Up, Up And Ka-Ching!

Big corporations are also getting into the act. Astrium—a subsidiary of the multibillion-dollar European aerospace corporation EADS, the owner of Airbus—hopes to get a passenger space jet off the ground by 2012, using a conventional jet engine for takeoff and rocket engines to go from 12km to 60km in altitude in a white-knuckle 80 seconds, at which point the rockets will be switched off and inertia will carry the ship to more than 100km above Earth.

Since Gagarin's pioneering flight, close to 500 people have followed in his tracks, but only five of them were private paying passengers. Virgin Galactic anticipates sending 600 new astronauts in just its first year of operation and has already put 100 ticketholders through rigorous G-force testing on a centrifuge in Pennsylvania. Rocketplane claims to have a waiting list, too, though it won't say how long, and is pursuing corporate link-ups, including offering ticket contests with Nestlé in France and the UTV television network in India. The technology for suborbital flights is considered sound. While the main protagonists play down talk of a new "space race" and emphasize safety, bragging rights are clearly at stake. "A lot of people have screamed and shouted that they are going to build a wonderful spaceship long before Virgin, and it's clearly total rubbish," says Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic. "Our only race is with ourselves in terms of the safety of our project. We are going to get this absolutely right."

Tourism isn't the only game in town. Entrepreneurs are also working on ships to take cargo into low Earth orbit. Satellites are one obvious opportunity, but entrepreneurs are also aiming to help service the International Space Station in 2010, when NASA discontinues the space shuttle. Having axed the X-33, a single-stage-to-orbit spaceliner that was supposed to replace the shuttle, in 2001, NASA is encouraging entrepreneurs to take up the slack. It has allocated $500 million in seed money for private partners to develop cargo services to low Earth orbit. "It's very important to turn to industry for technologies," says Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. "We want to positively encourage this market. It could serve not only NASA but other customers."

XCOR expects to be able to carry up to 50kg of extra weight on Xerus, allowing for small satellites or scientific research racks, and Virgin Galactic is planning for 50kg to 100kg. PayPal billionaire Elon Musk has also taken up the challenge. He formed Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in 2002 to build commercial launch services for satellites and cargo; it's now developing two rockets and a seven-person crew capsule. The goal is to take cargo to the space station by 2010 and, a year or two later, to start ferrying passengers. In a test launch last year in the South Pacific, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket reached an altitude of 321 km—at an estimated cost of $7 million, compared with the $500 million cost of a shuttle mission. This was the second of two test-flights and both failed to achieve orbit. A review by SpaceX—carried out with the help from NASA and the Pentagon—concluded that Falcon 1's problems were minor and that it could be considered "operational." After a third test-flight, SpaceX plans to launch a satellite for the Malaysian space agency, RazakSat, by April.

Farther down the road, entrepreneurs have their sights on rapid "point to point" Earth transportation. Virgin Galactic, for example, hopes that phase two of its business plan will involve pioneering suborbital flights that could whisk paying passengers from New York to Australia in under two hours. That would revolutionize the commercial airplane business. Those ambitions may not be achieved for decades, but the world will soon be a big step closer.

© 2008