The Seattle Times October 05, 2003
For this space race, the X factor is money The big challenge: 'It's rocket science'
By Andrew Garber
SPACE-FLIGHT contest draws big dreamers, but not all of them with millions to burn.
EVERETT Rich Harman has a prototype spaceship sitting in his garage, 5 feet long and gleaming white. All he and his buddies say they need is, oh, $4 million to make a bigger one to blast three people into space.
It's a vision that's kept the Canyon Space Team, an ad-hoc group of engineers, rocket hobbyists and a mathematician, meeting for years in hopes of building a ship to carry a crew 62 miles into the atmosphere, high enough to make them official astronauts.
Harman said their plan is pretty simple. "You take off like an airplane ... rotate, retract the gear and point up where you take off like a rocket." Before writing them off as dreamers, or worse, consider that they are not alone. More than two dozen outfits around the world, some with no money and others with millions to burn, are working on manned space flight. A few have the potential to launch a spacecraft within a matter of months.
The Seattle area is firmly plugged into this space race.
In a sprawling warehouse near the Duwamish waterway, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has started a company that's developing a spaceship. Andrews Space, a Seattle company that has had several NASA contracts, is involved in an effort to do the same. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is widely rumored to be bankrolling efforts by Scaled Composites LLC in the Mojave Desert to build a reusable spacecraft.
And Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh, is on the board of trustees for the X-Prize, an organization that's offering $10 million for the first team that can launch three people into suborbital space, bring them back safely and do it again within 14 days using the same vehicle.
The X-Prize, created in 1996, has fueled a flurry of attention recently about the prospects of private industry pioneering a new era of manned space flight.
"The vision of the X-Prize is to spur access to space for ordinary people," said Lindbergh, of Bainbridge Island, who blames government bureaucracy for hindering space travel. "Private businesses can innovate and use existing technologies more efficiently that will allow us to have access to space."
Bah, humbug, says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense- and space-policy consulting group in Alexandria, Va.
Anyone who thinks private industry can revolutionize space travel has "no idea what they are doing," said Pike, former director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists.
"Human space flight is something that costs many billions of dollars," he said. "It's rocket science."
The wealthy and the wordy
There are two basic types of entrepreneurs pursuing manned space flight: wealthy people who don't like to discuss what they're up to, and financially strapped engineers looking for money who will talk your ear off.
The Canyon Space Team falls into the latter category. The group of mostly middle-aged space buffs includes a Boeing engineer, a mathematician from Russia with a doctorate in structural mechanics, pilots and specialists in electronics and avionics. They all have day jobs and devote around 10 hours a week of their spare time to the space team.
"We're technically credible and financially broke," said Bill Roeseler, 60, technical director for the group and an aerospace engineer at Boeing for more than 30 years.
The team met recently at Harman's place, a modest home near Interstate 5 with a distant view of the Cascades. The living room is dominated by two Segway scooters plugged into a wall. The kitchen table overflows with charts, diagrams of their spacecraft and empty soda cans. A computer printout of the flight profile is taped to the side of the refrigerator and tumbles onto the floor.
The group formed in 1996 and tested small rocket engines for a while in rural areas around Seattle, sending one small rocket up to about 2,000 feet. Then it started building a prototype spaceship, the "S4V."
The craft, which looks similar to a space shuttle, sits in Harman's two-car garage amid used rocket nozzles and spare parts. They hope to test it early next year at supersonic speeds, bring it in to a safe landing by remote control and attract the attention of potential investors.
Their ultimate goal is to put three people in a bullet-shaped rocket with wings, shoot them high enough to glimpse the stars, experience a few minutes of weightlessness and then glide back to Earth. Total trip time: about 10 minutes from takeoff to landing.
If they, or any other organization in Washington, build a spaceship, they'll have to go out of state to launch. The federal government has approved spaceports so far in five states: Alaska, California, New Mexico, Florida and Virginia. There has been some talk of creating a spaceport in Moses Lake, which is certified for space-shuttle landings.
The Canyon Space Team wants to compete for the X-Prize. But time is running out and deep-pocket investors are proving scarce.
"If we don't start flying soon, it will be too late for the X-Prize," Roeseler said.
At times, the team has lost faith, he said. "We have to believe in ourselves," he said. "We have to truly believe we're going to go for it, and the money will come."
Follow the money
One thousand miles to the south, in the Mojave Desert, Scaled Composites apparently has no such money problems.
Paul Allen is widely rumored to be the financial backer. The billionaire isn't talking, but he's not doing anything to dissuade speculation.
Michael Nank, a spokesman for Allen's investment company, Vulcan, said they get lots of calls asking about the connection. "We don't have anything to announce, so we're not commenting," he said.
Scaled Composites isn't saying much either.
Burt Rutan, the founder of Scaled Composites, declined requests for an interview. Rutan, team leader for the company's X-Prize project, became famous for building an airplane that made the first flight around the world without refueling in 1986. The project was privately funded.
Information released by the company earlier this year shows his plan for manned space flight is similar to the X-15 program in the 1960s, in which an X-15 was carried aloft by a B-52 and dropped. The craft was boosted to high altitude by a rocket engine.
Rutan plans to have a twin-turbojet aircraft carry SpaceShipOne, a small, three-seat rocket ship. At about 50,000 feet, the spaceship would be dropped from the carrier jet. A hybrid rocket engine that burns a combination of liquid nitrous oxide and rubber would boost the craft to an altitude of 62 miles.
The craft's twin tails would be folded up for a "shuttlecock" effect as it re-enters the atmosphere. At 80,000 feet, the tails would be folded back down and it would glide back to Earth.
Many think Rutan is a front-runner in the competition for the X-Prize, although several teams around the world are testing equipment.
He unveiled SpaceShipOne earlier in the year and has a rocket engine picked out. Rutan has said he'd like to launch it before the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight on Dec. 17.
Little information is available on Andrews Space or Jeff Bezo's efforts.
Andrews Space says it's involved with a private effort to build a reusable launch vehicle, but will not divulge details.
Bezos is secretive as well.
The billionaire created a company called Blue Origin LLC in September 2000. E-mail to the company goes unanswered. It has a large, innocuous-looking warehouse on South Nevada Street, by the Duwamish waterway. A company Web site, www.blueorigin.com, offers few details.
A company job advertisement states that Blue Origin "is an aerospace R&D firm building a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems ... (with) a 20-year vision for developing systems that will enable a viable and enduring human presence in space."
Shane Ross, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, said he and a team of students did a yearlong research project that focused on building a space colony in a polar orbit that could be used as a base for mining asteroids and the moon.
The class gave a presentation on their findings to two representatives from Blue Origin.
"They said it was an interesting idea and that they were looking at a lot of different ways to make space profitable. They didn't say much more than that," he said.
Easy on the gee-whiz
Even with wealthy investors trying to build spaceships on their own, don't expect "Star Trek"-type explorations of the universe anytime soon.
It's hard enough just to get a ship into orbit.
Take the X-Prize competition. Experts expect one of the teams competing for the prize to succeed, after spending millions of dollars developing a craft and rocket engine.
But the competition won't really send people into deep space, it just puts people into suborbit, the fringes of space high enough to see the world as a blue globe, but still firmly in the grip of Earth's gravity.
The technology needed to reach suborbit is relatively simple, compared with orbital space flight. It requires a rocket that can reach around 3,000 mph and take the craft to an altitude of 62 miles, said Jason Andrews, president of Andrews Space, whose company has worked with NASA on spaceship designs.
The craft will fall back to Earth at a speed that isn't fast enough to require special heat shielding, he said.
Going into orbit is exponentially more difficult.
"There's a thing called the rocket equation," Andrews said. "You have to go from zero to 25,000 feet per second (about 17,000 mph) to go into orbit."
That requires a much more powerful rocket engine than being used by the X-Prize teams. It also requires special heat shielding because the spaceship re-enters the atmosphere traveling at 17,000 mph.
"Things really get hot above 3,000 mph," Andrews said.
He thinks it's possible to design a reusable, orbital spacecraft that will cost less to fly than current rockets, but expects it will cost at least $1 billion to develop such a craft.
If left up to the government, "it will take decades," he said. "If you come up with that privately, you could do it sooner."
X-Prize advocates say the race to build a suborbital spacecraft will be a steppingstone to true space flight. They expect the competition to result in a space industry that will cater to tourists wanting a glimpse of space.
That, in turn, they argue, will spur tremendous public support for space travel and more investment into more advanced spacecraft.
Pike, with GlobalSecurity.org, doesn't buy it.
"The only practical application (of the X-Prize)," he said, "would be for ... anybody who can buy a ticket and has had a hankering to be a real, live, flown astronaut. You could cater to that trade. How big is it? I don't know. It will certainly be smaller the first time they kill someone."
Members of the Canyon Space Team say that's the kind of talk that has kept space travel from the masses.
"It is difficult to do what we're trying to do," said Chris Erickson, a member of the Canyon Space Team. But the ability to build a suborbital spacecraft "in a common garage really isn't that far off in the future."
"Everybody has the choice to sit and be little," he said. "People do bigger things than they are."
© Copyright 2003 The Seattle Times Company
