Outer space trips still out of reach

SpaceShipOne can only achieve suborbital flight - a far cry from true space fight.

It would seem that money can't buy you love, but it can buy you a great view.

Five years ago, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid for a seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket that took him for a stay on the International Space Station. Mr Tito became the first paying astronaut - but what about the rest of us? Five years on, are we any closer to swapping our sun hats for space helmets?

Some others have followed Mr Tito. South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth made the trip a year later, and US millionaire Gregory Olsen was space cadet number three. Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto is next up this September, followed by Charles Simonyi, a former development guru at Microsoft.

None of these people are poor - each forked out around US$20 million ($31 million) for an eight-day trip.

Still, even at those prices, things have moved on a great deal since the Cold War, when space exploration was dominated by big government. The Apollo moon programme cost US$100 billion in 1990s money. Today's entrepreneurs hope to use private-sector efficiencies to slash prices for space tourism in the next few years.

"The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US Government often is not," says Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, which arranged flights for the five intrepid travellers who have made the voyage into space so far. Space Adventures brokers deals between wealthy tourists and the Russian authorities, buying them spare seats on existing Soyuz flights.

It's little wonder Mr Anderson is hitching a ride rather than building his own vehicles. Spacecraft must attain 28,000km/h to get into orbit, and survive extreme heat on re-entry.

A cheaper alternative attracting research and development from private companies is suborbital space travel. Suborbital craft still make the 100km trip into space, but they don't get far enough to make it into a self-sustaining orbit. Rather, they travel for a short time before gliding back to Earth. The difference between orbital and suborbital flight is huge; suborbital craft need to reach only 4800km/h.

Virgin Galactic was set up by the Virgin Group in 2004 with the aim of beginning commercial suborbital flights in 2008. It is ploughing US$240 million into space tourism and has pocketed US$14 million in deposits from 158 would-be astronauts.

Last June, Virgin Galactic formed the SpaceShip Company, a joint venture with the aerospace company Scaled Composites, headed by Burt Rutan. Mr Rutan made history in October 2004 when his suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne, became the first manned private craft to make it into space.

The SpaceShip Company now plans to sell SpaceShipTwo, which is designed to carry six passengers and two pilots. Virgin ordered five of them.

In the meantime, Blue Origin is working on another suborbital craft. The company, founded by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, will develop a series of crewed launch vehicles that will take off and land vertically. Expect flights in as little as five to six years.

But these craft don't make it into full orbit, which is bad news for Mike Gold, corporate counsel for Bigelow Aerospace, the skyward-looking venture of hotelier Robert Bigelow. Mr Bigelow is moving into space accommodation with a series of pods that can be flown into space and inflated.

Mr Bigelow is said to be spending US$514 million on the project, but if the means of getting his guests into space doesn't take off soon, his business could end up looking deflated. "We hoped that by the time we were getting within view of deploying our technology, the launch industry ... would have been well along the way, or that Soyuz prices would have dropped dramatically," says Mr Gold.

Suborbital space flight is a hotbed of innovation, but further out, progress has stalled. Here, tourists are riding Cold War technology missiles. Sightseers may look down on a brave new world, but for the time being, the technology that got them there comes from a much older one.

- INDEPENDENT