Read Beyond: Our Future in Space Online
Authors: Chris Impey
Beyond: Our Future in Space (11 page)
Like the space program, the Internet depended on investment by the military to mature. The US military establishment was particularly concerned about moving data efficiently between command centers and having redundancy and resilience in the case of a nuclear attack. In 1962, Licklider was hired by the Department of Defense to work at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. On October 29, 1969, a real-time link was established between research labs at UCLA and Stanford. Three characters were sent before the system crashed, but this simple transmission, reminiscent of the first phone message by Alexander Graham Bell almost a century earlier, was the start of a revolution.
DARPANET was the technical core of what would become the Internet. By the early 1980s, a new node was being added every twenty days. Many technical problems were solved in these pioneering years, such as designing protocols for chopping data into packets, sending them on diverse paths through the network, and seamlessly stitching them back together at the destination. The second phase of Internet development was carried out by universities and government labs. By the end of the 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) laid down the physical backbone of a high-speed Internet and NASA was providing connectivity to more than 20,000 scientists across seven continents.
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At that time, the public was unaware of the Internet. It was used by researchers to send data and e-mail. Commerce was forbidden.
The floodgates opened in the mid-1990s. Private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had sprung up to meet growing public demand for e-mail access. The US Congress passed a law that allowed the NSF to support access to networks that weren’t used exclusively for research and education. This created angst as researchers worried that the new Internet might not be responsive to their needs. The online world had always been a geeky place of text and equations, but in 1989 CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee released his hypertext concept for public use. In 1993, a team led by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois increased the visual appeal of the Internet by releasing the first web browser, called Mosaic. Encryption was added soon afterward to make transactions more secure.
In 1995, the NSF dropped all restrictions on Internet commerce and let private companies take over the high-speed “backbone.” That year also saw the founding of the Yahoo search engine, the auction site eBay, and the online bookseller Amazon. Huge new audiences adopted the technology and used it in unforeseen ways. As we will soon see, the space industry may now be where the Internet was in 1995, ready to soar.
The core of the analogy is that the government and the military have deep enough pockets to develop technology with no eye on profit or return on investment. Once the field has been prepared and tilled, the private sector can scatter seed and see what grows best.
With too much government and military control, technologies can’t reach their full potential. President Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
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It’s ironic that this five-star general and two-term president—the quintessential Washington insider—issued such a clarion call against concentration of influence within and around the government. He said: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for disastrous use of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
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The analogy between access to space and access to information seems to break down. However, the connection is uncanny when we recall the current controversy over the highly sophisticated and intrusive harvesting of personal data over the Internet by the US Government.
To understand the potential of space tourism, it’s helpful to look at the growth of the Internet. Since the Internet entered commerce and culture, its rise has been meteoric. It accounted for one percent of two-way telecommunication traffic in 1993, but that rose to 50 percent in 2000 and 99 percent today. In 1993, there were a million Internet hosts; now there are a billion. Space travel is poised to follow the trajectory of the Internet, becoming demilitarized and then massively commercialized (
Figure 17
). Leaving Earth may soon be cheap and safe enough that it becomes an activity for the masses rather than the experience of a privileged few. Some of the recently formed space companies will be like Netscape and Altavista—the web-browser and search-engine leaders in 1995 and now long forgotten—and some will become behemoths like Google. The next decade promises to be very interesting.
Figure 17. The space program also had visionaries who aimed for a permanent human presence in space. Progress was spurred by a military superpower rivalry and fostered by NASA. Private investment has recently begun so the space industry sits now where the Internet was in the early 1990s.
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The Radical Designer
Entrepreneurs are like the high-octane fuels needed to take space travel to the next level—volatile and sometimes hard to handle, but capable of unprecedented performance. Technical pioneers work best when they’re unfettered by conventional wisdom or institutional constraints. They have their eyes set on ambitious goals that might sound quixotic, but they pursue those goals with breathtaking passion and relentlessness. If they’re outsiders with modest means, they need deep pockets behind them to achieve their goals.
We’ve seen this combination of ingredients with Robert Goddard. He did his pioneering experiments while being shunned by academia and scorned by the military. His early work was sponsored by a modest grant from the Smithsonian Institution. Then came Harry Guggenheim, son of Daniel Guggenheim, who owned mining companies and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had one of the largest fortunes in the world. Harry, a former Navy pilot and president of the family foundation, was a friend of Charles Lindbergh, who introduced him to Goddard. In 1930, Lindbergh received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $100,000, which would be worth $4 million today.
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This support helped launch the Rocket Age.
Goddard was so far ahead of his time that his work was unregulated. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was formed in 1926, and it wasn’t until 1984 that the agency had a division to oversee rockets and commercial space travel.
Burt Rutan has an entrepreneur’s impatience with red tape.
When asked how he approached the Federal Aviation Administration about launching into space from a remote new site in the Mojave Desert, Rutan said, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” A lifelong pilot, he’s now in his early seventies and has heart problems. He calls the defibrillator implanted in his chest a “standby ignition system.” Alluding to his health issues, he said he’s discovered that when you’re in an airplane and you push the throttle forward and pull the stick back, it will take off even without a medical certificate.
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So far, he’s never been grounded for these infractions of regulations.
Rutan has worked his way into space from the ground up. He grew up in rural Oregon in a house with no plumbing, and his parents followed a religious sect that prohibited activity on the weekend. Unable to play sports, he started making his own model planes at the age of eight and developed an intuitive feel for design. “I never built from a kit,” he recalled. “I bought balsa wood and invented a new airplane.” He felt that keeping his creative side in the foreground made him a better engineer later in his career.
Rutan was hired straight out of college in 1965 as a civilian flight test engineer for the US Air Force. His job was to solve stability problems with the F4 Phantom jet fighter, which had suffered sixty-one crashes. The work became personal when he witnessed the death of his friend Mike Adams in an X-15 crash, also because of stability problems. Rutan invented a spin recovery system that prevented the F4 fleet from being grounded. Many of his homebuilt designs would use
canards
—small wings located ahead of and slightly above the main wings to give greater control and stability. Rutan also liked to employ a second, “pusher” engine at the back of the airplane, and he was an early adopter of light, composite construction materials.
At thirty, he started his first company, the Rutan Aircraft Factory. The two-seaters he designed were used by everyone from hobbyists to NASA. Instead of metal, his kits used foam and fiberglass. When asked how long it took to build an airplane, his pithy response was “one and a half wives.” His recreational planes are masterpieces of efficiency and sophistication, but Rutan was looking for a bigger challenge. In 1982, he founded a new company, Scaled Composites, and for thirty years the cutting edge of aircraft design was located “under his wing” in the arid, lunar landscape of Mojave, California.
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Rutan caught the world’s attention with Voyager, the first airplane to circumnavigate the world without refueling, which was considered impossible by many aeronautics experts. Flying around the world without refueling is like getting to orbit in one key aspect: most of the weight is fuel. The Saturn V rocket was 90 percent fuel as it launched and Voyager was 73 percent fuel when it took off. There was barely room for a pilot and copilot, and the ability of the crew to endure the flight was considered the biggest risk of failure.
Voyager looked like a dragonfly, and it was effectively a flying gas tank, with fuel filling the wings and the spars. Rutan used a radical design for the airframe and wings, where paper honeycomb was sandwiched by graphite fiber composite. Weight was reduced ruthlessly. The most important statistic in aerodynamics is the lift-to-drag ratio: the higher the better. Voyager had a lift-to-drag ratio of 27, better than a jumbo jet (17) or an albatross (20). He came up with the concept while having lunch with his brother Dick in a Mojave diner, sketching it on a napkin. Rutan told his staff to throw every new part up in the air for a weight test, and “if it comes down, it’s too heavy.”
Rutan had no capital behind him, so he built the plane on the cheap.
Company after company turned him down for sponsorship. The owner of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was willing to fund him, but only if the plane took off and landed from the casino parking lot, which was far too small for the job. One firm wanted to charge him $50,000 to fabricate the wings, so the team figured how to do it themselves for a few hundred dollars. Instead of wind-tunnel testing, Rutan flew a model on top of his Dodge Dart station wagon. He said that wind tunnels only tell you what you already know. He used his own money to finish the project. In December 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, daughter of famed test pilot Chuck Yeager, took off on their perilous journey. They landed nine days later with just 100 of their 7,000 pounds of fuel left.
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For his next challenge, Rutan was slightly better funded.
He was drawn to the challenge of suborbital space flight because, as he put it in a 2010 interview, “We can achieve some breakthroughs by making such flight orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.”
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He has noted that in 1961 Alan Shepard flew into space in a small capsule and ten years later was golfing on the Moon. Progress in that decade seemed unstoppable. He thinks that if you’d told someone in 1971 that now we’d be buying rides into space from the Russians, it would have seemed like heresy.
In the late 1990s, Rutan approached the billionaire Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen with the idea of competing for the Ansari X Prize. A California foundation had offered $10 million to the first organization to fly a manned spacecraft 100 kilometers high twice in a two-week window. Rutan wanted to avoid the complications of a rocket launch from the ground by using a large airplane to carry the rocket to a moderately high altitude and then letting the rocket do the rest. Landing, however, was a challenge. He wanted to avoid an unguided parachute descent and he preferred not to use the heavy heat shields employed by the Space Shuttle and Soyuz vehicles.
His clever solution was inspired by the way a badminton shuttlecock automatically orients itself correctly with the direction of flight. Allen and Rutan became partners, and SpaceShipOne started taking shape in the California desert (
Figure 18
). In keeping with his ethos of intuitive, hands-on engineering, Rutan tested the stability of SpaceShipOne by throwing a model off a tower. In June 2004, a crowd of 10,000 people watched Rutan’s mother ship, White Knight, haul SpaceShipOne up into the sky. It became the first manned civilian vehicle to reach an altitude of 100 kilometers. In September of that year, SpaceShipOne won the X Prize with two flights five days apart. The only sour note came with an argument between Rutan and Allen—the investor wanted the press but not the public to see the launch. Rutan wanted to inspire the next generation to do great things. He prevailed, and sixty school buses loaded full of kids saw the historic flight. Perhaps this provided the spark for the next generation of space entrepreneurs.
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