PHOENIX, ARIZONA -- There's no need to wait for big-ticket, big-money space programs to secure the public right of entry into Earth orbit, says a group of maverick rocketeers. A community of upstart startups is convinced that there is more than one way to create cheap access to space.

Their offerings? Huge balloon platforms anchored at the boundary of air and space to handle traffic to and from Earth orbit; passenger space travel as a booming business thanks to sleek, quick-to-turn-around vehicles that operate in rapid response, FedEx-like fashion. Imagine free-fall family outings courtesy of suborbital space planes that regularly depart from sprawling spaceports.

All these radical ideas have germinated beyond the bureaucratic snarl of government and aerospace industry officialdom, with many of the designers and engineers bringing their hopes and hardware to Space Access '02, held here April 25-27, and sponsored by the Space Access Society (SAS).

"Frankly, the reason new things are happening is pressure from the bottom," said Henry Vanderbilt, head of the SAS and chief coordinator of the meeting. Just like rocket thrust, reactive pressure has begun from the bottom up, he said, a force created by private groups who are forming an exclusive, sky-high alliance.

"These people have flown rockets, recovered them, refueled them, and have flown them again. We're not talking model rockets here, but rockets having complex controls, liquid-fueled and so on. It's an expanding club," Vanderbilt said.

However, it has not all been smooth sailing for the always cash-starved private rocket outfits.

Several entrepreneurial rocket projects have gone awry. A number of efforts have folded completely, spending millions of dollars in the process without a contrail to show for themselves. Other groups are riding on financial fumes or have altered their space business strategy altogether.

Some rocketeers blame the marketplace. Some blame the government. Some blame the rocket gods. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable passion radiating from do-it-yourself space access groups.

"We all thought we would be a lot further than this 10 years go, but at least we're moving forward," Vanderbilt said.

"Look at the space shuttle," says John Powell, president and founder of JP Aerospace of Rancho Cordova, California. "I see a billion-dollar biplane. Something went wrong along the way. People are convinced it is rocket science. That it takes a big government program and superman astronauts to fly at a cost of millions of dollars."

Powell points out that he and many others are busily working in the trenches looking for alternatives. Everyone is hungry to break the rules. "If somebody pulls it off, everything keeping us out of access to space is going to crumble away. It's just an illusion," he said.

JP Aerospace is focusing money, time and talent on fabricating a microsatellite booster, as well as balloon platforms that soar to the outskirts of the atmosphere.

"It's kind of our playground," Powell noted, detailing recent flights of the Dark Sky Station - a five-armed balloon platform capable of transporting payloads high above Earth. Still-larger balloon platforms are on the drawing boards. Envisioned is a huge, piloted, free-floating atmospheric launch pad from which outgoing rockets streak into orbit, later returning to the high-flying complex.

"We want to be the Wal-Mart of space, not the LockMart [Lockheed Martin] of space," Powell emphasized. "We are America's other space program," he said.

A leading do-it-yourselfer is John Carmack, perhaps better known in computer game circles as a founder of id software, and the brain behind such PC action games as Doom and Quake. But he also heads Armadillo Aerospace of Dallas, Texas and a group intent on building vehicles that transport people to the edge of space.

Personally bankrolling his space company, Carmack reported that good progress is being made and he expects to spend upwards of a $1 million on a craft that propels three people on a suborbital jaunt. In working up to the vehicle, the software sage and volunteers have been building and launching a series of inexpensive, small rocket platforms, shot into the air on hydrogen peroxide-fueled engines.

"I'm a big proponent of little experiments," Carmack emphasized.

Sometimes those experiments work. Sometimes they crash.

"The truth is we learn more from one crash than people can learn from months and months of simulation," Carmack said. "The challenges of rocket science have been mythologized out of all proportion to their true difficulty," he added, and that constructing, testing and flying rockets is not as expensive as people think.

The platform design -- eventually to be flown by an onboard pilot -- has recently evolved to include rotor blades. In the crosshairs of Carmack and his rocket mates is demolishing a climb-to-altitude record now held by a Russian jet pilot. Launching passengers, first to suborbital heights and later into orbit is a goal of Armadillo Aerospace.

"I plan on making money off this. I believe that if it's neat to me, it will likely be neat to other people. And neat is a commodityyou can make money off neat," Carmack said.

At the Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society (ERPS), the philosophy of choice is Keep It Simple Scientists, or KISS for short.

Founded in 1993, the society is based in the San Jose area and researches high-density storable propellant combinations. Single-stage-to-orbit rocketry is under study, as is another society venture, the Private Rocket to Orbit Tiny Objects (PROTO).

ERPS is developing reusable rocket technology, including designs that take off and land vertically under control of an on-board computer. Using off-the-shelf model aircraft parts, the society's GizmoCopter Project tests gyroscopes, accelerometers and computer software necessary for vertical takeoff, vertical landing rockets.

Randall Claque, vice president of ERPS, said their KISS rocket was flown twice within three hours in early April. That shows the society is on the right track in adopting the credo: "Build a little, test a little".

Reliability and reusability in rocket designs, he said, is central to reaching low Earth orbit in an affordable and routine manner.

Also showing their rocket wares at last month's SAS get-together was XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, California. This young startup organization is staffed by a band of nonconformist tinkerers, resolute in cranking out safe, reliable and reusable rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles.

Already taking flight is XCOR's EZ-Rocket, a souped-up airplane outfitted with rocket motors.

"We're showing that rocket engines are easy to operate, and that they are safe, attainable, reliable and reusable, just like a jet engine," said XCOR's Aleta Jackson. "We stand behind our product, but not when the engine's firing," she said.

Jackson underscored the company's can-do competence. "One running rocket engine is better than one PowerPoint talk," she said.

Although guarded in revealing all their future plans, XCOR officials see the company's next generation vehicles matched to the suborbital market place: Science experimenters and tourists alike can benefit by free-fall for-a-fee rides. Furthermore, an XCOR reusable suborbital craft, they explained, can boost to height a toss-away upper stage that then blasts a microsatellite into Earth orbit.

"We are not the answerwe're an answer to getting into space," Jackson said.

Several private rocket groups are taking up space in Oklahoma.

There, the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority is offering tax credits to like-minded space transportation companies. JP Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace, for instance, have set up operations at the Oklahoma Spaceport, the former Clinton-Sherman Air Base, in the town of Burns Flat.

Given lots of ground and open air space, the Oklahoma Spaceport is catering to clientele wanting to test fly their space hardware.

A recent addition to those using the Oklahoma Spaceport is Pioneer Rocketplane of Solvang, California.

Mitchell Burnside Clapp, founder and president of Pioneer Rocketplane, said his firm has reconfigured an earlier space plane design. They see suborbital passenger travel as a potential "icebreaker market" for space. A way to chip away at that market, he continued, is by way of the company's still-in-the-making four-seater fighter-sized Pioneer XP craft.

Clapp, as did others attending Space Access '02, wax and wane as to what space markets can be serviced, or propelled into being by far less-expensive access to space.

Pioneer Rocketplane, like other entrepreneurial access to space groups, have gone through turbulent times.

"The year 2001 was hardly a space odyssey," Clapp said. "The idea that we seemed to have decades ago that the sky was going to be dark with all kinds of space stuffit just didn't happen," he said.

"We were wrong about the size and scope of the projected market," Clapp said.

For one, the hype over ringing the Earth with constellations of low Earth orbiting telecommunication satellites, then maintaining those satellite networks, did not materialize. As that market disintegrated, so too did the hopes of private rocketeers to build and offer low-cost space transportation.

However, two other markets look promising as well. Promotions and sponsorships -- flying corporate logos and products, for example -- is a moneymaker. So too is microgravity research and Earth observation investigations done during suborbital runs of their space plane, Clapp said.

For the time being, locating venture capital for space may take a spiritual advisor. Thanks to the multi-billion dollar Iridium satellite debacle and investors losing major bucks, finding wellsprings of free-flowing cash isn't easy.

"Iridium has hurt. There's no doubt about it," said investor Paul Hans of P. Hans & Company in Scottsdale, Arizona. "The market for satellites has been far, far, far overestimated. Nobody looks at that as being a realistic market anymore. That does not play well," he said.

Hans believes that one likely driver for the entire space industry is the tourism market. "Right now, the Russians are more capitalist about this than we arebecause they need the money," he said.

Added Joseph Pistritto of Belmont, California, an investor in several high-tech areas, including space: "The vast majority of venture capitalists aren't very adventuresome. What's needed is an 'adventure' capitalist."

Pistritto suggested that the venture capital world doesn't have a clue about what's going on in access to space and budding markets. However, matching investors with the longer time horizons required for a return-on-investment in space is still promising, he said.

"It is possible to find money," Pistritto said, likening private space projects to the time horizons acceptable within the pharmaceutical industry.

The good news from the assembly of hot shot rocket groups that attended Space Access '02 is that econo-class space flight may truly be on the horizon.

Meeting organizer, Henry Vanderbilt, summed up the three-day gathering by identifying a theme he felt had emerged.

"Building a place to stand", Vanderbilt told SPACE.com. "The various low-cost launch startups are getting into position to move fast. They'll make their move when investment conditions and existing launch markets heat up again. Also, they will be building the means to address some of the exciting new markets opening up, not the least of which is space tourism," he said.

It is the belief of a corps of 21^st century crusaders that getting up into space requires less of a down payment than ever before. There's been a reduction in development time and risk to build vehicles able to offer routine, cheap access to space. Lastly, it appears that a flourishing of non-traditional space markets is near at hand, Vanderbilt said. "All this seems to be converging on a spot where the business case for these ventures makes sense," he said.

Over the decades, pushing spacecraft into orbit has primarily meant taking the "disintegrating totem pole" approach, said Clapp of Pioneer Rocketplane. Critically needed are true spaceships that fly "real high, real fast, and real often," he said.

At days end, it remains the thrill of space flight that stirs the soul, Clapp added. "It's almost as if we all share this religionthis enthusiasm for doing something in space. Its a passion that people who are very religious, I think, would understand."