Rocket Takes 1st Prize of a New Space Race

SpaceShipOne, a privately funded manned rocket, soared into space and back Monday for the second time in less than a week, claiming a $10-million prize and raising prospects for low-cost, reliable personal spaceflights.

The flight’s success brings to the fore a host of legal, regulatory and business questions that will determine whether the dream of commercial manned spaceflight can become a reality.

“This is the true frontier of transportation,” said Marion Blakely, an administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration, as she watched the rocket shoot into the sky.

The small rocket, piloted by former F-18 fighter test pilot Brian Binnie, was propelled by a mixture of rubber and nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, to an altitude of 367,442 feet, well past the 62-mile-high boundary that is widely considered the frontier between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. It glided safely back to the Mojave Airport before a cheering crowd of more than 10,000 people.

The flight marked the third time that the rocket, built by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, had reached space.

In June, the rocket climbed to 328,491 feet, becoming the first commercial manned spaceflight. On Wednesday, the rocket completed the first leg of its quest to win the $10-million Ansari X Prize by soaring to 337,500 feet, or about 64 miles up.

To win the prize, a competitor had to reach space twice within two weeks carrying a pilot and a payload with the equivalent weight of two passengers. On Monday, X Prize judges declared that the rocket had climbed nearly 70 miles into the sky, surpassing an altitude record set by the U.S. Air Force X-15 winged rocket in the 1960s.

“We’re at the birth of a new era, the age of personal spaceflights,” said Peter Diamandis, a Santa Monica entrepreneur who created the competition in 1996 hoping to spur privately funded spaceflights. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a very long time.”

The prize is named after the experimental planes, including the X-15, that propelled the United States into the Space Age, and the Ansari family, Iranian-born technology entrepreneurs from Dallas who gave a multimillion-dollar contribution to support the competition.

Organizers likened Monday’s achievement to Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize.

The Orteig Prize and Lindbergh’s flight spurred the growth of the commercial airline industry. People paying to fly in an airplane rose from 5,800 in 1926 to nearly 420,000 by 1930.

For the X Prize, M&M; candies and 7Up soft drinks were among several sponsors of SpaceShipOne, which included NASCAR-like logos on its side.

Whether Monday’s flight will prompt a vast expansion in private spaceflights is not clear.

To begin with, there is no precedent for establishing safety standards for manned commercial spaceflight.

Although the FAA has regulatory oversight over airplanes and commercial unmanned rockets to launch satellites, there is no process to license piloted suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipOne. The FAA can license a location -- the Mojave Airport, for instance -- to launch rockets.

Congress is considering a bill that would set FAA licensing regulations for suborbital flights, including provisions that would require operators to disclose the safety record of their spaceships. In return, the FAA would allow companies to require passengers on the spaceflights to sign a waiver of legal liability.

The provision is considered crucial for the growth of the nascent industry. Without the waiver requirement, investors are not likely to fund such a business out of fear of multimillion-dollar claims after an accident.

The FAA is facing other daunting questions, including how to write regulations for a developing industry. Many of the technologies are so new that there is no certification process to determine if they are airworthy and safe.

“We don’t want to overregulate before the industry gets started,” said Patricia Grace Smith, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation.

Even the business situation is not all that clear. Marketing research firm Futron Corp. estimated that by 2021, more than 15,000 passengers a year could be making suborbital flights for about $50,000 each. That would make it a $1-billion industry.

But Greg Autry, a lecturer at UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management who is studying the prospects for a space-launch industry, said that unless the venture attracts mainstream financial backers and the liability issues are resolved, it might not become a reality.

Hoping to sustain public interest, X Prize officials said Monday that they were organizing a competition next year involving at least a dozen rocket makers. They intend it to become an annual event.

Dubbed the X Prize Cup, the 10-day event to be held in Las Cruces, N.M., will have competitors fly their piloted rockets to win prizes ranging from $1 million to $5 million in various categories, including heaviest payload, highest altitude or quickest launch turnaround.

Forty to 50 spaceflights might take place during the course of the competition, Diamandis said. He added that he was in negotiations to televise the event.

In addition to generating sponsors and investors for the rocket developers, Diamandis said the events would help “push the envelope” in the development and research of passenger-carrying, revenue-generating space business.

“I want to show that there is money to be made and people are investing,” Diamandis said.

At least for the next several years, the focus for most competitors will be researching and testing new vehicles, he said. More than two dozen teams from seven countries vied for the X Prize, but only a handful were considered contenders.

Then, by 2007, the first paying customers could be lofted into space. Richard Branson, the British billionaire who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways, last week announced that he was launching a commercial passenger space line and would buy five vehicles from Rutan for $100 million. The vehicles for Virgin Galactic would be larger versions of SpaceShipOne, carrying five passengers and a pilot.

Rutan said during a post-launch news conference that he might continue to fly SpaceShipOne as a research vehicle to help in the development of what he called SpaceShipTwo.

Branson said the first paying passengers were likely to be well-heeled customers who could afford the initial round-trip airfare of $190,000.

Diamandis said, after several years of such flights, “there would be sufficient base of experience” to open up the market and make passenger spaceflights routine.

“We’re going to see technology continue to advance through the competitive spirit, and that’s going to make space available to everyone,” he said.

Unlike Wednesday’s flight in which the rocket rolled 29 times in what seemed to be harrowing climb, Monday’s ascent seemed flawless. The rocket was again lofted to about 49,000 feet attached to the belly of an aircraft before it was released and began its vertical climb.

Flight director Doug Shane said nothing unusual happened during Monday’s flight.

After the mission, pilot Binnie became the second civilian to be awarded the FAA’s new commercial astronaut wings, joining his colleague Mike Melvill, who earned his wings with the June flight into space.

The wings are given to pilots who have flown at altitudes above 50 miles. Virtually all of the more than 400 astronauts have earned their wings on government-funded rockets or space shuttles.

The big winner in the competition appears to be Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, who put up $25 million to develop and build SpaceShipOne. In addition to winning the $10-million prize, Allen signed a $21-million licensing deal with Branson.

The loser may be the insurance firm that bet no one could make the required flights by the end the year.

To fund the X Prize award, Diamandis took out a policy in which the insurer got to keep the premium if no one won but had to pay the prize money if there was a winner by a set deadline.

Such policies are commonly taken out for promotional sporting events, such as $1-million full-court basketball shots during the halftimes of games.