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OCTOBER 1, 2004
By Otis Port SpaceShipOne's Heady Flight Path The Burt Rutan/Paul Allen private spacecraft is on the brink of nabbing the $10 million X Prize. But that's just the start The $10 million X Prize is almost in the bank. On the morning of Sept. 29, SpaceShipOne was ferried aloft from the airport in Mojave, Calif. At about 48,000 feet, it was dropped by its White Knight mother plane, then lit its rocket, and soared to the edge of space, almost 68 miles (109 kilometers) up. That's several miles higher than its historic June 21 flight, when SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed craft to poke into space, nosing past an altitude of 62 miles. For this flight, test pilot Mike Melvill -- who earned his astronaut's wings in June -- was accompanied by the weight of two psuedo passengers. To win the Ansari X Prize, a private spacecraft must carry the weight of three people to at least 100 km, or 62 miles, and then repeat the feat within a fortnight. SpaceShipOne's second X Prize flight is tentatively set for Oct. 4. The date is, not coincidentally, the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, which triggered the first space race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Oct. 4 is also the first day of World Space Week, organized by the U.N. to promote the second space race -- opening this frontier to tourism and other new commercial enterprises. The U.N. has enlisted such people as musician Lance Bass, a member of the band *NSYNC, to visit schools and explain to students how their generation of aerospace engineers and entrepreneurs will be the ones blazing new trails in space. JUST LIKE LINDBERGH. For now, SpaceShipOne's developers -- legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan and billionaire Paul Allen -- have only themselves to beat. Until last week, it had appeared the X Prize might have something of a photo finish. Canada's da Vinci Project, another contender, had hoped to make its maiden launch on Oct. 2. But the Toronto outfit, now called GoldenPalace.com Space Program after picking up the online casino as a sponsor, has postponed its first launch until later this year. The X Prize -- "X" is the common designation for experimental aircraft -- is patterned after the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927. Designed to spur transatlantic aviation and tourism, it prodded nine teams to spend $400,000 in the quest for its $25,000 purse. When entrepreneur and wannabe astronaut Peter Diamandis discovered this in Lindbergh's book, The Spirit of St. Louis, "I thought, 'What an amazing business model -- you don't have to pay the losers, just the winner.'" He created the X Prize Foundation in 1995, won support from wealthy St. Louis execs and Lindbergh's grandson, Erik, and announced the $10 million reward in 1996. SHOESTRINGS FOR MOST. It had exactly the effect that Diamandis intended. More than two dozen teams quickly formed to compete for the prize, led by aerospace executives, engineers, or entrepreneurs. Like Diamandis, they had grown up expecting that space flights would one day, in their lifetimes, be almost as commonplace as transatlantic hops -- and felt frustrated by the lack of progress toward affordable space flight. How much investment the X Prize has spurred won't be known until next year, after all the various teams have wrapped up their work on prototype space taxis for tourists. Most contenders have been scrimping along on shoestring budgets, so the X Prize isn't likely to reach the 16-to-1 payback ratio of the Orteig Prize. Rutan's Mojave (Calif.) company, Scaled Composites, chewed through some $25 million of the fortune Allen earned as a founder of Microsoft. That may seem an extravagant sum, but Rutan points out that "we had to develop an entire manned-space program from scratch -- our own rocket motor, our own rocket-test facility, and our own flight simulator for training pilots." He pulled it off with a team of less than 50 people, he adds, "with absolutely no help from nay-say -- excuse me, NASA." IT'S A CHARM. But Rutan takes the most pride in his so-called shuttlecock reentry system. When heading back to earth, SpaceShipOne's tail section pivots upward, and the reconfigured shape resembles a badminton shuttlecock. The new shape is engineered to provide a virtually mistake-proof return to the atmosphere. No doubt the shuttlecock feature helped give pilot Melvill the confidence to continue rocketing upward even after SpaceShipOne began tracing a corkscrew path near the peak of its Oct. 29 flight. When that happened, mission control quickly told him to shut down the rocket, but the 63-year-old veteran test pilot kept it roaring for a few seconds longer, to be sure he would top the 100-km mark required by the X Prize. Another confidence-booster: Melvill was wearing the horseshoe pin that wife Sally puts on his shoulder as a good-luck charm before every test flight. He has been in the cockpit on the maiden flight for 10 Rutan-designed aircraft, including SpaceShipOne, since joining Scaled Composites in 1978. "VICTORY ROLL." After landing, Melvill, who was born in South Africa, said this flight actually went better than the one on June 21. He termed it "a solid, comfortable ride." But he admitted that he got a surprise when SpaceShipOne "did a little victory roll" near the end. It may have been due to his mistake, Melvill admitted, then jokingly added that at least "it looked good for the crowd." Even before collecting the $10 million X Prize bounty, Allen is already getting some return on his money. On Sept. 27, Virgin Atlantic Airways founder Sir Richard Branson revealed that he's diversifying into space tourism. His new venture, called Virgin Galactic, will license the "stretch" version of SpaceShipOne, which is designed to carry six passengers. Tickets on Virgin Galactic's initial flights are expected to run about $200,000. They may take off as soon as 2007. Rutan has also presented Allen with the blueprint of even bigger spaceship. With the data produced by the next flight or two, Rutan says, "I'll be able to prepare for Paul a very accurate, technically validated business plan for space tourism." It will feature space planes that can fly once or even twice a day. Within 15 years, he predicts, "space tourism will be a multibillion-dollar industry."  Port is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York
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