PRINCETON, NJ -- Would you spend $1 on a lottery ticket that promised the winner a trip to space PRINCETON, N.J. -- Would you spend $1 on a lottery ticket that promised the winner a trip to space? It's an old idea whose time may have finally come, courtesy of space tourist
Dennis Tito. That's what scientists and human spaceflight enthusiasts were told Tuesday at the 15th Space Manufacturing and Space Settlement
Conference held here."I think
Dennis Tito might be spearheading some drives for an international lottery," said Robert Howard of the University of Tennessee's Space Institute. Howard included the single-line item in a presentation loaded with suggestions for how to give the sluggish post-Apollo space program a much-needed injection of public support. Rick Tumlinson, the public face of MirCorp, which made Tito's trip possible, agreed.
"Having a bona fide commercial lottery to fly in space? Yeah, I think it's time. Somebody should do it," Tumlinson said in an interview. "Whatever works to get the most people up there."
And Tumlinson could be the man who organizes one. It was
MirCorp, a joint U.S.-Russian company that Tumlinson helped found, which financed the Mir space station's operation in its final days and brokered the original deal for Tito's trip. Only after Mir splashed into the ocean did Tito negotiate a spot aboard the International Space Station instead.
To Tito: Keep the airlock open
Despite the deorbiting of its only space vessel, MirCorp lives on and is working on its next moves, Tumlinson said. The company will get a new name and a new image. And a lottery would be just one of many high-flying ideas MirCorp might consider.
But when it comes to getting people into space, the evangelical Tumlinson, who is also president of the
Space Frontier Foundation, does not hoard opportunity. He said a lottery -- by any private organization -- is more feasible in the post-Tito era, now that the barrier to space tourism has been broken and given the public's interest in the flight. Meanwhile, he said that whereas a trip to the privately run Mir would have been Tito's $20 million right, his days aboard the government-operated ISS constituted "a very major privilege." Tumlinson therefore challenged the wealthy businessman to lobby for others to get the chance.
"What's he going to do now to keep the airlock open for the next people?" Tumlinson said. "Dennis owes something to the people of the world who want to get up there after him, and he needs to put in some sweat time to keep that airlock open."
Opening space to "normal" people
Robert Howard's reasons for floating the idea run deep. On a NASA grant, he has studied why human space exploration and public interest in the space program has stalled, and what is needed to reinvigorate the dream. While he contends that economic goals must drive future space exploration, grassroots public support is essential.
"Right now I think the public sees [space travel] as, 'You can go into space if you're an astronaut or if you are rich. But you still can't go if you're a normal person.'"
Orbiting a few regular Janes and Joes would fuel worldwide interest in space exploration, he says. "And I think that's what's missing."
Howard says anyone could run the lottery, from NASA to MirCorp to the Russian government. Ideally, there would be several.
"That would even be better, because that would increase demand, and if demand gets high enough, you might be able to get dedicated flights or maybe even dedicated space modules for this," he said.
Old idea, new life
The idea of a space lottery goes back more than a decade when a pair of Texas entrepreneurs set up a 900 number (cost: $2.99 per call) to solicit
cosmonaut wannabes. Lucky winners were promised a week aboard Mir.Thousands of calls overloaded phone lines the first day. Then Houston officials shut the operation down, accusing the company, Space Travel Services, of running an illegal lottery.
Buzz Aldrin put a new twist on the idea more than two years ago when he announced a plan to send 80 to 100 paying tourists to space in a specially designed spacecraft, while saving a few seats for lottery winners. (Tumlinson, in his role of doling out money for FINDS, the Foundation for the International Non-governmental Development of Space, provided Aldrin's ShareSpace Foundation with early funding two years ago, before MirCorp was set up.)
Who gets the money?
Tumlinson does not think it would be appropriate for NASA to run a lottery, so long as the space station remains a government operation. He favors private lotteries that would finance commercial spacecraft.
But government-generated lottery revenues would not necessarily need to directly finance the space program, Howard said. Proceeds might fund education, for example, as is done in some state lotteries.
In a more capitalistic approach, a group of engineering students at the University of Central Florida recently suggested that NASA could fund shuttle missions by taking a dozen tourists along on each trip.
Responding to a class assignment in April, the students developed a 29-page report calling on NASA to design a 12-passenger module that could drop into the space shuttle payload bay, then charge up to $9.44 million per reservation and include a lottery to fill some seats.
The professor who gave the assignment, Nebil Misconi, is forwarding the report to NASA, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
advertisement
