Beyond NASA: Dawn of the Next Space Age

The idea that bootstrappers can open up space by themselves has always been met by skepticism. After all, not a single proven private space company has yet to emerge. And hype about private-sector space projects rings hollow to the investors who lost their shirts on quixotic ventures like MirCorp’s plan for a private three-guest space hotel, or Rotary Rocket, the single-stage-to-orbit helicopter. (“You know the secret of making a small fortune in space?” Rotary CEO Gary Hudson reportedly quipped to a couple of guys from NASA as his operating budget quickly vanished: “Start with a large one.”) Or to anyone who has seriously considered the logistics of even a state-funded mission to Mars.


But there does seem to be something different about this particular historical moment. In the upheaval created by NASA’s recent troubles lies an unprecedented opportunity for private outfits to start driving the national space agenda—and at a time when the will is strong, the technology is available, and what Barron’s calls “the most pro-business, anti-regulation administration since Reagan’s” sits in the White House.


And that’s exactly what’s starting to happen. While standard vaporware continues to issue from bar stools, real hardware is coming out of hangars from California to Ontario. If the ’90s will be remembered as the decade of doomed experiments (Bill Gross’s private lunar lander mission, Blastoff.com; Andrew Beal’s heavy-lift booster rocket), the aughts will go down as the era in which the first private space missions got off the ground.




Consider recent events. The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest group, test-launched a prototype of the world’s first solar sail, a spacecraft that—propelled by light from the Sun, rather than an engine—should continually accelerate, eventually reaching the stars. A company called LunaCorp has convinced Walt Anderson, a telecom magnate, to back the world’s first commercial lunar mission—an interactive experience in which ordinary people would be able to remotely control a robot on the Moon’s surface. SpaceX has lined up three customers for its satellite-launch business, and at press time intended to send up its first payload, a U.S. Defense Department satellite, in May. Space Adventures—the first successful space tourism broker—has inked a deal with the Russian space agency Rosaviacosmos to send the world’s third and fourth space tourists (after Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth) to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz rocket next year. And a half dozen other would-be space travelers are in various stages of qualification and training for orbital flights, says Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson.


NASA, for its part, if not yet ready to bail out of low Earth orbit (LEO), seems prepared to cede some of its activities there to the private sector. In an astonishing development, the space agency has signed on as a passenger with Team Encounter—a Houston-based company best known for its offer to send your DNA into space for $49.95 if you give them a hair sample. When Team Encounter launches a craft in 2005, onboard for testing will be NASA’s Inertial Stellar Compass, a low-power navigational system for long-range spacecraft.
And that’s just the American side. In Russia, Cold War ICBMs are being converted into commercial satellite rides, seeding a new generation of private space ventures. Britain, Japan and, most notably, China now have active space programs—and India and even Brazil are under way. Clearly, space exploration is no longer the exclusive domain of two governments and the very large aerospace companies that have served them—or of governments at all. If we leave it to NASA, says John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, “cheap access to space is just not going to happen, and it’s not because of incompetence or malice or conspiracy. It’s just because of the way the industry has evolved.”

Rick Tumlinson concurs. “Many in the space movement thought there was some sort of spiritual consensus, that government understood that the goal was to get us to Star Trek or Babylon 5, humans living in space,” he says. “That was an assumption we had made because we all hang out with each other. Maybe we bought our own propaganda.”

The pervasive feeling—for everyone except perhaps 86-year-old sci-fi sage Arthur C. Clarke, whose long-nurtured dream of going into space seems just about shot—is that it’s not too late to rekindle the old hopes. The question is no longer, Is there going to be a post-NASA space industry, but, How is it going to happen? Who is going to lead it?


And out of the Sun come the alternative space cowboys, newly focused and riding into Dodge on cue.