By Marilyn Dudley-Rowley and Thomas Gangale
22 June 2004
On the Summer Solstice, an historically significant landmark was laid down by an industry in its infancy that will, in time, change the human condition. Several thousands witnessed an innovation as seminal as fire, the plow, the steam engine, electricity, heavier-than-air flight, and the Internet. What took place over the desert landscape of Mojave, California was reminiscent of the dawn of aviation on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first private spacecraft took test pilot Mike Melvill over 62 miles high. At that suborbital altitude, he experienced approximately three minutes of weightlessness, saw the curvature of the Earth, and the black of space. Melvill was the pilot of Earth’s first private spacecraft. And, Mojave's little airport now has the same cachet of being "first in flight"--that is, private spaceflight--just as surely as the North Carolina coast can boast of hosting the first genuine airplane flight.
The technology of the Melvill flight was a 21st century analog of the X-15 flights of the early 1960s when two of those flights made astronauts of those pilots who flew them above 62 miles. Alas, the American public quickly forgot those flights in the sound and fury of the Space Race and the various programs with names like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Then, after American astronauts made several flights to the surface of the Moon, and after both Russians and Americans built space stations on orbit and men and women lived there on various missions, the American public seemed to suffer cultural amnesia about the entire enterprise--even though their tax dollars were picking up the tab on much of it--and continue to pick up that tab on existing federally-funded space projects.
Monday’s flight did not use taxpayer money. Paul Allen, who made his fortune from his participation in the founding of Microsoft, kicked in the bucks for this new breed of Buck Rogers to underwrite maverick aerospace engineer Burt Rutan’s composite design. Similar to the B-52 borne X-15 flights of yesteryear, a carrier aircraft dubbed the White Knight flew the little rocketplane, SpaceShipOne, high into the sky, released it, and then Melvill ignited the rocket engine. He then proceeded to vertically climb to the requisite altitude to earn his astronaut wings. Then, he returned to Earth, making a flawless landing with his rocketplane on the same little airport runway from which he had been carried aloft, with thousands of people cheering only a few feet away. The configurable wing and tail of the rocketplane used the upper atmosphere to brake and that allowed a "care-free" re-entry. While "care-free" also described the mood of the crowd, it was the most reverential and mannerly group of over 11,000 people that we have ever seen.
Monday’s flight ushers in an era of a new kind of private sector aerospace aviation. We are not talking about the big aerospace companies that depend almost strictly on heavy federal contracts and that produce incremental upgrades to half-century-old intercontinental ballistic missile designs year after year. We are talking about a private space industry that begins at the level of Moms and Pops and that could produce staggering technological and economic changes of a kind and degree that non-commercial space systems did not produce. Author-visionary G. Harry Stine thought the American space shuttle program and its twin technology, a second American space station (following Skylab), would lead to a third industrial revolution. This did not happen. And, it did not happen precisely because of the choking drag of the bureaucracies charged with managing these non-commercial spaceflight systems. The weight of bureaucracy morphed space hardware and systems into a technology that, though somewhat useful, has not been as transformative an innovation as it should have been.
Melvill’s flight happens to come on the heels of the Aldridge Commission that recently decried the bureaucratic roadblocks that NASA has inflicted upon space development. Several solutions were explored to remove the roadblocks. One of those solutions was to farm out whatever NASA could to private industry. That sounds great--cased solved! It is not. What most of the American public does not know is that much of private space-related industry is nowhere near to being mature. Burt Rutan and his company are one of the few private space teams that exist in any real sense. Private space industry is at the stage of early aviation when it was one-third research and development, one-third somebody’s hobby, and one-third medicine show.
As with private air industry, we can expect there to be plenty of disappointment and heartache on the way to the maturation of the private space industry. The frameworks of early aircraft showed that they were little more than sophisticated kites and looking more like fish traps in design than anything else in the human toolkit. All too often they were death traps, coming apart mid-air, killing all aboard. Although our overall technology is better than sticks, wire, and canvas, we can expect our share of tragedy before the private spaceflight industry is mature enough to affect the human condition. However, the private spaceship enterprises will prove to "buy more bang for the buck" than the government-sponsored sacrifices have.
The key to private spaceflight is, indeed, the key to anything of value done in space--sustainability. Its effort has to survive long enough to loft longer and longer duration space missions and projects in order to turn a profit or enact those things that substantially alter the human condition for the better. So far, private space is no more sustainable than NASA has been, a taxpayer-based agency that is hard-pressed to build and operate a space station by itself. Despite the passion of a Burt Rutan, the deep pockets of a Paul Allen, and the allure of winning the Ansari X Prize, private space must ally itself with a cast of others in order to get that sustainability. This means hooking up with NASA and other space agencies, with more mature industries, and with many other going concerns, both public and private, domestic and international. It must transnationalize as its close relative, the aviation industry, has. Only in this way will it transcend the technological drag of national bureaucracies and the political whims of national budgetary bodies in order to have a fighting chance to become profitable.
Many social scientists believe that capitalism is destined to collapse if it cannot be transformed. One solution to the transformation of capital is to turn a one-world economy into a multiple-venue ecology by taking off-planet the way we make our living. Several compelling products and services present themselves by virtue of a transplanetary economic ecology: more effective pharmaceuticals manufactured in zero G, more powerful data compression technologies, large-scale environmental protection products to revitalize industries that harm the planet, etc. However, a nascent industry that can transform capital must walk before it can run. It will have to go through the developmental equivalents of dusting crops, carrying the mail, and hauling cargo before becoming fully functional as a transport system and the basis for a large profitable business, just as its aviation cousin did.
Until that time comes, private space will be a niche redolent of the early days of aviation full of hobbyists, hucksters, and serious men and women pushing the envelope for glory, fortune, and merely their suppers. In the end, the high frontier will be the final arbiter, for that unforgiving environment ensures that only the strong survive.
It seems an irony that we have done no more than we have in space with our huge state-run efforts and hundreds of billions spent. It is due to the technological drag of cumbersome bureaucracies and the slow political wills of nation-states. If the first classes of astronauts and cosmonauts were embittered by Apollo-era programs that were de-budgeted before the promise of those programs were fulfilled, think of what the entire Baby Boomer generation feels. Our cohort suffered the lost legacy of those programs that promised us that we would live and work in space. We were reared with this vision. After all, our public school educations got a major shot in the arm when our math and science curricula were beefed up, courtesy of Sputnik and the birth of the Space Race. All was not completely lost when penurious Congressional budgets and a de-focused, underfunded NASA let us down. Armed with that high octane education, some of us went out and set about to explore our world and beyond. As a consequence, we did things like found Silicon Valley, another industry that has transformed the world for good and ill. But, as an aggregate, we Boomers got the short end of the stick. We got all dressed up and there was no place to go. Our parents’ generation went to the Moon, and we dreamed of going to Mars.
However, on the 21st of June 2004, Mike Melvill, sixty-something, at the leading edge of the Baby Boomer demographic wave, saw the Earth as only a space flyer can see it. He rode into the heavens a test pilot on someone’s private dime and returned to Earth an astronaut and at the forefront of a new industry.
