Space tourism is nigh, but a new space age is not
Four years after Paul Allen won the X Prize with SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic has unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, bringing space tourism closer to reality. But in terms of achievement and fundamental technologies, we're merely watching a glitzy remake of the 1960s with private funding.
This week, Virgin Galactic rolled out WhiteKnightTwo, an aircraft designed to help launch space tourists if not humanity into a new age of space travel. WhiteKnightTwo will eventually carry SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger rocketplane, nestled between its twin fuselages. Upon reaching an altitude of about 50,000 feet, WhiteKnightTwo will release its payload and SpaceShipTwo will rocket in an arcing plume into the dark void of space. The first flights are expected in late 2009 or 2010. Should you pack your bags for a new era in human history?
The vision and largesse of Paul Allen funded the progenitors of the Virgin Galactic fleet, WhiteKnightOne and SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne earned the Ansari X Prize in 2004 for being the first privately funded spacecraft to carry humans into space twice in two weeks. Already there was a vision of "space tourism," flights for the more budget-minded at just $200,000, in contrast to the estimated $25 million that Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, to name one rich tourist, paid to fly a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. But the grand vision encompasses far more than joy rides for the mass affluent. Space tourism hitches the wagon of rocket science to the star of market forces. In computing, technological advances have increased computing power while reducing cost in a steady, self-reinforcing cycle, a phenomenon known as "Moore's Law." The question is whether the dynamic behind cheap laptops might eventuate in full-blown, interplanetary space travel.
Can't get there from here
The answer is: not likely. SpaceShipTwo actually will only barely scrape space, eking out a scant 68 vertical miles before succumbing to the gravitational dominance of Earth. The craft musters only about 1/16 the energy needed to reach even low orbit 100 miles up. The space station, reposing 200 miles from the earth's surface, is completely beyond reach.
Attaining such distances requires enormous energy; thus rockets are very tall and almost all fuel. We are accustomed to thinking that technology advances across a very broad front, often in a revolutionary fashion. For propulsion, however, there has been no next technology. With the V2, Nazi Germany built the first chemical rocket. Although subsequent engines have employed different designs and used different fuels, an exhaustive search for a clever, inexpensive way to escape the planet has come up empty.
Multitudes of chemical permutations have been tried, but even the most potent combination, fluorine and lithium, isn't radically better than the more venerable liquid oxygen and kerosene. Rockets powered by nuclear explosions were once envisioned. Splitting atoms can produce about 10 million times more usable energy than chemical combustion for a given amount of fuel. But even setting aside very significant engineering and environmental obstacles, nuclear bombs are not price competitive with kerosene. A matter-antimatter engine, if one could be built, would be more efficient than even nuclear fission, but only a few nanograms of antimatter have ever been produced, culled from tons of sub-atomic debris in very expensive, miles-long particle accelerators that consume gargantuan amounts of power.
The cost for putting a pound of anything in space essentially hasn't changed since the 1960s. In many respects, the space program is in retrograde motion, using technology broadly similar to that of four decades ago and pursuing goals already attained, such as NASA's plan to return the moon in 2018. Even the recent exploits of SpaceShipOne just recapitulate those of the Air Force X-15 project, which also dates to that golden age of space, the 1960s. Tang, anyone?
Boys and their toys
Science fiction-reading software geeks seem particularly susceptible to the siren song of interplanetary travel. There is Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who has also funded the Allen Telescope Array, which cocks an ear for communications from extraterrestrial intelligence. PayPal cofounder Elon Musk has invested a huge part of his fortune searching for a "Moore's Law of space." In rockets, however, that approach produced failure, either pyrotechnical explosion or a sputtering launch short of the target orbit. Musk's company has made reliability their new top priority — and raised prices.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought 165,000 acres (roughly three times the size of Seattle) in Texas to serve as a spaceport for his Blue Origin project. They are working on "New Shepard," an entrant in the space tourism business which will take off and land vertically. New Shepard is a step toward Bezos' proclaimed goal of an "enduring human presence in space." Google has established a $30 million prize which awaits the privately funded team able to send a robot to the moon. Meanwhile, in 2011 Google co-founder Sergey Brin will board the Soyuz — redoubtable work horse for more than 40 years — to check out space at first hand.
A notable outlier in this pattern is Bill Gates, whose views on space are much more reserved and circumspect. Consequently, when the first Space Shuttle launched in 1981, Paul Allen joined the throngs watching at Kennedy Space Center; Gates remained at work. In 1997, Gates praised the Mars Pathfinder mission as "a fine example of small science ... undertaken on a strict budget [with] limited, achievable goals." He believed space would not be transformative: "Though humanity will do some great things in space in the next 100 years, and there will be enormous benefits, I don't think what goes on in space will fundamentally change the way we live." For Gates, there's not going to be faster-than-light travel, so "as a species we're stuck in this part of the galaxy."
Comments:
Posted Fri, Aug 1, 5:48 a.m. inappropriate
Just a few mistakes: There are a few awkward realities you ignored while writing this opinion piece.
1. WhiteKnightTwo can indeed launch a payload into orbit. This has been widely reported. In fact Scaled Composites was part of an organization call transformational space or t/Space that proposed a method of flying astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station.
2. Another boy and his toys, Elon Musk and SpaceX is currently being funded by NASA to build vehicles capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. He is also part of a little company called Tesla Motors which is helping spur a revolution in the automotive industry.
3. Most planetary geologists agree that a manned mission to another planet could provide magnitudes more data than an armada of robots. This doesn't mean robotic exploration isn't a funding priority...it's just not the most important priority.
Enough ranting from me. I sincerely hope that your book and Gates and Allen is better researched and more insightful than your commentary on the space industry.
Posted Fri, Aug 1, 4:22 p.m. inappropriate
Gates and Space: Allen and Gates' different takes on space travel (Allen's enthusiasm and Gates' coolness) perfectly reflect their roles in the founding of Microsoft. Allen was the technician, Gates the salesman. Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft was primarily a marketer of technologies developed elsewhere. Once Microsoft's developers got ahold of them, those products became buggy and bloated all in the name of marketing everything to everyone. Gates isn't interested in space exploration because he can't market it as a proprietary product. And, anyway, would you want to ride in Vista Rocket version 1.0?
Posted Fri, Aug 1, 10:36 p.m. inappropriate
It's not tourism: Space tourism is the wrong term. What's being offered is a thrill ride, not Tourism in any meaningful sense of the word.
Posted Sat, Aug 2, 9:44 a.m. inappropriate
Cheap fuel and cheap shots: You seem to know a lot about rocket fuels but nothing about their cost. In fact, fuel only contributes a few dollars to the cost per pound of putting a payload into orbit.
Most of the thousands of dollars per pound for getting to orbit is due to the fact that usually rockets are thrown away after each use. A flight to Britain would have a similar cost if the 747 was dumped afterwards. Even the Shuttle throws away a $50M external tank. Furthermore, it takes a standing army of thousands to refurbish a shuttle between flights.
You have therefore completely missed the point about the SS2 and the other entrepreneurial suborbital space vehicle projects. They are seeking to overcome the above costs with true airliner-like reusability. Their vehicles will fly daily because they are robust enough to need only small crews to deal with refueling and checkout. This will enable a large space tourism market and then economies of scale will bring down the cost of spaceflight just as they have for every other product or service that we have in our economy.
Yes, getting to orbit takes a lot more energy that what is provided by a suborbital vehicle. However, such vehicles greatly overlap in capability with the first stage of a Two-Stage-To-Orbit system. Building a highly robust, safe and low maintenance TSTO requires first learning how to build a first stage with those qualities.
Claiming the SS1 and SS2 made no advance over the X-15 is as silly as saying the Altair or Apple II were of no consequence because IBM computers had provided similar capabilities decades previously. It is OK to sacrifice some amount of performance to attain very low costs and to build large markets.
Finally, I find your narrative that Gates is doing good and Allen is doing selfish highly ironic considering not only Gates's renowned business ruthlessness but that for both of them their billions came from personal computers, which were assailed as pointless extravagances when they first appeared on the market.
Posted Mon, Aug 4, 8:42 a.m. inappropriate
Near Light Speed Propulsion and Space-Base Wireless Power: It appears there are minds thinking outsie the box.
Posted Mon, Aug 4, 8:47 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Near Light Speed Propulsion and Space-Base Wireless Power: is - outsie (kind of a cute sounding word)
should be - outside
Posted Mon, Aug 4, 11:50 a.m. inappropriate
The point I am making is not one I invented. See, for example, Thinking Clearly About Space where Monte Davis writes:
"Bottom line: with chemical rockets, getting 'halfway to anywhere' has always been hard and expensive. The reasons are in physics and chemistry, defining an envelope which no amount of brilliant engineering can stretch. [The] picture we face today isn't a pretty one in terms of room for technological improvement."
I directly address the point you think I missed, namely whether science and technology harnessed to the market can break out of the current envelope. My answer is "not likely" and your example of the Altair nicely illustrates why: The Altair was based on a revolutionary technology, the Intel 8080 microprocessor. The manufacturing technique of integrated circuit designs like the 8080 constituted an evolutionary leap over the production of earlier, planar transistors used in IBM mainframes. Moore's Law and the Information Age has been the result.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in search of a "Moore's Law of space." But no one has found a propulsion technology to drive it. Instead, SpaceX tries to scrimp its way to savings using essentially classical technology. But even mere commercialization has endured serious difficulties: all three SpaceX launches have failed so far, the most recent failure coming just two days ago.
SpaceShipTwo uses a hybrid rocket, a technology invented in the 1930s. But even advocates for hybrids insist they will not replace solid and liquid technologies but instead be complementary. The proposed DreamChaser orbital spacecraft, powered by a hybrid rocket, assumes initial launch by the venerable Atlas V rocket. (NASA turned that idea down.)
A new space age is hardly precluded, but that's why space tourism is nigh but a new space age is not.
Posted Mon, Aug 4, 2:24 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Just a few mistakes: Learn2Innovate,
Your points don't challenge the piece.
1. Branson et al can make all the claims they want about launching payloads into space, but until they actually do it at lower cost than NASA and other govt agencies are doing, it is all talk. See this unfortunate failure .
2. Being funded by NASA to design vehicles is as commonplace as budget overruns. Wake me up when an actual vehicle is built that can do things cheaply and safely.
3. Sending a manned mission to another planet is orders of magnitude more expensive and risky. This fact is perfectly consonant with the point of the article. Show me some technology that can do it cheaply and safely and then you have a fact that contradicts the piece. I'll wait.
Going into space is damn hard. It deals with completely different physical constraints than designing a microchip. So far no one has come up with a clever way around those constraints. We've been waiting 40 years.