ON 21 June, SpaceShipOne kissed the edge of space. In doing so, it became the first privately funded craft to carry a person into space, and its pilot Mike Melvill became the first to earn astronaut wings while flying a civilian vehicle.
The thousands who witnessed the flight got a glimpse of a commercial future for space flight. SpaceShipOne is the first fully reusable space vehicle designed for routine, regular flights. The hope is that it will lead to a sharp fall in the cost of space exploration and research, opening up new vistas for both science and commerce. The craft’s designers even dream of making tourist flights above the atmosphere commonplace.
SpaceShipOne’s trip to the edge of space took less than 90 minutes from start to finish. From an airport in the desert town of Mojave, California, a graceful carrier plane with long drooping wings took off with a stubby-nosed three-seater rocket slung beneath it. The paired craft slowly climbed to an altitude of 46,000 feet (12.2 kilometres). Then the mother ship, nicknamed the White Knight, released SpaceShipOne, and Melvill fired its rocket. For about 90 seconds the craft was propelled straight up, to reach an altitude of 100 km, the official edge of space.
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To those gazing up from the desert below, the unique characteristics of the flight were obvious. After an hour of watching the carrier craft and its pair of chase planes circle lazily upward, they saw a contrail shoot up to the zenith, straight as an arrow and astonishingly fast. The vertical plume of vapour, so characteristic of a rocket launch, is hard to get a sense of from pictures or video. But to everyone below it was obvious that this was a special flight.
It has been a special effort on the ground too. In contrast to the thousands involved in the design, construction and testing of every vehicle that has reached space before this week, this project was accomplished by a team of some two dozen people, led by designer Burt Rutan of the company Scaled Composites of Mojave.
There remains a long way to go. This week’s sub-orbital flight grazed the edge of space and returned to Earth a few minutes later. Reaching orbit is a far more daunting prospect, and Rutan acknowledges the enormous challenges of creating an orbital vehicle. But he said this week: “We are heading to orbit sooner than you think. We do not plan to stay in low Earth orbit for decades.”
That will mean designing an entirely new vehicle. Currently SpaceShipOne fires an innovative hybrid rocket motor that uses a rubber-based solid fuel with liquid nitrous oxide as an oxidiser. The mixture provides a combination of the stability and reliability of a solid-fuel rocket – which can be stored fully fuelled and ready for use for long periods – with the ability to start and stop the burning instantly that has previously only been possible with liquid-fuelled rockets (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 10 May 2003, p 12). But SpaceShipOne’s maximum speed was Mach 3, in contrast to the Mach 22 needed to reach orbit. So for starters, an orbital vehicle will need a new rocket motor. And while SpaceShipOne’s low speed means re-entry does not require a special heat shield, this would be essential when returning from orbit.
SpaceShipOne itself, however, is expected to serve as one of the first commercial vehicles to offer rides into space to paying customers. Space Adventures, the company that helped Dennis Tito go into space, has advertised flights on such a vehicle for $98,000. And Rutan said this week he expects such rides to cost $20,000 or less within a few years – comparable to the cost of tours to exotic destinations like Antarctica.
But getting to even that point requires work. The team will have to analyse and correct problems with the control systems that occurred on this first flight to space. Immediately after the rocket burn, and as the craft was coasting up into space, Melvill said he suddenly lost control of the craft’s attitude, for reasons still unknown. Once that problem is understood and corrected, SpaceShipOne will attempt to win the $10 million Ansari X prize by flying the craft twice within two weeks, each time carrying the weight of two passengers in addition to the pilot.
The race for the X prize is certainly on. Peter Diamandis, head of the X prize foundation, said this week that six contestants have already test fired their rocket engines, and any one of them could now be considered a serious contender for the prize, especially since the control problems could delay SpaceShipOne’s run for the prize. The Canada-based Da Vinci Project is among those who have said they still have strong hopes of beating Rutan to the prize.
Rutan himself is looking beyond the X prize. He plans to build a bigger version of SpaceShipOne that could carry six to 10 passengers, and reach 150 kilometres, so that tourists can enjoy for longer the feeling of weightlessness and the view of the black sky above and the curving Earth below.
SpaceShipOne’s success could open the floodgates for commercial space travel. A decade after the Wright brothers flew there were thousands of pilots, and commercial passenger services and mail-carrying flights followed quickly. But in more than four decades since Yuri Gagarin’s and Alan Shepard’s first forays, fewer than 300 people have been to space and commercial services are nowhere in sight.
With governments’ grip on space flight now easing, that may change. As Rutan pointed out, if a few people in a small desert town, with modest funding, can reach space, many other people could now be inspired to do the same.
Living the dream in mojave
“THERE is an enormous pent-up hunger to fly in space, not just dream about it.” So said Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne, hours before the craft he designed and built briefly left the atmosphere and entered the darkness beyond.
The extent of the support for this private venture was dear before pilot Mike Melvill had left the tarmac. Thousands of spectators swarmed to the remote desert town of Mojave, population 3763, for an event they figured they would one day want to tell their grandchildren about Many were simply fans of space travel. Others were aerospace engineers or entrepreneurs hoping to witness not just a milestone in private enterprise but the birth of a new industry. Space interest groups turned out in force, and the National Space Sodety held an all-night party in the publk viewing area.
Rutan is not the first pioneer to blaze a trail over this windswept desert. Here the shuttle made its first landings, and at Edwards air force base nearby, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and the ultra-fast Blackbird spy plane and B-2 stealth bomber were developed. But Mojave airport, whkh just last week was granted a licence as the US’s flrst private spaceport, had never seen anything like this.
The sense of achievement was palpable as successive milestones were passed. “There were several times in mission control when tears came to our eyes,” Rutan says. He has been accustomed to working in relative obscurity and privacy, and until this week had never pre-announced any of his test flights. All requests for press visits to the team’s headquarters and for advertising slogans to be put on the rocket had been refused. But he was clearly thrilled by the attention ordinary people paid to this week’s feat, and by the strong words of support. And despite the team’s brave public face before the flight, they were dearly all concerned about its risks.
Melvill’s safe return made him the first person to earn astronaut wings in a purely civilian project And fittingly Bun Aldrin, second man on the moon, was one of the first to congratulate MeMII after he crawled out of his rocket He had joined the club, Aldrin told him. “How I know what it was like for those working on the Apollo programme,” Rutan said.