To Boldly Go... 
by Andrew Kerr
October 2006
While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, delivered another of his typically defiant speeches to the United Nations last month, Anousheh Ansari, a wealthy entrepreneur from Houston, Texas whose family had fled the Iranian Revolution during the 1970's, floated in a Russian-built space capsule towards the International Space Station. She was the latest "space tourist," a businesswoman who had spent $20 million of her fortune in order to experience the thrill of space travel. Although her week-long adventure was not widely covered by the American media, Ansari captured the imaginations of people around the world—particularly Muslim women. Those women saw her as the ultimate role-model, one who had broken the yoke of sexual repression associated with many Muslim countries. The Associated Press reported that as the Soyuz rocket streaked across the Iranian sky shortly after its launch from Kazakhstan, Iranian women watched with tears of joy streaming down their faces. Ansari inspired some Iranian activists to lobby even harder for more rights for women. Many saw her life as the ultimate embodiment of the American Dream. Grammy-Award winning dance act Deep Dish (a hugely popular Washington, D.C. group with Iranian origins of their own) wrote a song for her.
In a world where every major continent has been explored and where the extreme sport of skydiving doesn't seem so "extreme" anymore, space continues to offer the greatest adventure. We are inspired by those who explore it because space travel is perceived as something daring—even dangerous. And it is. The world stood still in January 1986 when the Challenger space shuttle (which, it's probably not unfair to say, carried the first space tourist) exploded shortly after lift-off (read President Reagan's eulogy here). Challenger's older sister, Columbia, once best-known as the first shuttle to go into space, exploded during re-entry in February 2003; the memories of its astronauts survive on a page on NASA's website.
So space is not only "the final frontier," but a realm inhabited by heroes—and martyrs. And Stephen Fleming wants that era to end.
That's because Fleming, Georgia Tech's Chief Communications Officer ("The quickest description of my job is, 'Professors at Georgia Tech invent stuff and I try to turn it into money'") wants to see space travel become utterly...mundane. Stupifyingly dull! So ordinary and everyday an occurrence that you, me—any of us—would think nothing of leaving the earth's atmosphere in order to drop in on the fam in New Zealand.
But NASA is not in the business of taking everyday people on joyrides through space—especially after Challenger (the Russians, of course, are another story). So several years ago a number of organizations began exploring the concept of commercialized space travel, and Fleming, a former venture capitalist (and, like space tourist Anousheh Ansari, a former telecom player as well) has invested in three different privately financed space programs.
But NASA has decades of experience sending people into space and bringing them back! Could private spaceflight ever be as safe as that offered by our official space program?
"It would be much safer—much safer," Fleming exclaims. "Every time you get in a shuttle you're on the first flight. You're really doing a test flight every single time you light the engines."
That's because our current space program is based on the V2 rocket system, Fleming says, a German World War II rocket model. Effectively, astronauts are strapped to a rocket and blasted into space. "All rockets that are currently being used, including the shuttle, the Russian rockets, the Apollos that took us to the moon, trace their history back to the V2 system. Everything we've got traces its genetic DNA back to ammunition. But there's a reason we don't strap a person inside a piece of ammunition. It's dangerous!" (Recall that even though the shuttle lands like an airplane, it is strapped to rockets when it is shot into space. "That's why I was so horrified years ago when the Challenger blew up," Fleming says. "We were trying to pretend that it was just like an airplane flight. That was wrong.")
The designs now under consideration by private space flight companies focus on, well, things that look and behave more like airplanes. They can be flown multiple times. "You do this incremental testing on the same vehicle," Fleming says. "This way, passengers will be in the same vehicle that has flown a hundred times. You can't do that with ammunition."
If you want to elicit a good chuckle from Fleming, ask him, "What's wrong with NASA?"
Government bureaucracy/inefficiency is one issue, he says, as those of us who stand in line at the DMV are already well aware. He offers the following colorful example: "Do you know how many signatures it takes to allow a 737 to pull away from the gate and fly? It takes three. Do you know how many signatures it takes to allow the shuttle to fly? One million." That's because every shuttle part has to be signed off on, every tile, every switch, every bolt. And even despite that caution two catastrophes have occurred.
Fleming also describes NASA as "a huge job program" hampered by the weight of its many employees. It's the typical laissez-faire philosophy you'd expect from a former venture capitalist, but darn if it doesn't make some sense.
The various companies investing in space travel are now engaged in a delightfully spirited series of competitions wherein each of their models competes against the others. It's sort of like that old Discovery Channel show "Robot Wars," except that these battles are between rocket planes shrieking around an aerial racetrack 5000 feet over the New Mexican desert. Again, in the spirit of privatization, there is nothing better than a competition to sort out the best from the rest. A ten plane race is scheduled in 2007.
"What's neat about the market right now is that different people are trying different things," Fleming explains. "There's different architectures." So, who knows what model will come out working the best? This is part of the fun in speculating on the future of space travel.
So let's address some logistics right here. Who, in fact, owns space?
"There are some international treaties some of which date back to the 1960's," Fleming says. "The mental model is that space is kinda being treated like Antarctica (a continent divied up by an international treaty which effectively gives that landmass to the world). Now that's probably going to change."
What about space traffic control?
"Space traffic control right now is being handled by the military through NORAD. They've got the radars they've got the computers, but they're not trained or budgeted to be a civilian space traffic control authority. So, right now that's being done in a very collegial, cooperative sort of way." In other words, that's one day going to change, too.
I spoke also with XCOR's Jim Busby. "We're going to go with what the FAA says," he says, but certainly the whole phenomenon of (literal) space races makes every step forward an interesting legal test case. "Part of this will be just as it was in the roaring 20's," he says, furthering the historical analogy by comparing the last few years to the journey from "the Wright brothers to a World War I biplane."
Of course, we are familiar enough with such rosy technological predictions from previous eras to sarcastically ask, "Where are our robot servants and flying cars?" But space travel is different; there is an enormous demand for it, and the benefits (dramatically reduced travel time) are obvious. The Economist, a magazine not known for jumping on just any bandwagon, proclaims that "the era of private space flight is about to dawn."
NASA is not only facing competition from what must from its behemoth perspective appear to be pesky gadfly companies like XCOR, but from the mighty Lockheed Martin, which in September announced that it is eyeing the possibility of sending people to an orbiting space hotel by using some of the leftover technology from space programs past. In other words, the train of privately financed space travel is so far down the track that it now appears impossible for anything to derail it.
Predictions on when this commercialized space travel will go into effect? "By one standard we're in the era of commercialized space travel today," Fleming says, citing Ansari as an example. "By another standard (selling suborbital tickets), Neiman Marcus has a charter space flight in this year's Christmas catalog for flights in 2009. By 2020, I think it will be boringly routine... 'We went to orbit for our vacation!' 'Oh, no, does that mean we have look at your home videos?'"
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