Virgin Galactic and the Start of the Commercial Space Race

Visionaries like Bert Rutan and Richard Branson are planning to make sub-orbital commercial space flight a reality by 2020

By Loz Blain

Space—it's the final frontier of human exploration, a mysterious eternity of distance, all around us and yet so tantalizingly out of reach. In its dark recesses hide the secrets of extraterrestrial life, planets yet to be explored, and it's reasonable to assume, some sort of future home for the human race once we're finished stuffing this planet up.

Although mankind has been fascinated with space since we first saw the twinkling of night-time stars, it took us tens of thousands of years of technological progress to develop the tools to interact with it in a meaningful way. Firstly with telescopes that allowed us to make visual sense of faraway stars, then with scientific theories to explain the movements and relationships between massive celestial objects, and finally, in just the last half century, with spaceships that allowed us to take both ourselves and our equipment and technology outside the Earth's atmosphere.

In the late 1950s, at the height of the cold war between the United States and USSR, the intense competition between these two countries resulted in a golden age of space development. The Soviets were a step ahead of the Americans to start with, putting the first artificial satellite into orbit in 1957—Sputnik 2—and getting the first human into orbit—Yuri Gagarin— by 1961.

Of course, the USA famously retaliated by putting the first man on the moon in 1969—but the late 50s to the early 70s was a period of intense and exciting one-upmanship that left many Earthbound observers thinking anything was possible.

And here's where we meet a fellow called Elbert Rutan. Born in 1943 in Oregon, USA, Bert was in his late teens and early 20s at the height of the space race, working for the US Air Force as a flight test project engineer. Remember, this is only 15-20 years after the first rockets and jet aircraft had come onto the scene. And now, all of a sudden, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are sending back videotapes from the moon, bouncing around and planting American flags. Bert's imagination was going crazy—as a lot of people's were—just imagine what we'd be doing by the year 2000.

Well, now we know. Not much at all. In the 40 years since Armstrong and Aldrin first walked on the moon, a total of only 10 men have ever followed. As Bert puts it, the young people of today have nothing more exciting to look forward to than a cellphone with a better camera, or another sequel to their favorite movie or video game.

It's not just spaceflight, Bert's disgusted by the apparent stagnation of development across the entire aerospace world. The supersonic Concorde survived its entire life cycle without competition and went out of service, leaving us flying around the world in commercial airliners that are no faster than they were in the 1950s.

Luckily enough, Bert is in a position to do something about it. Over the last 35 years, he's designed dozens of aircraft, from ultralights to race planes to the Voyager endurance plane that made the first ever round the world trip on one tank of fuel. But he really shot to international fame when he convinced Microsoft's Paul Allen to stump up $25 million and finance the world's first privately operated, manned spaceflight in 2004.

Now let's have a look at what that means. The space shuttle Endeavour, built by NASA, cost approximately $1.7 billion. Every time it's launched, it costs another $450 million. Bert thinks these costings are ridiculous in this day and age.

With just a tiny fraction of that money, he was able to develop and build his spaceship one, and fly two suborbital space missions within two weeks. In doing so, he won the $10 million Ansari X prize.

But just how far from the Earth does space begin? Well, jumbo jets tend to fly around 10 km off the ground, that's about 33,000 feet, and the first layer of the Earth's atmosphere, the troposphere, reaches up to about 20 km. The next layer, the stratosphere, reaches up to about 51 km above sea level. This is where you find the ozone layer.

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