Starship Enterprise

How private investment has launched a new space race

By GLENN REYNOLDS
July 28, 2007; Page P11

Rocketeers
By Michael Belfiore
Smithsonian, 305 pages, $26.95

But despite these setbacks -- as with past misfortune in the space industry -- the push to venture far from Earth will no doubt continue. The only question is just when commercial enterprises will begin to pose a serious challenge to government-funded space exploration. The answer: soon. That, at least, is the message of "Rocketeers," Michael Belfiore's enlightening survey of the entrepreneurs bent on conquering space.

In the old days of science fiction, the recipe for conquering space was simple: take some genius rocket scientists, maybe add a rich guy who shared the dream and provided funds, stir in a lot of backyard-style tinkering, and soon you'd have a spacecraft that did the job. From E.E. Smith's "The Skylark of Space" (1928) to Robert Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo" (1947), the assumption was that spaceflight would take off pretty much the way aviation had taken off, thanks to the skilled hands of dedicated amateurs who would blaze a trail soon to be followed by big business and big government.

It didn't work out that way, of course. The earliest days of rocketry, when Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun built rockets in garages in the 1920s and 1930s, did look like the early days of aviation. But by 1957, when the first Sputnik satellite was launched, it was clear that space exploration was going to be mostly a job for federal agencies and tax dollars.

The big-government approach did get us to the moon -- the process might have been expensive and complicated, but it had also been fast, and it had worked. Unfortunately, the big-government approach stopped working. The Apollo program was ended early, the promised follow-up missions didn't appear, and talk of going to Mars quickly died down. We spent most of a decade waiting for the Space Shuttle, and when it arrived it was a disappointment: an orbital trucking service, and not a cheap or reliable one either. The International Space Station was likewise slow, overpriced and in some ways even creakier than the Mir and Skylab stations that had preceded it.

As NASA has lost its glow in recent years, space enthusiasts have begun to wonder whether early science-fiction writers might have been right after all. And indeed, private-sector space initiatives are heating up again. So far, as Michael Belfiore shows in "Rocketeers," the results look promising.

Mr. Belfiore opens with a discussion of Peter Diamandis, the communications entrepreneur who, in 1996, announced an open competition for what he called the X Prize. (It was renamed the Ansari X Prize after two venture capitalists, Amir and Anousheh Ansari, put up $10 million for the award.) The challenge to competitors: Develop a spacecraft able to carry three people to an altitude of roughly 62 miles -- generally regarded as the point where airspace ends and outer space begins -- and safely return them to Earth, then repeat the trip within two weeks.

The X Prize contest was reminiscent of aviation's early days, when privately funded prizes inspired design competitions and trial-and-error efforts with comparatively little governmental help. Charles Lindbergh didn't fly the Atlantic with the assistance of a federal grant; he was chasing the Orteig Prize. And Lindbergh was one of many aviators competing for the $25,000 award -- it touched off a frenzy of creative thinking and problem-solving.

The Ansari X Prize was won in 2004 by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. The excitement over the contest prompted others to look afresh at the possibilities of space transportation. Mr. Belfiore offers an inside look at many of these "NewSpace" entrepreneurs, including John Carmack, the creator of the Doom video game. In 2001, he launched the Armadillo Aerospace project, currently competing for the million-dollar NASA Lunar Lander Prize. Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, has started SpaceX, a startup that has launched everything from Naval research payloads to the ashes of "Star Trek" actor James Doohan.

Not every NewSpace venture has its roots in technology and engineering. Budget Suites owner Robert Bigelow has gotten into the game with Bigelow Aerospace. His goal: orbital hotels. The company has already launched two spacecraft. And outdoor advertising mogul George French is behind Rocketplane, which bills itself as "a commercial space transportation company focused on providing safe, reliable and low-cost access to space."

If private-sector space exploration efforts bring to mind aviation's early days, they also evoke the personal-computer world circa 1975: a lot of creative energy and a critical mass of engineers, early-adopter customers, bold financiers, and start-up suppliers and subcontractors. Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the pioneering days of the PC, the rocketry folks display a sense of mission as they pursue transformative breakthroughs rather than short-term gains.

On Memorial Day weekend, in Dallas, I attended the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference for the first time in more than a decade, and the change was striking. In the early 1990s, the gathering had the atmosphere of a Star Trek convention; now it's something different, with Brioni-suited venture capitalists and prosperous, big-firm lawyers filling auditorium seats and schmoozing with tech-geeks between panel discussions. Shortly afterward, it was announced that Northrop Grumman was buying Burt Rutan's company outright. The amount paid was undisclosed, but Old Space clearly wants a piece of NewSpace and is willing to pay serious money to get it.

The combination of lavish investment, entrepreneurial zeal and technological inventiveness may well give a big lift to nongovernmental efforts at space exploration. Mr. Belfiore does a terrific job of capturing the dream-chasing that is already under way. If we ever see cities on the moon or Mars -- the kind of thing science fiction once promised so enticingly -- I'm betting that the lion's share of credit will go not to NASA but to 21st-century rocketeers.

Mr. Reynolds is the author of "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths."