MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA - As you stroll through the desert airport/spaceport here, you don't see a "Keep Out! Spaceliner Under Construction" sign. On the other hand, there's a palpable feeling that behind closed hangar doors, the future of public space travel is, indeed, a work in progress--and in good hands.
At Scaled
Composites--home of the privately financed and built SpaceShipOne that made a
trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004 under the rubric of Tier 1--the
fabrication of a fleet of passenger-carrying space planes and huge carrier
launch planes is underway. This activity is labeled Tier 1b.
Burt Rutan,
head of the firm, is chief design maestro leading a spaceliner workforce. While
he's not about to roll out blueprints or show you factory floor hardware, he
gave this reporter a squat down, legs folded, but relaxing beanbag chair
interview in his office to discuss the business of public space travel.
Wanted:
breakthroughs
"First of
all, just because people have kind of discovered 'Oh, now we can have a
personal commercial spaceflight industry' ... that doesn't mean we can just throw
money at the problem and send people to resort hotels in orbit," Rutan told
SPACE.com.
Rutan admitted
that he's frustrated but committed to building suborbital spaceships.
"I'd love
to be working on going to the Moon. I'm doing this really because I don't think
I can convince a funder to go out and invest in an orbital system that we're
not sure would work."
In Rutan's
plotting of things to come, Tier 2 is orbital.
"My bottom
line is that we have to have some kind of breakthroughs," Rutan explained.
"What's needed is to create an environment to have breakthroughs ... to try
things that may seem illogical at first."
Long-shot
Looking
back on SpaceShipOne, Rutan said the focus was on safety, on recurring cost,
and asking the question: "When we're done with this, if it worked, could it
lead right into flying the public? Could it be safe? I don't think that's been
done to go to orbit," he said.
While
Microsoft mogul, Paul Allen, bankrolled SpaceShipOne and had a lot of
confidence in the effort, Rutan added that the investor confessed later that he
did think the suborbital project "was a real long-shot."
"I'm
focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never did with
airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and build something that
would be certified. Produce it and sell it to spacelines and let them go out
there and compete with each other to fly the public," Rutan said.
His hunch
is that by profitably flying people by the tens of thousands, the funding pump
will be primed, and the recognition fostered that breakthroughs are needed for
a high-risk orbital spaceship research program.
"I'm
getting a commercial system going for one reason: I don't think anybody else
will," Rutan explained. "I think it's really important for me to build a lot of
them," he added, not just a few for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, "but a
lot of them."
Must have
checklist
In building
the multi-passenger SpaceShipTwo, Rutan offered a design glimpse of what's in
store for ticket-paying suborbital travelers.
Along with
lots of windows, a close second on the "must have" checklist is for customers
to experience weightlessness. A person in SpaceShipTwo will feel just four
minutes of freefall, so having a great big cabin is extremely important, Rutan
pointed out, "to be able to stretch out your arms and legs and float around."
To gain
some think space about weightlessness, Rutan took his own fact-finding flight
aboard the private Zero Gravity Corporation's aircraft.
"The
impression you get is that it's important to know why you're floating, so you
need windows. You want to fly...you don't want to be strapped in. And to
experience weightlessness in shirtsleeve is important, not being bothered with
a pressure suit or tied down to a cable or having a helmet on," he said.
Mega-mothership
Given
SpaceShipTwo's flight path to the edge of space and back, the four minutes of
freefall gives you what it would be like to live in orbit for weeks, Rutan
suggested. Coming back into the atmosphere, he said, passengers would float
gently to the craft's floor as it takes more than 40 seconds to reach
one-gravity.
"That's the
reason we feel we'll easily be able to certify people floating around and
getting into a seat...more of a bed to lay flat," Rutan said.
Hauling a
SpaceShipTwo into launch position will require use of a mega-mothership that's
patterned after the White Knight aircraft utilized for the Tier 1 program.
That giant
airplane will have an identical cabin like that built into SpaceShipTwo. You
can take up people and float them out of their chairs. "They can't tell they
are not in the spaceship," Rutan said.
The
mothership will be an aerobatic airplane, Rutan said, able to provide rehearsal
runs that produce seconds of weightlessness for future suborbital space
travelers, as well as offer a view of the dark blue sky at 50,000 feet (15 kilometers).
"They can
practice floating around, playing games, and to get into their positions for
reentry and deceleration. We'll be able to give them the entire reentry g
profile and I think that's extremely important," Rutan noted. "So we've got
something here that I think is very special."
Natural
selection
Branson has on order a fleet of spaceliners. But there were other offers before Branson's investment proposal was picked, Rutan confided. "He was selected as an investment source because he was very early telling everybody what he was going to do, and usually I'm against that. But he's putting his reputation on
the goal of this program ... doing that on day one."
Rutan said
that his biggest concern was investment money "getting chicken" on the courage
to take risk and to move forward to tackle issues. "I felt that Branson was
making commitments so that he, even without me, had to finish it," he said.
Taking a
long look out to the next ten to twelve years, Rutan predicted that "there's
going to be some very good news and some very bad news."
The bad
news, Rutan advised, is related to the government space programs. "I hate to
say that, but the reason is that they are just structured so there will be a
lot of money spent and they are not likely to reap the benefits that are going
to help us."
The good
news, Rutan suggested as a guess, is that there will be breakthroughs
forthcoming, stemming from what happens after the first generation of
suborbital craft--including competitors, now known and unknown--take to the sky.
"We need
what amounts to natural selection to work. Nobody is smart enough to know ahead
of time whether something is the right answer. You've got to field the good
ones and bad ones for the good ones to float to the top," Rutan said.
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