Living in the Universe

Your Next Vacation?

April 18, 2008 on 8:00 am | In Space Program | Comments Off

 Third Week of April 2008

The way Will Whitehorn tells it, the story began in 2003 in Mojave California on a visit to Scaled Composites, a company with a reputation for designing futuristic aircraft. Whitehorn is one of the top executives in Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard’s airline, was sponsoring Global Flyer, a Scaled Composites creation, on a non-stop voyage around the world. On his way out of the factory, Whitehorn saw something unusual and asked what it was. Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites, told him it was a spaceship. He was building it for another customer, but he couldn’t say any more.

Rutan’s customer turned out to be Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft founders.  When Spaceship One, as the aircraft was called, reached space for the second time on October 4, 2004, it won the ten million dollar Ansari X Prize. The craft was taken to high altitude by White Knight, a more-or-less conventional aircraft, and then dropped whereupon its engines ignited to shoot it a hundred kilometers above the planet and thus officially into space. It reentered the atmosphere and glided onto a conventional runway.

This was an epochal moment in the history of space because it was the first time space travel began to move from the realm of governments to the realm of private enterprise. But Mr. Allen is a billionaire only interested in proving that spaceship technology would work, not in exploiting it commercially himself, and this left Rutan a problem: he had a very cool spaceship on his hands but no way of making money from it. That’s where Sir Richard Branson came in. Virgin Galactic, the company in the Virgin stable headed by Mr. Whitehorn, decided to license the technology for Spaceship One and White Knight. Virgin Galactic wants to offer sub-orbital flights to paying passengers by the end of the decade.

Virgin Galactic has accumulated a number of commercial rivals in the space tourism market so free enterprise is working. One of them is led by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is building a competing sub-orbital spaceship at a ranch in Texas. His space company Blue Origin is so secretive that it won’t even answer questions about its logo. But Virgin Galactic has passed an important milestone. At an event held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in January, the company unveiled the design of its new generation of space vehicles and said the first examples have almost been finished out at Mr. Rutan’s factory. White Knight II, as it’s called, is due to roll out of the hanger soon. Test flights of Spaceship Two will start towards the end of 2009.

How does this space technology work? The combination of a carrier aircraft and a spaceship to get into space is sort of like building a two-stage rocket. Air launch rockets have a long history. Spaceship One and White Knight are essentially vastly improved and cheaper versions of the X-15 rocket plane that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s, and the B-52 Bomber that carried the Rocket Plane under its wings. However, pure rockets such as the ones that lifted the Space Shuttle won out because the space race between America and Russia emphasized speed over cost. Rockets were a cheap and proven technology, having already been developed as intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Rockets were a dead-end for the space program because they consume a huge amount of power as they claw their way up through the Earth’s thick atmosphere, and they spend most of that power lifting the fuel itself. By contrast, a rocket lifted by an airplane with wings before being launched can be made much smaller and lighter. The plane itself is light because engines breathe air. It thus needs to carry less fuel than a rocket and no chemical oxidant to burn that fuel as a rocket would. That also makes it safer, since chemical rockets are essentially giant firecrackers.  Each craft, the plane and the rocket, can therefore be optimized to do its own job. It’s also easier than designing a single vehicle with a lot of compromises to be able to do both jobs.

Virgin Galactic’s second generation of craft are based on Spaceship One and White Knight, but there are plenty of differences. White Knight II has been redesigned wholesale to lift a much larger spaceship with eight people on board instead of three. It has a wingspan similar to a Boeing 757. It’s three times larger than its predecessor and is the largest aircraft ever made from purely composite materials like carbon fiber. It has engines by Pratt & Whitney—tested and mature technologies, and with its twin boom and long wing it looks more like Global Flyer than its predecessor.

The new spaceship has been engineered to give the thrill of passengers having zero gravity swoops on the way down after they’ve watched the spaceship be released for its trip into space. There will be two pilots up front and six passengers who will have enough room to bounce around in the zero gravity. The spaceship is fueled by a hybrid rocket; called that because it contains both liquid and solid propellants. These rockets are cheaper to develop and operate, and the fuel is safer to store than purely liquid fuel ones. Spaceship One used as materials rubber and laughing gas, or nitrous oxide. Scaled Composites is studying alternatives to rubber that may improve performance. All of this pioneering technology leaves NASA and its European equivalent, ESA, in the dust.

Work is now beginning on another factory to start turning out these spacecraft in significant numbers. Virgin Galactic has ordered five spacecraft and two carrier aircraft. The spaceships will take longer to refuel for their next flight than the carrier aircraft do so thinking just as an airline would the firm has concluded it needs more spaceships than carriers. Each spaceship would eventually be capable of making two trips into space every day and the launch aircraft three or four flights. Rutan says they could operate from a number of airports and spaceports around the world. Virgin Galactic believes the fleet it has ordered should be large enough to furnish its space tourism business in the early years. Trips are expected to cost some two hundred thousand dollars each to start with, and hundreds of people have put down a total of thirty million dollars in deposits. Space travel is becoming real. As the price comes down, could this be your next vacation?