Private team will try to send man into space
Published 5:30 am, Thursday, June 3, 2004
Within three weeks, a private spacecraft built and funded by two Americans will try to soar where only the space shuttle and other legendary creations of the U.S. and Russian space programs have ventured before: Out There!
SpaceShipOne, the daring and sleek creation of pioneering aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and billionaire financier Paul Allen, will climb 62 miles to the fringes of the final frontier -- until now the near sole province of astronauts and cosmonauts.
Rutan and Allen announced plans on Wednesday to attempt to send a pilot on the near 90-minute flight from California's Mojave Desert early on June 21 -- a journey that could bring their team a step closer to the potentially lucrative venture of commercial space travel.
If successful, the risky suborbital flight would include about three minutes of weightlessness for SpaceShipOne's yet-to-be-named pilot. It could become the private equivalent of the May 5, 1961, flight that launched Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard 116 miles into space.
In short, experts believe SpaceShipOne has the potential to do for space passenger travel what Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean did for the air travel industry.
"I'm excited," said Rick Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, an organization that has long advocated private spaceflight. "This really begins to signify to a broad audience that a handoff from the government to the private sector is inevitable. Space is no longer going to be an exclusively government domain when it comes to human beings."
As last year's loss of the shuttle Columbia illustrated, even professional spaceflight is risky. In the historic territory Rutan and Allen seek, high velocities and altitudes could quickly turn thrill and romance into disaster.
But experts believe Rutan and Allen are credible risk managers. It's little surprise they have driven the most significant civilian space travel development since space tourists Dennis Tito of the United States and Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa each paid Russia a reported $20 million earlier this decade to visit the space station for a few days.
Rutan designed the Voyager aircraft that made the first nonstop unrefueled flight around the world in 1986. He now runs Scaled Composites, the 130-employee company that built SpaceShipOne and all its components. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has invested his fortune in other successful endeavors.
"I don't think there is any question they are credible," said Jerry Grey, the director of science and technology policy for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the principal professional organization for the nation's aerospace engineers.
"Everything I've seen about SpaceShipOne seems reasonable, the engineering seems to be good, the concept is good. I see no reason why they should not be successful," said Grey.
For months, Rutan's creation has been the odds-on favorite to win the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million purse offered by the nonprofit St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation. Established in 1996, the prize will go to the first privately financed team to send a manned craft to space and back, then repeat the flight within two weeks.
The pursuit includes 27 teams from seven countries. It was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig prize won by Lindbergh that fostered a commercial aviation industry. The X Prize Foundation plans to suspend the competition on Jan. 1 if there is no winner.
"We are very confident it will be won before the end of the year -- we would hope in August or September," said Ian Murphy, a foundation spokesman. "We've looked forward and expected this for quite awhile. The next step is the X Prize, and this certainly places them in clear front-runner status."
Rutan unveiled SpaceShipOne and its equally futuristic looking carrier aircraft, the White Knight, in April 2003 to inaugurate a series of increasingly more ambitious test flights.
On Dec. 17, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier in a test flight that lofted the spacecraft to 68,000 feet. That achievement coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first powered flight.
During a May 13 test flight, the spacecraft reached 211,400 feet, or about 40 miles, an altitude record for a private venture. Typically, U.S. and Russian astronauts reach altitudes of 200 to 400 miles for destinations like the international space station or the Hubble Space Telescope.