Ian Henderson boldly goes to a party in London’s West End for PrivatAir magazine – and finds himself in a queue of would-be astronauts.
We were at a chic party in London in a
remarkable modernist house, itself built entirely inside a vast Victorian
theatrical warehouse in the quiet streets behind the bright lights of Drury
Lane. The party marked the UK launch of Space XC, and the day trader wasn’t
alone – he received his framed astronaut training certificate from one of Space
XC’s radiant hostesses alongside a doctor, a lawyer and surprisingly, a Russian
student named Dimitri who said he’d be “the youngest Russian in space ever,
except Laika.” (Laika was a dog the Russians put into space in 1957.) These would-be astronauts had signed up to
medical checks, an intensive astronaut training programme, acclimatization flights
at Space XC’s new spaceport (currently being built in Curacao) and, ultimately,
the chance to sit alongside a real astronaut for the real thing. A flight into
space, in a two-seat rocketplane called the Lynx.
Space is defined as 100km/62 miles above
the Earth’s surface – the Karman line. At that altitude, there’s not enough
atmosphere to keep even the fastest winged aircraft flying. You’re no longer in
any Earth country – it's where national airspace usually stops. If a meteor
passed you, you wouldn’t see it until it started burning up in the thicker air far
below you. You’d see the curvature of the earth, and above you only stars.
Millions of them. And you’d be an astronaut.
Fulfilling the dream of going into space
has driven the growth of a new industry, much of it based around the desert
town of Mojave in the USA where companies like Scaled Composites, X-Cor (builders
of SpaceXC’s Lynx) and others are finding ways of building the light, reusable,
robust – and above all, safe - technologies that make commercial spaceflight
possible. Ask SpaceXC founder Michiel Mol if he wouldn’t do more for humanity
by, say, investing in clean water for Africa and he pauses. Then says firmly,
“No. This is about science, learning, endeavor. We may seem crazy, but this is the
start of a new era.”
Competition is also driving down prices;
the first space tourist Dennis Tito paid $20million for his ticket aboard a
Russian Soyuz, although he did get to go into orbit rather than the suborbital
out and back trips offered by Space XC and others like Virgin Galactic. Virgin
has a waiting list for tickets at £100,000 on their 12-seater suborbital craft Spaceship
One, expected to make its first commercial flights in 2013. (Mol: “We’re not in
a race with Branson. But we’d like to win.”)
Mojave is a commercial test airfield in California
next to Edwards Airforce Base, setting for Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff which
chronicled the exploits of legendary test pilots like Chuck Yeager. He flew the
Bell X1 rocketplane in 1947, breaking the sound barrier for the first time – having
to conceal the fact that only two days before he’d broken two ribs out
horseriding in the desert. Edwards AFB was also backdrop for the launch of the first
aircraft into space, the X15, which crossed the Karman line in 1963 and reached
a speed of 3,710mph.
Space XC’s two-seat, compact Lynx is in
many ways the X15’s successor. It takes off and lands on a runway just like any
conventional jet but is powered by four sophisticated rocket engines which,
unlike jet engines, don’t need to take in air. One breakthrough has been to
make these motors capable of being throttled up and down and even restarted in
flight; this is a long way from the X15’s uncontrolled rockets, which bore some
comparison to lighting the touchpaper on a garden firework.
Virgin’s solution differs in that it
piggybacks the spaceplane VSS Enterprise (named jokily after the intergalactic
craft in Star Trek) to altitude on a mother plane – it is then dropped and
powers into space before gliding to a runway landing. Another firm, Blue Origin,
are offering a straight up and down flight in a capsule atop a reusable booster
rocket, not unlike the early Vostok capsules that put Yuri Gagarin into space –
the first man ever to leave Earth’s atmosphere, in 1961.
Competition to simply be first with a
reusable passenger vehicle was inspired by the Ansari X Prize, awarded to
Scaled Composites and Microsoft founder Paul Allen for being first to make
three flights in under two weeks. That triumph has matured into a whole new
industry finding diverse answers for the challenges of suborbital spaceflight.
In the process, the industry is pushing forward the boundaries of what is
humanly possible – a dream which, since Chuck Yeager, has attracted some fairly
extreme individuals. That’s still true today, as both sponsors and passengers -
famously maverick entrepreneur Richard Branson’s name is firmly linked to space
tourism through his pioneering company Virgin Galactic, which is likely to run
its first flights with paying passengers in 2013. Branson’s spacecraft are
built by brilliant aviation engineer Burt Rutan, owner of Mojave company Scaled
Composites.
Another industry player is Elon Musk, inspiration
for the main character in the film Ironman, who made his fortune as founder of
PayPal. He now owns electric sportscar company Tesla Motors and spaceship maker
SpaceX, which is contracted to build NASA’s new launch vehicles now government
funding is less available. A true visionary, Musk is less interested in space
tourism; his drive comes from a firm belief that, “Sooner or later, we must
expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct."
That long-term, visionary perspective was
far from the minds of the eager would-be astronauts signing up with SpaceXC
that frosty night in London’s West End. As champagne flowed and beautiful
people got caught up in the excitement and glamour of the occasion, I got
talking to their chief test pilot Harry van Hulten, a former F16 jet fighter
pilot with the Dutch airforce and one of Space XC’s founders along with media
magnate and entrepreneur Michiel Mol.
He happily explained the intricacies of
liquid-fuelled motors that can do 5000 flights before needing to be replaced
and advanced carbon composite construction. He also pointed out that the Lynx
doesn’t have to take off and land in the same place; one day its successors may
be a pricy but practical way of getting to the other side of the world in a couple
of hours.
But it was when he talked about standing
the Lynx on its tail and pushing the engines to maximum, accelerating with four
times the force of gravity, going fast enough to escape the atmosphere that his
eyes lit up and behind the calm, test pilot persona the boy who wanted to fly
was still as thrilled as ever. He said quietly, “It’s like flying an F16 again.
But better.”
I was up there with him. Like the others in that room, I had stars in my eyes. I could see the blackness of space, the curve of the Earth, the precious fragility of our planet beneath. Space flight has been an aspiration for mankind ever since we realized that there are other worlds out there. The writer John Wyndham once called it ‘the outward urge’ – the innate human drive to constantly explore new places, define new barriers. On a frosty night in London, I watched four people sign up to breaking our ultimate barrier, the Karman line. The temptation to join them remains almost irresistible.
