Unit 38
Space Voyage for the Average Joe and Mary
Forty-one years after the original space race began with the launch of the Russian Sputnik, the world's first satellite, a new race has emerged. Its goal is to make space flight accessible to the average Joe or Mary -- by offering a $10 million cash prize to the first person to design a spaceship that can take three passengers into space and back. It will do for space flight what PCs did for computers -- take it out of the control of governments and very big companies and put it in the hands of average people.
"The biggest obstacle to opening up space flight is money," says the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit organization that's putting up the X Prize money.
Since the beginning of the space age, the cost of space flight hasn't changed much, and that's because there hasn't been enough flights to force the cost down. So, in an effort to stimulate less expensive spaceship designs, the Foundation has organized a competition: Ten million dollars will go to the first person or team that designs a spaceship capable of launching three passengers to an altitude of 100 km. At that altitude, passengers would get to experience about four minutes of weightlessness and get a view of the Earth.
The emphasis of the competition is on the spaceship's reusability, an ideal that was not quite reached by the current NASA apace shuttle, whose fuel tanks are tossed in midflight as are its rocket boosters which are partly reusable. The reusability of this next wave of spacecraft will help develop commercial markets, which is believed to be space tourism.
The competition itself is actually modeled on the Orteig International Prize of 1927, which promoted Charles Lindbergh's famous non-stop flight from New York to Paris 71 years ago on the Spirit of St. Louis. The $25,000 cash prize stimulated nine attempts to cross the Atlantic and the investment of $400,000 in aeronautic design. The prize was one of over 100 aviation prizes offered between 1905 and 1935, which created today's $250 billion aeronautics industry. In an effort to repeat history, after the X Prize is awarded to individuals who have make the greatest contributions to commercial human space flight.
Once the cost of putting something into space goes down, the number of things you can afford to do goes up greatly. It's a new ear of spacecraft design, in which spaceships can be treated more like aircraft and the passengers won't be professional astronauts, but adventure seekers or space enthusiasts. |