The most secretive entrant in the commercial space race is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com (and a donor to the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine). His space tourism company, Blue Origin, is based on a 165,000-acre Texas ranch. It’s developing a rocket ship called the New Shepard. A flight on the vehicle would last just a few minutes and allow a brief period of weightlessness. In mandatory government filings, Blue Origin revealed plans to start testing unmanned vehicles at the end of 2006. Otherwise Bezos has remained mum.
Branson and his peers are confining themselves to suborbital travel for now: blastoff, a few minutes of zero gravity at the edge of space, then back again. The technology to make this type of trip has been around for decades, though NewSpacers are working to make the trip exponentially cheaper, better, and faster. Bigelow’s hotel-in-space project is more ambitious, on par with the International Space Station, but also has a longer time horizon. And no one has taken serious practical steps toward a private voyage to the moon, though there has been a lot of discussion about the legal preconditions to make a moon trip attractive to entrepreneurs. For starters, it’s not clear how property rights will work on the moon or on asteroids. Who is allowed to build, and where? Perhaps more important, what can be brought back to Earth and sold?
Devotees of private space travel have long blamed NASA’s monopolistic behavior for their own failures. And it’s true NASA has done virtually nothing to encourage outside innovation over the years—despite repeated mandates to do so—while selfishly sucking up billions of dollars and all the dreams and hopes of space buffs nationwide. But when the NewSpacers lowered their sights from “infinity and beyond” to a few minutes of floating, they realized NASA couldn’t really stop them from snagging a little bit of space all their own.
Extraterrestrial Entrepreneurs
It was 1999 when the free market faction of the space world finally
gave up on NASA. In that single year, NASA boasted two failed Mars
robot missions, a mostly grounded shuttle fleet, a busted space
telescope, and a semi-abandoned space station; it also aborted
several pet projects, from a space plane to a planned landing on a
comet’s nucleus, in large part because they were politically
inexpedient. Most space geeks had long ago lost hope that NASA
would ever make it back to the moon, as the space agency seemed
resigned to sending shuttles scooting back and forth to the
International Space Station with small scientific payloads, spare
parts, and the occasional astronaut. Pessimists pointed to the
average age of NASA professionals, a ripe old 46, and sighed about
the lack of innovation. Gone were the Apollo days, when the command
was “Waste anything but time.” NASA seemed happy to clunk along
with its $16 billion a year, doing what it had been doing since the
1970s: not much.
From that despair, the seeds of dozens of companies were tossed to the winds. A few promise bumper crops soon. Once the really big projects were out of the picture—Mars colonies, dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, etc.—a few guys with big money started to ask: What could be worse than NASA? We might as well try.
Surprisingly, many private space enthusiasts concede that things have started looking up at NASA in the last few years. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity performed well, pluckily winning the hearts of the American public. The recent shuttle excursion to resume work on the International Space Station got good publicity and actually achieved something of practical worth by delivering new solar panels to the station. And there’s another reason the grumbling has diminished: Getting out of NASA’s orbit and into their own suborbital groove has left many NewSpacers with a more generous attitude toward the agency, or at least a willingness to turn a blind eye to NASA’s failings when their own projects are under way.
The Vegas conference was dubbed NewSpace 2006 but could just as easily have been called “Selling Space,” since pretty much everyone in the room was doing just that, in one capacity or another. As one participant noted: “A few years ago, all these guys had the names of struggling nonprofits on their nametags. Today everyone’s a CEO.”
For years the Space Frontier Foundation, which organized the conference, has been nagging space geeks to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like businessmen. The trouble with engineers, apparently, is that they are naturally authoritarian. If we could just calculate everything out to the nth decimal place, they say, we could tell you the One Right Way to get to the moon or to launch a rocket. During the no-go ’90s, conferences about commercial space ventures were dominated by talk of propellant, rocket design, and lunar habitation specs. “Here’s the thing,” warns Kevin Greene, founder of a fledgling startup called Lunar Constructors. “There is no ‘optimum design’ for a moon colony. This is hard for engineers to understand. This is not a libertarian tirade; there is a role for government. But don’t over-design it.”
Bigelow agrees with the sentiment, adding: “Whether you’re building a regional shopping center mall or a 70-story office building, go out and find your anchor tenants. Don’t build the whole thing from your idea of what might work.”
Having shed their pocket protectors and donned pinstriped suits and silk ties—most of which, mercifully, didn’t have little shooting stars or pictures of the starship Enterprise on them—NewSpace enthusiasts have grown comfortable with the language, and the indeterminacies, of business. The conference participants talked about “selling ourselves to the public,” market segmentation, and strategies to fend off government regulation. Many were starting to think beyond the One Right Way to get to space and beginning to consider extra frills to offer travelers once they’re up there.
This isn’t to say the field has shed its nerdy image or impulses. Nearly every laptop in the Flamingo’s Red Rock meeting room sported space-themed desktop wallpaper. (Perhaps 40 percent were Star Trek–related.) One speaker flattered a colleague by saying his “light saber is sharper” than most. And the trade fair presented in conjunction with the conference looked less like a cutting-edge technology expo and more like a middle school science fair. Foam boards with laser-printed pictures of spaceships dotted the walls, and a model rocket engine filled with water bubbled in the corner.
Selling Space
With the recent rise of the market-savvy spaceman, the business
plan competition should have been a highlight of NewSpace 2006.
Sadly, the viability of the proposals correlated inversely with how
awesome they were. Not that rockets aren’t cool, but it’s hard for
the layman to get really excited about which kind of hybrid
propellant is going to maximize efficiency.
First among the compelling losers: a pitch for a suborbital football league cum reality show called Space Champions: Zero Gravity. The downs, company president Rocky Persaud conceded, would have to be short to fit into the 30 to 40 seconds of zero gravity at the apex of parabolic flight patterns, and tackling in the absence of gravity was going to be tricky. But he optimistically predicted the venture would be profitable almost immediately, with just $3.2 million in financing at the outset. I longed to give this man my money, or someone else’s, but his weak PowerPoint presentation and lack of an impressive board of directors suggested he had a long way to go.
Another plan mentioned “memorial space flights” where clients can outdo LSD guru Timothy Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry by ensuring that all of their cremated remains, rather than just a few grams, make it into space. More measured options included cheap “dedicated launches for small payloads” and easier microsatellite launches. The fun stuff captured the imagination, but the nitty-gritty on rocket manufacture and launch efficiency was bound to win out.
The guys pitching wacky projects have one thing right, though: If the public is going to be interested, it needs to see exciting images and hear wild stories about space. Grainy footage of “One small step…” can sustain people’s interest only for so long. NASA has lost its touch at selling space, and NewSpace companies are just starting to learn the skill. Virgin Galactic has done the best job so far, with a sharp little product placement in the recent Superman movie: A Virgin Galactic–branded spaceship, possibly piloted by Branson himself, appeared in trailers for the film.
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