Although the Ansari X-Prize has been won, the contest to offer the first space tourism flights is hotter than ever. And now there's even talk of starting a suborbital racing series...
Eight months after Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOnecaptured the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, several of the competing teams are racing to be the first to offer commercial suborbital flights. But despite the fact that the first passenger flights are expected in only 18 months' time, there are still plenty of obstacles that could ground space tourism. Financing, legislation and technology development could all combine to produce a space tourism industry of just one company – or none.
The sole firm to have an exclusive technology licence deal with the developers of SpaceShipOne is Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. With a memorandum of understanding signed, later this year Branson will start to pay Rutan's Scaled Composites for development of the SpaceShipTwo (SS2), which is expected to carry up to eight passengers.
"The shape of the ship is ready to go," says Virgin Galactic head of operations and chief pilot Alex Tai. "People have already sent us cheques, but we haven't banked them yet." The firm plans to charge $200,000 for a suborbital flight service that will include a few days' training. Tai estimates there are 7.8 million millionaires in the world, and his company is aiming its service at them.
The first to pay will fly on the SpaceShipTwo that Branson is calling VSS Enterprise. Passengers flown on Enterprise will have to pass health checks, and the US Federal Aviation Administration will work with Virgin Galactic to prescribe what these assessments will comprise.
For the FAA and the industry, the regulatory framework for suborbital tourism has been as big a challenge as the technology. The legal success – as important as SpaceShipOne's spaceflight last year – was the 11th-hour passing of the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act at the end of the last legislative day of President Bush's inaugural term. The bill has enabled development of the industry by defining a suborbital rocket; creating the concept of an informed-consent passenger liability waiver; and allowing the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Office to produce guidelines on flight operations with crewed and passenger-carrying vehicles.
"Informed consent" means the passenger understands and accepts the dangers of suborbital flight, and over the next 18 months the FAA plans to go through a nine-step process, with public input, to turn that concept and its vehicle guidelines into hard laws.
One company president from the nascent suborbital industry who is happier with the prospective laws is Jeff Greason of California-based X-Prize contender XCor Aerospace. "Regulatory risk was viewed as a major problem, but now it is not a problem. Regulatory risk is no longer among the top risks," he says.
Informed consent
But not everyone agrees with Greason and other like-minded industry figures who approve of the informed-consent concept. Rutan and Tai argue that, for the safest possible flight, the US government should decide what is safe enough to be certificated, just as it does for commercial airliners. Even some supporters of the informed-consent rule acknowledge it has weaknesses. "I'm sure it will be subject to litigation at some point," says Tim Hughes, majority counsel for the US House of Representatives science committee.
Another view of the argument in favour of certification is that it is being promoted to create a monopoly. Tai's competitors fear the standard would be set at a level which would make their vehicles – but not the SpaceShipTwo – uncertificatable.
However, Tai disagrees strongly, saying Virgin Galactic just wants to make sure the industry is as safe as it can be. "We're engaged with [US lawmakers] to change [the informed-consent rule]. We've got two or three years to change it. We have a duty to make it as safe as possible."
That intent does not bode well for the Personal Spaceflight Federation, launched in February to develop technical standards to ensure the safety and promote the growth of space-tourism industry. Its members are the burgeoning industry's leading lights and include Rutan, Greason, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) chief executive Elon Musk, Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack and X-Prize Foundation chairman and president Peter Diamandis. Yet Greason and Carmack are on one side of the "certification versus informed consent" argument, while Rutan and Tai are on the other.
If Virgin Galactic did not have enough problems with its rearguard action against informed consent, its status as a UK company stops it from viewing Rutan's technical designs for the SpaceShipTwo due to US technology export laws.
Tai says the technical assistance agreement (TAA) needed under US arms export controls to allow discussion of design details takes six months to obtain and costs $200,000. The process began in the first quarter and Tai expects this to be resolved soon, once the US Department of Defense responds to the TAA application. But it is a potentially major obstacle if the TAA is initially refused.
One company and its billionaire backer without this problem are Seattle-based Blue Origin and its chief executive, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. The firm is known to be developing a vertical take-off and landing vehicle similar to the McDonnell Douglas DC-X Delta Clipper experimental vehicle of the 1990s. After buying land for an engine-test facility and spaceport in Texas in March, Bezos has given only one interview, in which he said he expected to start test flights in six or seven years.
Armadillo's Carmack is another information technology entrepreneur, having created the video game Doom. Funded by money from his software interests, Carmack's vehicle is also DC-X-like, but the slow-paced development programme suggests Armadillo is not going to close the gap on Rutan for some time.
Launch vehicles
Musk, another IT entrepreneur, also has Bezos-like financial resources to invest in the new race to space. He is a co-founder of PayPal, which was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, and his company SpaceX is developing a family of expendable launch vehicles. The first of these, the Falcon I – capable of putting 670kg (1,480lb) into low-Earth orbit (LEO) – is expected to have its maiden flight later this year. Also in development is the 4,500kg-to-LEO Falcon V.
"The Falcon V, scheduled for first flight next year, is a medium-lift rocket designed to carry people. My hope is that this vehicle will provide the USA with an all-American means of transporting astronauts to orbit," Musk said at an April hearing of the US House science subcommittee on space and aeronautics. But he is concentrating on government satellite contracts and is unlikely to offer space tourism services before Virgin does. At the other end of the wealth spectrum, meanwhile, is Greason's XCor. A start-up company with an annual turnover of $800,000, it is slowly accruing the necessary technologies for its vehicle through small research-and-development contracts. Greason admits he is working on vehicle development in phases, and says he has no fixed timetable.
The two companies that say publicly that they will get paying passengers into space before Branson are Rocketplane and new entrant Aera.
Rocketplane's target date to begin flights is some time in 2007. The company – based at Oklahoma Spaceport, a former Strategic Air Command air force base – was granted a $12 million tax credit by the state's government. After selling on this credit, as allowed under Oklahoma law, it is now building a prototype vehicle. The Rocketplane XP is a jet- and rocket-powered four-seater based on a modified Learjet 25 business jet, and takes off and lands like a normal aircraft.
Paying passengers
Aera announced its suborbital intentions earlier this year and in May made public its plans to launch the first paying passenger flight in December 2006. The company's Altairis rocket will carry six passengers, paying $250,000 each, and a mission commander.
Launched vertically from the Florida Space Authority's Cape Canaveral site, the vehicle will reach an altitude of 420,000ft (128,000m) and land back at the spaceport horizontally, using a parafoil and airbags. The Altairis single-stage rocket uses a helium-pressurised liquid-oxygen/kerosene engine, with gas jets to orientate itself to a horizontal position for re-entry. Its clamshell nosecone will open to create a canard foreplane to maintain the horizontal orientation in the atmosphere, and the parafoil will be deployed at 25,000ft. Aera says the entire flight can be computer controlled.
Although would-be passengers will have to wait at least 18 months before flying with Rocketplane, Aera or Virgin Galactic, some of these companies will be demonstrating hardware at the X-Prize Foundation's X-Prize Cup Expo, to be held at the Southwest Regional Spaceport (SRS) in New Mexico from 7-9 October. Armadillo and XCor will be there, along with former X-Prize contenders ARCA from Romania, the Canadian da Vinci Project and the UK's Starchaser team. Diamandis's foundation hopes to attract thousands of visitors to SRS with its displays from the competing teams, as well as hardware and software suppliers, and there will also be a technical symposium.
What is more, Diamandis is planning to have races between prospective suborbital tourism vehicles as soon as possible at a future Expo. The goal is to regain and maintain the momentum of the X-Prize race. Government space policy, US law and the industry have been going through some of the biggest changes since the space race with the Soviet Union began.
Now, 50 years on, the competition is between private companies, not political ideologies. The winner might corner the market in space tourism, or there may be no winner at all. What is certain is that there is a long road ahead, and it will be as much of a rollercoaster ride as the sub-orbital flights being marketed.
ROB COPPINGER/LONDON
Source: Flight International
