Beyond NASA: Dawn of the Next Space Age

Who are these guys? A group big and diverse enough that it’s impossible to answer the question in a stroke. They comprise a whole world, like the denizens of Middle Earth. There are the mythic principals, including a legendary aircraft builder (Burt Rutan) and a genius videogame designer who once spent a year in juvie (Carmack). There are the muses, contemporary sci-fi writers playing the role that Wells and Verne did for Goddard and von Braun (and drawing “consultant” salaries, to boot). There are the provocateurs, guys playing around the edges of the edges, working in the yard on things barely allowed by physics. There are the nonprofit groups, functioning (as Tumlinson puts it) as “air cover for the infantry charge.” And there are the funders, who shovel capital to the visionaries like patrons to Italian painters during the Renaissance.


Indeed, a scan of some of the financing match-ups puts you in mind of a sign in the crowd during last year’s Mavs/Blazers playoff series: “Our billionaire can beat your billionaire.” This is where the dot-com cash-outs and telecom magnates have landed—because, hey, after you’ve had the world’s most lucrative job, it’s natural to want the world’s coolest job. Many of the most high-profile space entrepreneurs, like PayPal founder Musk (SpaceX) and Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos (spacecraft developer Blue Origin) and hotelier Robert Bigelow (space hotel developer Bigelow Aerospace) have a deep personal interest in the day-to-day operations of their companies. Many are astonishingly young men (and they are, let’s face it, mostly men) who were still in their teens when the Challenger exploded, who have no live memories of Armstrong’s Moon walk. (“A lot of us,” says Space Adventures’ Anderson, who is 29, “felt like we missed out.”)




Their visions range in scope from grand—Buzz Aldrin’s wide-body orbital space-liner—to grander—extracting platinum from asteroids or the Moon to serve as a catalyst in terrestrial fuel cells—to grander still—Mars Society chief Robert Zubrin’s plan to send astronauts to Mars without the fuel to get back, because a robotic craft, sent earlier, would have produced the fuel in situ. Their motives comprise both the high-minded (the Planetary Society’s efforts, through its SETI program, to send interstellar messages conveying human altruism) and the chiefly mercantile, like Team Encounter’s DNA-launch scheme. They are steel-tacks business guys who project that once the highway gets humming up there in low Earth orbit, it’s going to need mechanics, and it’s going to need hoteliers, and it’s going to need gas-station attendants. They are the engineers chasing the X Prize by building suborbital rocket ships that look like Frisbees or cigars, that will launch from beneath the surface of the ocean or from the world’s largest helium balloon, that will come down under parachutes or land on conventional runways. They are doing this work to save the species, or to get rich, or to force regulators to define their terms, or just because it’s a kick (or some combination thereof). They are the kind of people you want to sit next to at a dinner party: folks like Brian “Rocket Guy” Walker, who is building a personal, hydrogen-peroxide-powered rocket that looks like a 37-foot-tall lawn dart, funded mostly by sales of kids’ toys he has invented. Or William Stone, a robotics engineer who is working on a way to return from space cheaply with equipment that weighs only a few hundred pounds.


They are a fiercely independent lot, but also oddly codependent. Many have devoted themselves to inventions that are contingent upon other people’s inventions working. Stone’s contraption may get you down from space—but someone else will have to get you up there. Robert Bigelow’s inflatable hotel will only be viable if others make a go of space-plane tourism. Orbital assembly and repair services for satellites—like Walt Anderson’s Orbital Recovery or Dennis Wingo’s SkyCorp—will thrive only if the satellite industry continues to do so.


No matter what brand of space travel they advocate, most share a source of inspiration. “These people grew up in a culture that said, â€We are moving out into space,’” Tumlinson says. “And science fiction gave them images and ideas. Put those two together and you end up with a fairly unique set of people who believe it can be done, have seen something major done in their lifetime, and think that maybe they can do it themselves.”