Enter Citizen Astronauts

scaping from Earth will not always be astronomically expensive; contrary to the impression created by a Saturn launch, the energy needed to reach space is remarkably small.

“About eight hundred pounds of kerosene and liquid oxygen, costing some twenty-five dollars, will liberate enough energy to carry a man to the Moon. The fact that we currently burn a thousand tons per passenger indicates that there is vast room for improvement.

“This will come through the space refueling, nuclear propulsion and, most important of all, the devel­opment of reusable boosters, or ‘space ferries,’ which can be flown for hundreds of missions, like normal aircraft. We have to get away, as quickly as possible, from today’s missile-orientated philosophy of rocket launchers which are discarded after a single flight.”

When I wrote these words in July 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts were on their way to the Moon.* The Space Age was barely a dozen years old, and travelling to space required so much money and effort that only the governments of the richest countries could engage in it.

But the early years of space exploration were driven by different considerations: both national space agencies and TV networks seemed to love the massive firework displays at rocket launches. Indeed, witnessing a Saturn V take off could be a moving experience—if we overlooked the fact that it was a grandiosely wasteful way to travel anywhere (each Apollo mission cost around two hundred million in 1960s dollars).

So, even as I covered the Moon Landings for CBS television, I was already looking ahead to a time when space travel would make more economic sense. In my essay, I envisaged that the true Space Age would dawn sometime after 1985, “. . . and projects which today are barely feasible will become not only relatively easy, but economically self-supporting.”

I added: “The closing years of this century should see the beginnings of commercial space flight, which will be directed first towards giant manned satellites or space platforms orbiting within a thousand miles above the Earth’s surface.”

Well, in those heady days of Apollo, I couldn’t have anticipated all the detours and distractions of the 1970s that delayed our optimistic projections. Politics and economics have taken their toll, but looking back, I’m happy to note that I was off by only a decade or so.

Commercial space flight is now beginning to be technologically feasible and will soon become economically viable. The rise of citizen astronauts has already begun—this time, I doubt if politics can hold up progress because it is no longer so closely tied to the fluctuating interests and resources of national governments.

SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History chronicles a key milestone in the race to take private citizens and pri­vate enterprise to space. It’s the story of how a group of determined and passionate aerospace designers— and their financiers—pulled off one of the most remarkable accomplishments in our conquest of gravity.

In that process, they won the ten-million-dollar Ansari X Prize founded by my friend Dr. Peter Diamandis to galvanize private enterprise and technological innovation in space travel. The prize was modeled after the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize, offered in 1919 by hotelier Raymond Orteig, to the first pilot to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. An unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh finally won this challenge in May 1927, flying a single-engine aircraft named Spirit of St. Louis. That feat won him instant fame and spawned the commercial aviation industry that changed our world beyond recognition.

And here’s an interesting coincidence. In 1987, I received the Lindbergh Award presented annually for those seeking a balance between technology and nature. The winner in 2000 was Burt Rutan, who went on to design SpaceShipOne with generous backing from Microsoft co-founder (and science fiction enthusiast) Paul Allen.

Burt and I are connected in other ways. I am intrigued to read that Burt’s boyhood imagination was sparked by watching Wernher von Braun on TV talking about the exploration of the Moon and Mars. Wernher was a good friend who took to diving on my suggestion—I told him that the best simulation of weightlessness was achieved underwater. And a few years ago I found out, from his long-time secretary, how Wernher had used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to land men on the Moon.

While writing this, I came across Burt’s remark in Popular Mechanics (September 2007): “If we make a courageous decision like the goal and program we kicked off for Apollo in 1961, we will see our children or grandchildren in outposts on other planets.”

Fortunately, we need not rely solely on governments for expanding humanity’s presence beyond the Earth. The Ansari X Prize has succeeded in spurring commercial astronautics, and I hope governments will not stand in the way. I am following with much interest the emergence of a new breed of “astropreneurs” who are trying out new technologies, business models—and indeed, building a whole industry—without relying on government funding.

In that sense, space travel is returning to where it started: with maverick pioneers dreaming of journeys to orbit and beyond, some carrying out rocket experiments in their own backyards. Burt and his team have been a great deal more successful than Robert Goddard ever was in his lifetime (and, thankfully, no one is ridiculing Burt the way they did with Goddard).

Yet, today’s astropreneurs like Paul Allen and Burt Rutan are driven by the same spirit of enquiry, adventure, and exploration that sustained Lindbergh and Goddard. This, then, is the inside story of how citizens reclaimed space.