Lift-Off for Space Tourism

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California-based Xcor, which is developing a two-seater rocket plane to get into suborbital space, recently signed a deal to export its technology for use in South Korea. Meanwhile, Armadillo Aerospace, founded by the computer game developer behind Doom, John Cormack, has been working on a craft that will take scientific payloads soon, and humans later. And, in the background somewhere there is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (AMZN), who created Blue Origin and set up a spaceport in west Texas with the aim of manned flight by this year. His secretive company had gone silent for two years until dramatically re-emerging a few months ago with a $3.7m NASA grant to develop a craft for orbital space flight.

"Virgin is definitely our lead dog in the field," Mr Pomerantz said, "and it certainly has the most publicity and the most visible partners, but we are starting to see others making great leaps and bounds in terms of their ability to fly scientific payloads. From a business point of view, you can start flying scientific payloads earlier in the testing regime, because of course they don't have quite the same safety requirements as people."

Entrepreneurs who build a business based on ferrying cargo could quickly evolve into passenger carriers, too, Mr Pomerantz said.

There has been a proliferation of prizes on offer for breakthroughs in space flight, in an echo of the early days of air travel, where Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris in 1927 in the Spirit of St Louis won him $25,000, for example. Google (GOOG) is sponsoring another X Prize, this time for the first commercial venture to put a robotic rover on the moon.

There also seems to be competition developing among different states in the US and regions elsewhere in the world for the opportunity of playing host to these pioneering space companies. Virgin Galactic got $300m from the state of New Mexico to subsidise Spaceport America in the Mojave Desert, and the government of Abu Dhabi paid $280m for a one-third stake in the company and a promise to use the emirate as a hub for travel from the Middle East. There even appears to be feisty local campaigns in areas of Scotland, to win Virgin Galactic's business among three airforce bases.

And now NASA is showering money, too. Its budget has been slashed and its programme to put a man on Mars has been scrapped, so it is focusing instead on seeding commercial ventures, and last month it offered $75m in grants to commercial operators that can put scientific payloads into suborbital space on its behalf.

"For everyone who has dreamt of participating in the grand adventure of spaceflight, this $75m commitment marks the dawn of a new space age," Alan Stern of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said at the time. "As the commercial space industry continues to grow, I expect that we will see increasing numbers of payloads and people flying to space."

The early ticket buyers are most likely paying a premium price to secure their places in the history books. Observers expect that prices will quickly fall, perhaps to a half or even a quarter within the decade, which should stoke demand. A 2002 market research report from the consulting firm Futron is still viewed as a reference point for the nascent industry, since it polled the very wealthy individuals about their desire – and their fitness – to travel into space. It concluded that, if prices fall significantly, there could be 15,000 suborbital space tourists annually by the end of this decade, and while the technical timelines have slipped and slipped again, the demand is hardly likely to have done: there are plenty more millionaires and billionaires now than there were when the survey was conducted.

In the 49 years since Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight, 512 people from 38 countries have been to space. The first operational suborbital craft could easily beat that record all on its own. Now there is just the little matter of proving it's technically possible.

Provided by The Independent—from London, for Independent minds

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