Up the long ladder

47 years ago today the Soviet Union, under the direction of Sergei Korolev, stuck a metal beachball equipped with four buggy-whip antennas on top of a rocket and threw it into orbit. This beachball, named Sputnik, really didn't have much of a purpose except to circle the planet and beep. But that was more than enough to jolt people into action, because the whole point of the Sputnik launch wasn't to send up something with any actual use per se, but to prove that it could be done.

And today, Burt Rutan and Brian Binnie launched a plastic airplane fueled by laughing gas and old tires to 70 miles above the earth and brought it back in one piece. SpaceShipOne is a lot like Sputnik or the Spirit of St. Louis, in that it doesn't have much practical value beyond winning the prize. Nobody's going to be flying SS1s from LA to New York in thirty minutes or anything. But again, that's not the point.

SpaceShipOne proved today, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is possible for a completely private group to build a spacecraft, fly it into space, bring it back, and then do it again within a week. We were promised that kind of action with the Space Shuttle back in the 80s, and it failed to deliver. SS1 doesn't promise us as much as the Shuttle did - it is still just a suborbital craft, after all - but so far Burt Rutan and his team haven't failed to deliver.

Proving that it can be done is the first step. Now, the trick is to capitalize on it. As we've already discussed, more prizes are being floated for the next stage in the game, and the other players haven't considered themselves out just yet. Groups like DaVinci and Armadillo Aerospace have come too far to give up just because the cash payout has been awarded. I fully expect that both the Canadian team and Armadillo will fly their vehicles by next summer at the latest, just to prove that they can. Some of the other X-Prize teams will probably also follow suit.

We're beginning to see the first glimmerings of a real space tourism industry in the plans of Richard Branson. Suborbital space tours, I suspect, will become one of the major novelty draws for the rest of the decade. While the price is going to be fairly high (I know I'm not going to be able to afford a ticket), companies are already setting up contests for free tickets on SS1-derived aircraft. That kind of publicity, combined with Branson's stated claim to try and reduce the cost of passenger tickets, will be of immense help in getting a nacent tourism industry off the ground.

In the meantime, the other X-Prize contenders won't necessarily be left out in the cold. The modern concept of "extreme sport" seems tailor-made for the kind of garage-built suborbital craft that make up the majority of the X-Prize contenders. If the X-Games can be a legitimate sporting event (complete with ESPN coverage and millions of dollares in ad revenue), then the planned X-Cup in New Mexico, where rocketeers will be able to launch their craft in direct competition with each other, has the potential to make some serious dough. Hell, if NASCAR can become so incredibly popular, why not spaceship racing?

You may have noticed that compared to Project Apollo, or the various ill-fated Mars schemes out there, that these goals seem kind of small and petty. If you were of the appropriate mindset, you might even think there was something evilly capitalist about the whole thing. Well... maybe so. But the aerospace industry that made folks like Burt Rutan possible wasn't built on huge projects like Apollo, it was built on people who were small and petty and had capitalist dreams like being able to sell tickets to passengers or win prizes at races. Without the innovations and the work those small and petty people put into flight, modern aviation would not have moved nearly as fast as it did during the 20s and 30s.

Barnstorming on ESPN isn't as glamorous as being the first man to walk on Mars, but it certainly beats all hell out of sitting at home.

Posted by the Fourth Man at October 4, 2004 05:21 PM

---