Internet Pioneers' Next Frontier

Tech visionaries including Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Amazon's Jeff Bezos are setting their sights on space exploration

by Rachael King

For the Internet's innovators, it seems, there's no path like the one from cyberspace to space.

In announcing the Google Lunar X Prize on Sept. 13, Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin joined a growing brigade of tech luminaries who have put their Web wealth to work in an area where they've little expertise: trying to transform space travel from a largely government affair to a civilian, profitable business.

Like the $10 million Ansari X Prize, the Google Lunar X Prize provides incentive for the emerging private space industry to come up with innovative ways to build space exploration technologies (BusinessWeek.com, 9/19/07) cheaper and faster than ever before.

The $20 million grand prize will be awarded to the team that can land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and send a specific set of video images and data back to earth by Dec. 31, 2012. "We believe that these kinds of contests, in setting an ambitious goal like going to the moon, are a really good way to improve the state of humanity and the world and that's why we care about this," Page, who has served on the board of the X Prize Foundation since 2005, said at the contest launch.

A Star-Studded Roster

Even without Page and Brin, the roster of tech visionaries who, as an encore to revolutionizing the Internet, have set their sights on space, is star-studded.

Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, began working a decade ago on protocols for deep space communications, known as the Interplanetary Internet. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com (AMZN), has started Blue Origin, which is working to develop a vehicle to transport a small number of astronauts into suborbital space.

Elon Musk, former CEO of PayPal (EBAY) and Zip2, has invested more than $100 million of his own money to start Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company that's building a family of launch vehicles. Jim Benson, who founded CompuSearch and invented modern full-text computer indexing and search, is creating a vehicle for space tourism at Benson Space that seeks to minimize the violent impact that spacecraft encounter on re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.

Satellites Dominate the Business

Cerf doesn't think it's a coincidence that people who were involved in key Internet developments might turn to space for a new challenge. "A lot of what goes on in the Internet is to try stuff that has never been done before and there's this intriguing challenge—'I wonder if I can make that work,' or 'Boy, that's a hard problem. How are we going to deal with that?' I think there is something attractive about that," says Cerf, who is now vice-president and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

The space industry is already sizable, though it consists mostly of the business of launching and operating communications satellites. Combined commercial and government spending in the sector totaled about $180 billion in 2005, the last year for which numbers have been compiled, according to a report issued by the Space Foundation, a nonprofit space advocacy group. Surprisingly, U.S. and foreign government space budgets account for just 39% of the market. The remainder consists of commercial activity such as satellite manufacturing, launch, and services such as satellite TV, radio, and data communications.

Companies such as Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic are targeting the potential market for space tourism and commercial transport. Both companies plan to start with suborbital flights that would likely last a few hours and peak at 300,000 to 400,000 feet above the earth, a height at which passengers can experience weightlessness.

Space Tourism Off to a "Good Start"

While Virgin Galactic is already taking reservations and deposits for $200,000 flights it hopes will start in 2009, and the Russian Space Agency has flown some civilians, tourism still amounted to less than 1% of the total space market in 2005. Still, the Space Foundation estimates that space tourism could produce $600 million to $700 million in revenue per year by 2014. "In the landscape of a $200 billion industry, it's not much. But it's a good start," says Elliott Pulham, CEO of the Space Foundation.

While Bezos is extremely secretive about Blue Origin, his Web site shows that he's developing a reusable launch vehicle called New Shepard that looks like a modernized version of the Apollo Command Module. New Shepard is a vertical takeoff and landing craft designed to ferry a small number of people on a suborbital journey. The idea is to dramatically reduce the cost of going into space so that more people can travel there.

In November, 2006, Blue Origin launched and landed Goddard, an early unmanned prototype of New Shepard. In filings with the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin has said it will continue testing vehicles through 2009 and commercial operations might begin by 2010. According to the filings, Blue Origin anticipates enough demand for up to 52 launches per year.