Jeff Bezos is not an innately glamorous figure. Affable and eager, with a laugh like a foghorn and soberly casual taste in clothes, he made his billions selling books and garden furniture on amazon.com, holding his nerve through the dotcom crash while rivals and peers crumpled around him.
These days, like most successful people, he has his fans and detractors, but one thing no one disputes about Bezos is that he's smart. So when a story emerged this week that this cautious retailer was now -- in apparent seriousness -- training his sights on space through a company called Blue Origin, the lay person could have been forgiven for imagining that either he'd lost his marbles or he'd made too much money.
As described to the Federal Aviation Authority, Blue Origin's plan involves flying "reusable launch vehicles" to altitudes of 98,000m from a private spaceport in the Chihuahuan Desert, Texas. Given the trouble NASA has in getting the shuttle up and down safely, one might wonder who'll pay to ride these things. But the story changes when you look around and notice who Bezos' chief competitors will be in what amounts to a second space race -- one that is about to hit full stride almost 50 years after the first began with the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957.
Bezos' interest in space tourism has been an open secret for several years. More open have been the intentions of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and of the hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, whose construction of inflatable space-hotels in the Nevada desert seemed to have a whiff of urban myth about it until he launched one aboard a Russian rocket this month.
Design prize
Still more public was the October 2004 capture of the US$10 million Ansari X Prize by the maverick plane designer Burt Rutan, following the success of the first privately funded team to launch safely and land a crewed, sub-orbital spaceship twice in the space of a week. The prize had attracted dozens of entrants from around the world, and Rutan's bizarre-looking design for SpaceShipOne was snapped up by Richard Branson for use in his Virgin Galactic enterprise. Other teams that lost out on the prize, including Armadillo Aerospace, the plaything of the hip video game designer John Carmack (the super-rich author of Doom and Quake), remain actively engaged in the rush to commercial application.
The Russians, via the American organization Space Adventures, have already lugged the first three space tourists to the International Space Station aboard their primitive but reliable Soyuz rockets. But at a price of between US$11 million and US$20 million, most of us will be sitting that one out. What Bezos et al aim to do is progressively and radically lower costs, as was done with air travel in the 20th century, and, with 2010 given as the likely time for commercial operations to start, it's going to happen. The question is why this second space race has come upon us so suddenly, when only five years ago spaceflight was still the exclusive domain of states.
The common feature of nearly all the players in this space renaissance is that they were kids when the Apollo moon landings happened in 1969. At the time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's remarkable feat, aided by a computer with less power than a modern digital wristwatch, looked like the first step to a new future rather than the eccentric folly it now appears to have been. Yet a child's imagination does not wipe clean like a blackboard.
No one has left Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972, and during the intervening years of what one astronaut describes as "sliding around" in shuttles and space stations, NASA changed from being a creative, risk-taking organization to a bureaucratic poodle, forever begging funds from reluctant politicians. Worse, the space shuttle had been intended to cut the cost of getting people and materials into orbit -- it was never capable of leaving Earth -- but ended up increasing it tenfold.
Worse still, it was dull: The best joke in Deep Space Homer, the Simpsons episode in which Homer accompanies Aldrin to the moon, comes when a TV commentator breathlessly explains of a shuttle mission: "And today's flight is devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws ...," while the watching Simpson almost expires with boredom. By this time, NASA staff were underpaid and demoralized. The one thing the organization could cling to was its monopoly on space activity, which it guarded jealously.
The movement that would lead to change began in 1986, when the shuttle Challenger exploded over Cape Canaveral, killing its crew of seven. Now, for the first time, NASA could be challenged not just on grounds of vision, but on competency, and a loose opposition began to form, gradually coalescing into an unlikely but tenacious "space underground." Mostly composed of disillusioned enthusiasts, former space professionals and successful businesspeople who'd grown up in the anti-authoritarian 60s, the movement embraced some of the stance and tactics of the counterculture in an effort to loosen the agency's grip on space exploration.
Space guerrillas
When, in 2002, I met Rick Tumlin-son of the Space Frontier Found-ation, a self-confessed former bong-worshiper and "space activist," he spoke of using "jujitsu" lobbying techniques, as per Naomi Klein's anti-globalization tract, No Logo, and spoke gleefully of the foundation as "the guerrillas of space."
When I worried about bypassing the state and opening his beloved frontier to private organizations and individuals, and about the possibility of Enrons and Worldcoms colonizing the space above our heads and maybe one day "owning" the moon in splendid privacy, he countered: "Yeah, but what we've had here is a combination of some of the worst aspects of both. You have giant corporations working with a very elite insider group that has a quasi-militaristic leaning. You have to bear in mind that, in the beginning at least, NASA was a partial fig leaf to cover the Cold War antagonisms of the 50s and 60s. There was all this `We came in peace for all mankind' stuff, but they literally were part of the military-industrial complex -- it was the same companies designing and making the military hardware and all that. If you were an anti-war hippy protester, they looked like the same group of people." Just as they mostly do today, in fact.
At the start of 2003, the space underground's project still looked charmingly quixotic, until history repeated itself on Feb. 1, as the shuttle Columbia broke up upon re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. Now there were loud calls for a reappraisal of NASA's role as lone owners of space: When the X Prize had begun, no one could be quite sure whether any of the contestants would be allowed to launch, but there was no question now.
US President George W. Bush used the inquiry that followed to shower himself with stardust, announcing a bold new "manned" space program aimed at returning to the moon and pushing on to Mars. But this was smoke-and-mirrors stuff, contrived to cost him almost nothing while committing his successors to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of outlay -- something none are likely to agree to. The near and medium-term future of deep space exploration is likely to be conducted remotely, through machines like NASA's remarkable Mars Rovers. If anyone's going to leave the Earth in the near future, the smart money is on the Chinese, whose leaders have a propaganda incentive -- and no electorate to answer to.
Catch-22
What often goes unappreciated is this: While entering Earth orbit is difficult, requiring speeds of 28,000kph, venturing further (and hoping to return) is exponentially more costly and dangerous. If you're NASA, there's also the Catch-22 that, by the time you've developed a big, expensive spaceship reliable enough to be trusted with live crew, the technology deployed is out of date.
The impending boom, then, will mostly involve tourism. The first such punter, Dennis Tito, points out that US$20 million for a week on the International Space Station represents unnaturally good value, but Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and others will initially aim for much less -- namely, for about US$200,000, an up-and-down, sub-orbital lob such as Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard first rode back in 1961.
At the same time, the foundations of Bigelow's US$75 million orbital hotel are above us now, apparently airtight and functioning well. What Bigelow doesn't yet have is a way of getting guests up there at anything other than monstrous expense. Meanwhile, at last year's Moscow air show, the privatized Russian space agency, Energia, displayed a mock-up of a small ship that would screw on to a Soyuz rocket and, in principle, be capable of circumnavigating the moon, as Apollo 8 did in December 1968. Indeed, the Russians have already slapped a US$100 million price tag on such a trip, which would not involve a moon landing.
At a time when pollution by airliners is such a concern, there will obviously be questions about introducing fresh methods of accelerating global warming. Rutan insists that the products of combustion on his SpaceShipOne are "mostly benign," consisting predominantly of water vapor, hydrogen and nitrogen, though including some carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Other rockets run on hydrogen and oxygen, or (as in the case of the Saturn V moon rockets) liquid nitrogen, but NASA's shuttle employs dirty solid-fuel boosters. One hopes, with scant confidence, that the first wave of rich thrill-seekers makes a point of choosing the cleanest of the available options.
On the other hand, any extra pollution may be partly offset by the effects of more people getting a chance to see the Earth for what it is -- an isolated globe in space. Last year, I was lucky enough to fly to the edge of space, 67km high in a Mig-25, and certainly came back with a heightened sense of how fragile our tenure on Earth is. Even from that height, the atmosphere on the horizon looked impossibly thin, as though you could take a deep breath and blow it away.
Mark Shuttleworth, the second tourist to visit the International Space Station, tells me how shocked he was by the scale of human activity he saw going on beneath him, with almost no true wilderness visible.
The big step occurs when you travel away from the planet, though, as only 24 human beings ever have, all between the Apollo years of 1969 and 1972. At that point, Earth suddenly seems not large and majestic, but tiny and isolated against the shiny black backdrop of space, which gleams like patent leather, according to the astronauts, and it contains the only color you can see anywhere in the universe.
The moonwalkers will all insist that this was more moving even than knowing you were on another world. Hardly surprising, then, that the photos they brought back, first of an "Earthrise" and then of the whole Earth -- still the most reproduced image we have, and no one's quite sure who took it -- are credited with kick-starting the environmental movement in the early 1970s. Perhaps if we could all get up there and see ourselves for what we are, we'd take a little more care of what we have down here on Earth when we come back.
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