To the Moon, Alice
Long the exclusive province of science-fiction writers and government engineers, manned space flight became just another business on Monday with the third successful foray into space of the privately funded rocket SpaceShipOne.
The idea of the final frontier succumbing to commercialization may not strike everyone as romantic. But the nonprofit Space Frontier Foundation, which has spent nearly two decades lobbying for a human presence in space, managed to capture some poetry in the guppy-shaped rocket’s ascent to a height 62 miles above the Earth. In a news conference, it heralded the flight as “the dawn of a new American Space Age, [which proves that] space is not a government program but the birthright of all humanity.”
All humanity, of course, will not be able to afford the $190,000 that Virgin Atlantic plans to charge for a ticket on one of the five SpaceShipOne-successor craft it is spending $100 million to acquire. Nor is there any guarantee that those craft will be any less susceptible to technical snafus than NASA’s space shuttle fleet, whose relaunching was delayed by the agency last week from next spring to next summer.
Still, all U.S. taxpayers have reason to cheer SpaceShipOne’s success. For four decades, NASA has been unable to reduce the $10,000-per-pound cost of putting people or payloads into orbit. SpaceShipOne, however, will. Its entire research-and-development budget, amounting to about $20 million, is a fraction of the $450 million it takes to launch a single space shuttle.
It’s heady stuff, this business of slipping “the surly bonds of Earth,” so perhaps its participants can be forgiven for engaging in a bit of hyperbole. The Space Frontier Foundation claimed Monday, for example, that entrepreneurs will someday want to bankroll manned missions to the moon and Mars. Only if they can figure out a way to make it profitable, which in the near future seems unlikely.
Still, the practical need to get payloads into orbit as cheaply as possible is real, as is the desire of many wealthy people to experience a few moments of weightlessness.
SpaceShipOne may not have claimed space as the birthright of all humanity, but the engineers who designed it have made that frontier more accessible than battalions of government bureaucrats ever did.
