7 Flights Into the Future

But Rutan questions the engineering chops of the current round of suborbital enthusiasts. "These groups are more like the [inadequately prepared] people who were trying to fly airplanes in 1905 and 1906 and didn't do it. What you have to have, I believe, is entrepreneurs succeeding, not just trying." Rutan fears that the industry and the public are not prepared for the inevitable string of fatal failures that must precede the launch of a paradigm-shifting enterprise.


But why is the next revolution in flight—Earth to space and back, routinely, commercially—being left in the hands of amateurs and entrepreneurs while the big-money aerospace companies look on? "Years ago," Diamandis says, "I asked panelists at a conference—Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing and so forth—when they would build a suborbital spaceship. And the answer was 'When we have enough orders from the industry to pay for it. We don't take risks on designing new vehicles. The government pays for it, or American and United and Delta.'


"The real thing here is the cash flow," Diamandis insists. "When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, there was a perceivable spike in aviation stocks, and the number of pilots flying passengers tripled within a year of Lindbergh's flight. There's a market study that estimates the marketplace within 10 years at 15,000 people buying suborbital flights at $50,000 a seat. That's a real market. The most valuable thing that will come out of the X Prize competition hopefully is operational experience and reusable subsystems."

WILL YOU FLY WITH A ROBOT?



Military needs have long driven the pace of change in aviation. Jet engines showed up in fighters first. GPS navigation guided military pilots a decade before the public could benefit. Nothing is likely to change in the coming decades. The most advanced materials, including new composites and laminates, will lighten and strengthen military aircraft first, and hypersonic jet engines—
ramjets or scramjets—will propel long-range bombers or missiles before pushing planeloads of passengers into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. First-strike capabilities will be astonishing—aircraft launched to anywhere in the world within 90 minutes. Information technology will connect combatants in remarkable ways that civilian pilots and passengers will have to wait for; perhaps combat, not porn, will drive true VR.



According to Muellner, range will be the key to 21st-
century military aviation. Enormous wing-in-ground-effect aircraft, far larger than anything flown in the 20th century, will allow the military to "lay down" millions of pounds of equipment half a world away in a matter of days instead of weeks. Attack and surveillance craft—which will in their next generations reach the useful upper limits of stealth technology and speed—will focus on achieving the performance efficiency that will allow them to loiter in a strike zone far longer than they can today.



All these advances—in addition to anti-missile technologies that are barely beginning to be transferred to civilian aircraft—will trickle down to commercial applications. But the most significant technology transfer may happen in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles, the best known of which are Predator and Global Hawk. Currently the near-exclusive domain of the military, UAVs offer considerable promise for everything from communication and environmental monitoring to quick, automated package delivery. "We may find it's a lot easier and cheaper to move materials around cities, between cities, over forests without building roads through them," says MacCready, who predicts a wave of electrically powered ultralight UAVs, "by using simple transport devices that don't use people but do use the effectiveness of the air."



Rutan, despite his optimism about synthetic vision as an aid for human pilots, challenges the ubiquitous-UAV vision, particularly if the endgame is unpiloted vehicles carrying human cargo. He cites a high accident rate in the military's UAV programs. "I believe until you have some paradigm shift on how UAVs deal with problems and some paradigm shift on how the systems work, UAVs are always going to have a horrible safety record compared with manned airplanes."