The next giant leap
Businessmen with billions to spend want to make the joy of spaceflight accessible to ordinary people.
LATER this year, tech entrepreneur turned space pioneer Elon Musk is planning the blastoff of a new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, that would be twice as powerful as any other in use and one of the biggest since the Apollo era’s mighty Saturn V. The stage for the rocket’s debut: the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took off for the Moon in 1969.
SpaceX’s use of 39A is the ultimate symbol that the United States government’s monopoly on American space travel is over. To Musk, it also is proof of an additional triumph – over his fellow billionaire and rival Jeffrey Bezos, who had fought to secure the launch pad for himself.
Nearly five decades after the US beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, another space race is emerging, this time among a class of hugely wealthy entrepreneurs who have grown frustrated that space travel is in many ways still as difficult, and as expensive, as ever.
Driven by ego, outsize ambition and opportunity, they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money in an attempt to open up space to the masses and push human space travel far past where governments have gone.
Musk, who made his first fortune on Zip2 and PayPal, and Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, are the most prominent of a quartet of billionaires aspiring to open the frontier of space the way the public-private partnerships of the 19th century pushed west at the dawn of the railroad age.
The two others are Paul Allen, a Microsoft founder, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. All have upended industries, including retail, automobiles and credit cards, and are now embarking on the greatest disruption of all – making space travel routine – in a business long dominated by commercial-space contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket may have crossed the boundary into
‘[ The Apollo 11 Moon landing] was a seminal moment for me.’ JEFF BEZOS
‘‘space,’’ an arbitrary barrier generally agreed as starting at 100 kilometres above Earth’s surface. But Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft don’t just go up; they go up and out, following an arc and moving so fast – about 8km per second – that they stay aloft and can circle the Earth in less time than it takes to watch Star Wars.
It was supposed to have happened by now: Space tourism. Bases on the Moon. Humans to Mars and beyond. The next giant leap. And the next.
Bezos was 5 years old during the Apollo 11 Moon landing and remembers watching it on his living room TV with his parents and grandparents. ‘‘It was a seminal moment for me,’’ he has said. In 2013, he embarked on a threeweek quest to recover from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean the F-1 engines used in the Apollo-era Saturn V rockets.
After Musk sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq, for more than US$300 million, he started thinking more seriously about space exploration and wondered when Nasa was planning on getting to Mars. He searched the space agency’s website for its Mars plan but could not find one.
Musk, who also runs Tesla Motors, plans to send an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018, and hopes that people could arrive by 2025. While that seemingly impossible goal remains aspirational, SpaceX continues to build bigger and more powerful rockets, and has disrupted the existing commercial and military launch markets by offering affordable and transparent prices.
Last year, however, an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station blew up, forcing the company to delay all launches for six months. But it now has a backlog of more than 70 missions.
As a child, Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, knew the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were the star players of his favourite baseball team. In 2004, he teamed up with legendary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan to develop SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize, a US$10 million contest, and became the first commercial vehicle to reach space. Allen licensed the rights to the technology behind the spacecraft to Branson and concentrated on other interests.
But now he’s back. He’s building Stratolaunch, that would become the world’s largest air- plane, with a wingspan wider than a football field. It is designed to carry a rocket tethered to its belly to an altitude of about 35,000 feet. The rocket would drop away from the plane, fire its engines and ‘‘air-launch’’ into orbit.
Branson’s goal is to create the first commercial spaceline. And he’s proud that more than 700 people – more than the approximately 550 people who have actually been to space – have bought tickets to ride on his spacecraft, some paying as much as US$250,000.
‘‘Because government space agencies are not asked to help ordinary citizens to become astronauts, most of our planet’s seven billion people have had no opportunity to experience space and all of its possibilities for themselves,’’ Branson’s Virgin Galactic says on its website.
The last time the US was not able to launch its own astronauts to space, the hiatus lasted 2098 days, from the last of the Apollo- era missions in 1975 to the first space shuttle flight in 1981. Today, Nasa is again in a hiatus, this one beginning when the shuttles were retired in 2011. But now there is a painful twist: the US has to rely on Russia, the country it bested in the Cold War race to the Moon, to ferry US astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
That is expected to end by late 2017, or early 2018, when a cadre of carefully chosen Nasa astronauts will board a spacecraft on the Florida Space Coast and launch from US soil. That historic moment will feature a rocket that for the first time will be owned and operated by a commercial company, not Nasa.
Today, SpaceX and Boeing, the companies that Nasa is entrusting with the lives of its astronauts, are vying to see which will fly first. Then could come the birth of regular commercial space tourism trips. Washington Post