Beyond NASA: Dawn of the Next Space Age

In a nutshell: Saganites say, Look but don’t touch; O’Neillians, Do it yourself; von Braunians, We’ll do it for you. Saganites are about indulging our sense of awe. They believe all space races we can imagine now are just tune-ups for the real event—which will happen when we discover, through SETI, or planet-hunting interferometry probes, evidence of probable intelligent life. Saganites would like to see humanity develop international space treaties, to view space as a common resource. O’Neillians are about free enterprise, manifest destiny and everyone’s right to a piece of the private-entry-to-LEO pie. They believe space is fair game for development. Von Braunians are about national prestige—NASA’s very reason for being, and surely the biggest single driver of space-faring to date. When Kennedy announced Americans would be first to the Moon, when Nixon signed off on the space shuttle program, when Reagan OK’d the space station—they were all serving up old Wernher, wrapped in Old Glory.

Struggling astropreneurs are stuck in a catch-22: To get R&D funding, they must prove there’s a customer base for space tourism. To build a customer base—to create technology to get ordinary folks to LEO relatively cheaply ($10,000 a ride, not the $12 million it costs today)—they need cash. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.


The “giggle factor” kicks in well before you start talking about private figure-eight rocket trips around the Moon. Testifying before a Congressional committee, Dennis Tito, Earth’s first space tourist and a canny investor, was asked if he would put money into this industry. He said no. He wanted to go up because, well, he wanted to go up. But he wouldn’t invest his own cash because, in his judgment, the market wasn’t there. With no venture capital materializing to help finance Lockheed Martin’s X-33 reusable-launch-vehicle
prototype, which would later be killed by NASA, then-CEO Peter Teets conceded to Congress in 1999: “Wall Street has spoken.”

Still, the alternative space race has one great thing going for it. Beneath debates about economics and species preservation, scientific curiosity and national pride lies an argument that hardly anyone, irrespective of politics, can reject outright, because it twinkles beyond words or reason. It has to do with human destiny. “This cause of exploration and discovery is
not an option we choose,” George W. Bush intoned at the memorial service for Columbia’s crew. “It is a desire written in the human heart.”

At times, the meeting of the alternative space crowd in that L.A. banquet room seemed about to dissolve into anarchy. Shuttle astronaut Rick Searfoss projected an image on a screen of a cat, illustrating the soul of the problem: Getting members of the citizens’ space agenda to agree on anything is like herding this animal. But one thing everyone did agree on is that things must change. Perhaps the change will come after the first private venture turns a profit—and suddenly what seemed to be a nest of contradictory ideas will actually fit together. “When things do get going great guns, and low-cost, reliable access to space is here, then all these things we’re focusing on now will become transparent,” Peter Diamandis, father of the X Prize competition, told the crowd.


“There’s a story Vint Cerf tells,” Diamandis says, referring to an architect of the Internet. “He’d spent a decade pushing the rock up the hill. Then, once the Internet took off, he spent the next year running as fast as he could so as not to be crushed by it. That’s where we are now in space. Everybody’s pushing the rock up the hill. But once it starts, it’s going to be unstoppable. There aren’t going to be dozens, but hundreds of business plans. It’ll be like setting off an exothermic reaction.”