. Welcome to the age of commercial spaceflight. Prepare your chequebook for take-off.

On June 21st, Mike Melvill fired his rockets, hit three times the speed of sound, and took SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 100,124 metres (about 62 miles) before coming back down to Earth. It was the first privately built craft to fly a human into space, and later that day Mr Melvill became the first private pilot to be awarded astronaut's “wings” by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

In awarding those wings, Patti Grace Smith, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA, said the flight opened a new chapter in history, bringing access to space within the reach of ordinary people. Sure enough, tens of thousands of such people seemed to feel the same. They chose to make the pilgrimage to watch SpaceShipOne enter the history books because they were inspired by a sense of occasion, and the hope that this would expedite the development of space travel.

They are probably right to be excited. Ms Smith's definition of “ordinary people” may not match that of most of her fellow Americans (current estimates are that a flight into space will set you back $30,000-100,000), but something new and interesting is definitely happening. For SpaceShipOne cost a mere $20m.

This is a surprisingly reasonable price. The craft's sponsor, Paul Allen (who co-founded Microsoft), could have spent as much, or more, on a luxury yacht. Furthermore, there is cause for modest optimism about the changes that the flight of SpaceShipOne signals in the broader space business, as a new breed of entrepreneur creates a thoroughly modern industry.

In the short term, the next step for SpaceShipOne is to prepare for two further flights that could win it a $10m prize. The Ansari X Prize is an award for the first privately financed team to build and launch a vehicle capable of taking a pilot and two tourists into space twice within two weeks. But although SpaceShipOne landed flawlessly, the flight was not perfect. If the problems cannot be fixed quickly, they will delay Scaled Composites, the local firm that built SpaceShipOne, in its attempt to win the prize.

SpaceShipOne suffered two malfunctions, one of which Burt Rutan, the craft's designer and the founder of Scaled Composites, described as the most serious safety problem he has encountered so far. This was that when Mr Melvill fired his rockets, the craft suddenly rolled 90° to port. Although he was able to correct this, the system that runs the aerodynamic control surfaces of the craft subsequently malfunctioned. As good luck—or rather good design—would have it, there was a back-up. But he also had a scare when, during the ascent, he heard a loud bang. This is believed to have been caused by the buckling of a piece of fairing—a lightweight covering that slightly reduces drag. These problems meant that the craft only just managed to exceed its target altitude of 100km.

The aim of the X Prize Foundation is to jump-start the space-tourism industry. Mr Rutan and Mr Allen, too, have such a dream, and have been working at it since 2001. They want to show that space can be reached much more cheaply and reliably than at present. Most space entrepreneurs are driven by a belief that America's space agency, NASA, has failed in its responsibilities in this area. Only Mr Rutan, though, will say such a thing openly. He has won many fans. After the flight, he proudly waved a sign he had been given by a member of the public. It read, “Space Ship One. Government Zero”.

Despite much excitement over the X prize, though, only a few of the more than 20 groups that have registered their wildly differing ideas with the prize foundation have any realistic chance of winning. Furthermore, of those few, it is unclear whether any have designs that will suit commercial operation. Jeff Greason is the CEO of XCOR Aerospace, another small firm based in Mojave, which designs, tests and builds flight hardware. He worries that the prize, with its attached conditions, may not lead to the right sort of craft being built. Prize entrants simply need two flights in close succession, and are not necessarily motivated to develop a vehicle with low operating costs.

Mr Greason's company has a prospective design for a suborbital vehicle, Xerus, that could fly a single tourist into space. That automatically disqualifies it from winning the X prize. But Xerus is designed to make money. As Dan DeLong, the firm's chief engineer, points out, it is necessary to take more than one passenger only if the cost per launch is high.

Mr Rutan, naturally, has his own ideas about what a truly commercial vehicle would look like. He seems to favour craft that would carry more people—perhaps between six and nine. He estimates that the first tickets would cost between $30,000 and $50,000. A second-generation vehicle, he speculates, might bring the cost down to between $7,000 and $12,000. That is about the price of a luxury cruise. But he has not published the costs of operating SpaceShipOne and its carrier jet aircraft White Knight, so it is difficult for his competitors (as well as everybody else) to work out what a ticket might actually cost.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives some idea. Mr Rutan says his highest costs are staff for the pre- and post-flight check-ups. He has a few dozen staff and, at one point, had a plan to run SpaceShipOne once a week for five months. Assuming each of his staff cost $120 an hour to employ, it would cost a minimum of $60,000 per tourist for staff alone. On top of that come the costs of fuel, compliance with regulations, depreciation and, naturally, profit. That bumps the figure up to something nearer $100,000. Fortunately, studies have shown there would be a market for flights into space even at this price. In this context it may be no coincidence that Mr Melvill, though a fit and experienced test pilot, is 63. For a certain sort of retiree, a trip into space would be a desirable alternative to a cruise round the world. By picking Mr Melvill to fly SpaceShipOne, Mr Rutan has given America's elderly rich a subtle reminder that space could be for them, too.

AP Scaled Composites

Indeed, Space Adventures, a firm based in Arlington, Virginia, which has already brokered three tourist trips on Russian rockets to the International Space Station, is promising customers a trip on the first vehicle that goes into commercial operation. It has set a ticket price of $100,000, and has sizeable deposits for 100 trips. XCOR certainly believes Xerus could operate commercially at this price.

The big unknown (and one that is bothering potential investors) is the cost of compliance with government regulations. If a spacecraft cost the same as an aircraft to certify (several hundred million dollars), the industry would not get off the ground. Aircraft companies can spread the cost of certification over many units. That would not be true (at least at the beginning) for spacecraft manufacturers. Government inspection has already, according to XCOR, added three years to the Xerus project.

Mr Rutan will not say whether he is going to try to build a craft that will take paying customers, though several reports have suggested he is putting together a business plan to do this. Mr Allen confirms that he is interested in investing in commercial operations, but says he has not reached a decision. Other wealthy entrepreneurs, such as Dennis Tito (the first of the tourists taken up by the Russians) and Sir Richard Branson (proprietor of the Virgin Group), who have expressed an interest in commercial space ventures, turned up to the launch of SpaceShipOne. Mr Tito appears ready to make an investment in the space-tourism market as soon as the legislation under which it will be regulated is finalised. Unfortunately, a bill that would do this is currently stuck in the American Senate and may run out of time this year.

SpaceShipOne is, according to Mr Rutan—an experienced aeronautical engineer who designed the first aircraft to fly around the world without refuelling—the hardest thing he has ever built. Success came from using cheap, off-the-shelf technology where possible, and innovative design elsewhere. There was also a certain degree of pragmatism. Mr Rutan chose to work with composites, not because they were optimal but because he had decades of experience building aircraft with them.

One novel aspect of his design was the “feathered” re-entry. Re-entering the atmosphere is the most dangerous part of a mission. Three of the four fatal accidents on manned missions have happened then. In a feathered re-entry, the wings are folded to provide a “shuttlecock” effect that gives the ship high drag. Deceleration occurs at a higher altitude which, because the atmosphere is thinner there, reduces the forces involved and the amount that the structure heats up. The feathered configuration also aligns the ship so that the pilot can control the flight more easily.

Despite the brouhaha, though, SpaceShipOne has only dipped its toe into outer space. Its flight was merely suborbital. Getting into orbit is a trickier game to play. Although nobody at Scaled Composites has said anything formal about orbital flight, the company is interested. “We do not plan to stay in low Earth orbit for decades,” said Mr Rutan. “Hold on, the next 25 years will be a wild ride.”

AP

Who are you calling an old fogey?

In any case, Mr Rutan has already thought about how suborbital tourist craft need to differ from orbital craft. To yield the full “being in space” experience, a suborbital craft would have to be large enough to allow passengers to bounce around and enjoy weightlessness—and the flight would have to last long enough for a satisfactory amount of bouncing to occur and for there to be time to look out of the window and take pictures. For this, he says, a vehicle would need to be bigger than SpaceShipOne, and would have to go significantly higher. Orbital craft, though, could be quite different. They could be cramped and windowless as long as the intention was to deliver the passengers to a structure such as a space hotel.

Although such a hotel sounds futuristic, it is not an impossible idea. Bigelow Aerospace, of North Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, wants to build one using inflatable components. These would be light, and therefore cheap to launch into orbit. Robert Bigelow, the firm's founder (and also the owner of the Las Vegas-based Budget Suites of America hotel chain) thinks there is a viable business here. If all goes to plan (and things rarely do in the space business) Bigelow will eventually launch a test structure on the Falcon V booster that is currently being developed by another new company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), of El Segundo, California.

Nevertheless, it is a huge leap in cost and technology to get into orbit, warns Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and a co-founder of PayPal, an online-payments firm. So SpaceX is first developing a “lite” version of Falcon V, a low-cost, partly reusable satellite launcher called Falcon I. The firm is well on the way to flying this at a price that will undercut its established competitors by more than 70%. SpaceX has three launch contracts so far. The first (a satellite for the Defence Department) should come to fruition quite soon. There is strong military interest in small, cheap launchers that can be ready in weeks rather than months. These would enable America's forces to put tactical satellites up on demand during a conflict.

Another company that would like to get into the satellite-launching business is SpaceDev, of Poway, California. This is the firm that built the “hybrid” liquid/solid-fuelled rocket motors which power SpaceShipOne. It proposes to use similar motors (which burn a solid rubber fuel in liquid nitrous oxide) for satellite launches, rather than employing the purely liquid-fuelled rockets used by Mr Musk's outfit. But, it says, it will take at least three years to develop the technology. The advantage that hybrids have over liquid-fuelled rockets is that they are cheap to develop and generally safer to store and operate, though some people question whether they will ever be powerful enough to launch things into orbit.

Whether this new breed of entrepreneurs succeeds in bringing down the cost of access to space for both people and cargo remains to be seen. Costs have remained static, at $20,000 per kilo put into orbit, for decades. By contrast, Mr Musk highlights the huge improvements in cost and performance during the history of information technology. With IT entrepreneurs such as Mr Allen, Mr Musk and also Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, getting into the space business, it seems that winds of change are blowing through the industry.

SpaceX, though, is restricting itself to non-living cargoes at first. As for getting people into orbit cheaply, this is much further off. To reach orbit it is necessary to travel at 25 times the speed of sound. There is a huge gulf between this and the speed needed for a suborbital flight. Moreover, bridging the gap is not merely a matter of more oomph in the engines. The more power you need, the more fuel you have to carry. And that fuel itself needs fuel to lift it. The result is that more than 90% of the launch weight of a craft destined for orbit is fuel. Building a lightweight container for that fuel is no easy task.

On top of this, the energy used to get into orbit has to be dissipated during re-entry, so better heat shielding is needed than for a suborbital flight. Thirdly, the speed of orbit leaves little room for manoeuvre, so it would be necessary to develop a precise guidance system for the craft.

None of which is to detract from the achievement that Mr Rutan's skill, Mr Allen's money and Mr Melvill's daring have pulled off. They, and those like them, understand that in this area, as in so many others, real progress will happen only when small, innovative firms are allowed to flourish.

Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.