Present at the Future (21 page)

So after costing billions of dollars and two deadly accidents, the space shuttle will be put to rest by 2010. Its successor, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle dubbed Apollo on steroids, is now in the planning stages. It appears that we’re picking up where we left off in 1975—we’re going back to the future.

“We’re now in a very uncertain transition that NASA and the country hasn’t faced in decades, trying to design a new space vehicle while recovering from an accident with the old one, at the same time trying to draw plans that will credibly get us out to places we’ve never touched before,” says Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and a NASA astronaut from 1990 to 2001. He flew four shuttle missions and led three space walks during the construction of the ISS.

The two shuttle disasters have convinced NASA that the shuttle’s design had been faulty from the very beginning. “The shuttle was built in the early ’70s, designed in the early ’70s as part of a compromise in cost and capability with the government and its budgeters, and so its very design was made fragile and vulnerable three decades ago. And now we’re still paying the price for that.”

We were told back then that the shuttle would be so safe that even civilians would be welcomed aboard, journalists and schoolteachers. The space shuttle was the first rocket ship in the history of the space program—American or Soviet—that did not provide an adequate means of escaping a disaster during launch like the kind that killed the Challenger astronauts on January 28, 1986. In that tragedy, the vehicle broke up 73 seconds into the launch.

“It had been envisioned that it would be a very safe, almost indestructible or infallible vehicle, and of course, our confidence in conquering the hazards of spaceflight was oversold, and so now the shuttle, as we realize, is a somewhat fragile and now aging vehicle that needs to be replaced,” says Jones. “We want the crew of this new vehicle to have
a much better chance of escaping any problem with their launch vehicle and coming back to the Earth with an almost bulletproof heat shield and recovery system, and that would have gone a long way toward preventing the Columbia tragedy from ever happening.”

So NASA engineers are bringing back the tried-and-true design of the early days of the 1960s space race: The crew capsule sits atop the rocket, safely away from the lethal dangers of falling chunks of foam or ice, and an escape rocket is positioned above the capsule, ready to whisk it away from danger during a launch gone wrong.

But why wait until 2010 to scrap the shuttle? Why not just go ahead with the Crew Exploration Vehicle now? Because according to Whitesides, the space shuttle’s mission has not been completed: “We need to finish the International Space Station and fulfill our commitments to the international partners who have been literally working for a decade or two on their pieces of the space station. There’s a lot of debate about the ultimate value of the International Space Station right now, but it is a triumph from the perspective of international cooperation, and we owe it to our international partners to fulfill the promise that we made, which was, essentially, to launch their laboratories and their modules.”

Jones agrees: “The vehicle has a job to do in the next few years to get the most important components that are on the ground, already checked out, up to the space station. Those include the Japanese and European laboratory, for example, that our partners have been waiting on for years.”

But some experts feel that finishing the space station is throwing good money after bad.

“It’s very ironic. NASA already is planning to walk away from the space station as soon as they get it built, says Rick Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation. “Not only are we draining money to keep the shuttle going, which I think is partially political, [but] there’s a large standing army of political constituency, people who depend on shuttle-related jobs to keep going.”

Tumlinson says he understands those promises to foreign countries, but there could be ways around the commitments. “We have created and designated a national space transportation entity in NASA, and come hell or high water, they’re going hang on to their own ability to have access to space, which I think is not what we need to open the frontier. Whereas what I would rather see is all kinds of vehicles accessing space so that we can start creating a frontier up there and an economy that would allow us to expand and stay.”

SPACE ENTREPRENEURS

Enter the space entrepreneurs, people of means and money, billionaires who see the “final frontier” as a business opportunity. They believe that the future of space travel belongs to travel agents who will be booking extraterrestrial trips to hotels orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth or planted firmly on the gray soils of the moon. And they already have begun to lay the groundwork for that day.

Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites raised the bar on private-enterprise space travel by winning the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE. It became the first company to send a person into
space twice within a two-week period aboard a privately owned spaceship: SpaceShipOne. Billionaire Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, financed the feat. Rutan immediately partnered with Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways (part of the Virgin Group of Companies) to create the space tourist company of the future. Their goal: to create a fleet of spacecraft that would carry tourists into suborbital space rides. Branson has already begun signing up thrill-seeking customers via his Virgin Galactic tourist venture.

“He plans to use derivatives of SpaceShipOne, carrying four or five people at a time up to the edge of space at about $200,000 per crack,” notes Dr. Jerry Grey, director of aerospace policy at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “Now he has to get FAA approval, in addition to what Rutan got, in order to carry passengers. And that process, I think, will be fairly easy to do. Again, people will probably have to sign waivers at this stage of the game. But ultimately, I think we’ll see more and more people. Branson does not invest money in things that he doesn’t think he will
make money on, and I suspect that he will sell a large number of these flights.”

Robert Bigelow, another multimillionaire, has created his own space station company, to design an orbiting platform for commercial use. He too is offering a prize, a big one: $50 million dollars to the first person or company that can build a spaceship that can orbit the Earth twice, with a crew of five, and be able to dock with his space station.

“That is a much larger step forward, I think, than what Rutan has done,” says Grey.

Other entrepreneurs are seeking to go even farther out into space. Among them is Elon Musk, CEO and chief designer of Space Exploration Technologies, otherwise known as SpaceX.

“SpaceX is a rocket company. Our goal is to solve, or help solve, what I consider to be, by far and away, the great problem of space, which is the cost of getting there.

“We’re starting off with a small launch vehicle called the Falcon 1, named after the Millennium Falcon. I hope George Lucas doesn’t sue us.”

Falcon 1 will be a proof of concept.

“It is designed to put small satellites into orbit and test out the key technologies necessary to go bigger and to build manned rockets and manned capsules. But looking into the future, the big development at SpaceX is something called the Falcon 9, which is considerably larger. In its largest version, the Falcon 9 would be capable of putting twenty-five tons into Earth’s orbit. And it’s also capable of missions to geosynchronous orbit and to escape.

“And the Falcon 9 is also being [built] from the ground up with what’s called a manned safety rating, so that the margins of safety in the design of components are higher than they are in an unmanned rocket. That’s something that isn’t all that hard to do if you design the rocket from the beginning to do that, but it’s very difficult to retrofit a rocket to be man-rated.”

A ONE-WAY TICKET TO MARS

The ultimate goal of SpaceX is not tourism, as it is for Branson’s company, but a much bolder goal: the colonization of other planets.

“SpaceX is really to help enable humanity become a space-faring civilization and one day, a multiplanet species. And that’s why I started the company, realizing of course that that’s an incredibly difficult journey with numerous pitfalls, and perhaps the chances of us getting all the way there are very low. But that is the aspiration, if I was to describe the holy grail objective.”

To do so, he must first lower the cost and improve the reliability of the service “to the point where if you want to move to Mars, you should be able to do so if you can afford the median house in California.

“It sounds a little odd to contemplate, but I think there actually is a business model, potentially, if you can make it cost somewhere around a few million dollars to move to Mars and become one of the founding people of a new planet.”

Tumlinson is concerned with a business model too: the one driving NASA. The space agency has been traditionally seen as a pioneer, a trailblazer, the Lewis and Clark of space travel, going where no human has ever gone before. But space exploration has now been going on for more than 50 years, and it’s time for private businesses to get a firm foothold, he reasons. After all, it was way before 50 years after the Wright brothers flew their crude airplanes at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, that private airliners were ferrying passengers. It’s time to turn space travel over to the private sector, where it can be commercialized. Tumlinson believes that NASA understands his point of view and agrees with it. But he is concerned that NASA’s coziness with the contractors who have been working with the agency for decades, who have received and continue to receive billions of dollars to design and build future space vehicles, will shut out the fledgling competitors.

“For example, NASA is going to be subsidizing this new rocket, which is probably going to be built by one of the two or three major
contractors out there, who are already incorporating in their plans, sort of a backup plan. That they’re going to use the money that they get to actually do those things Tom was talking about, which the current administrator is saying is for the private sector, which is carrying goods and cargo to and from space stations.

“So we already have the aerospace companies, the traditional aerospace companies, as I call them, saying that they’re building a variation of their vehicle which will actually compete with these nonsubsidized private companies that are going to be allegedly carrying stuff to and from stations. So I see a few years down the road, we could have real trouble there, as the smaller guys get kind of booted out of the way by these heavily subsidized aerospace companies.

“If we’re going to settle and stay and create the communities that Elon was speaking of, we have to make all of our decisions with that in mind. And that gets to the Lewis-and-Clark function for government and the enabling and protecting and nurturing the new private-sector companies that are going to be the ones who actually create the economy that allows us to stay. One of the big challenges is going to be to get NASA focused on a supportive role for this industry rather than the not-invented-here, do-it-yourself approach. Because as we say in our group, nobody stays until somebody pays. And I really don’t want it to be the taxpayers.”

Whitesides agrees. “The private sector is absolutely critical, is indeed indispensable to NASA’s exploration plans. It is literally impossible for NASA to do what it wants without bringing in strong involvement of the private sector.”

And a good place to start involving and encouraging the privatization of space is in the completed space station, says Jones. “So that’s the first thing, to get the space shuttle’s expenses put to bed. And then that’ll free up, I hope, some money from some commercialization activity that will support the space station. All the supplies and cargo shouldn’t be flown up on NASA rockets; they should be flown up on commercial enterprises that can bid for that business
and get NASA out of the freight business and get it back in the exploring business. That may be the surface of the moon where we go or the asteroids, which I would like to see visited pretty quickly, and then, eventually, to Mars.”

“What we really need is a partnership, as we move out, between the government playing the Lewis-and-Clark role on the leading edge, and this is where we screw up and have screwed up in the past,” says Tumlinson. “Built into that Lewis-and-Clark function should be a constant handoff of operational activities to the private sectors, such as Elon’s company, and the things Rutan might build, and others out there. Just constantly shedding. So we have what I call a lean, mean exploration machine, in the form of NASA moving outward. And then the settlers and shopkeepers bringing up the rear and creating an economy.”

“All the while, filling in that commercial exploring,” says Jones, “will be the commercial spacecraft that Elon talked about that can take some of the burden off the taxpayers and put it where the biggest bang for the buck is.”

As for President George W. Bush’s goal of returning to the moon and then going to Mars? Why not bring in private space companies to do the work, more cheaply and better than NASA could? And in doing so, have the moon project spur the growth of private industry. “In other words,“ says Tumlinson, drawing a complete picture, “let’s stop NASA from doing any launches, human or otherwise, from Earth to low Earth orbit, and then from low Earth orbit to the moon. Let them focus their energy and attention to those types of transportation systems that would be a huge spur to this industry. It would be an incredible kick for these guys to be able to carry payloads to and from the space station, the pieces that we might need for building bases on the moon and Mars or communities out there instead of some sort of massive government space shuttle like Saturn V,” the rocket booster that took astronauts to the moon but went no farther after the costly crewed moon program was killed to save
money. “As we saw with the Saturn V, when that doorway closes, you’re locked out of the solar system.”

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