DotCom cash fuels DotSpace race

WHILE EARTH'S assault on Mars continues to capture headlines with the ominous failure of Europe's Beagle-2 to report home and NASA's pair of rovers scheduled for equally risky touchdowns on January 4 and 24, 2004, dot.com-era slush money is fuelling a range of low-earth orbit projects. One low(er) cost satellite launcher and several cracks at manned sub-orbital flight are making steady progress towards flights.

SpaceX is building the Falcon, a two-stage liquid fuelled rocket literally engineered "from scratch" using the latest know-how and techniques to put together a more reliable and cheaper launch vehicle. According to SpaceX, current launcher tech costs too much, with the closest competitive launcher - Orbital's Pegasus - running $30 million per flight. For $6 million per shot with a "mostly reusable" rocket capable of putting 1250 pounds into low Earth orbit, Falcon's first flight is scheduled out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in early 2004 for a Department of Defense experimental payload. Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, is underwriting SpaceX with his personal fortune estimated at around $200 million.

Heavy versions of Falcon are already on the drawing board, with the Falcon V expected to lift up to 4.5 tons to low-earth orbit when it rolls out in 2005 for a cool $12 million, but most paying commercial customers want their communications satellites put in geo-sync orbit. Musk expects a human being put into orbit on one of his launchers within 5 years. Ultimately, Falcon's liquid oxygen and kerosene-fuelled hardware will be fully reusable.

Musk's almost mundane pace is nothing compared to the race for $10 million (US) dollar Xprize for sub-orbital flight. The first group to launch a privately-funded manned reusable spaceship to 100 kilometers with three passengers and to repeat the same feat with the ship two weeks late wins. Oh yes, and the passengers have to survive the trip both times.

At last count, up to 27 teams from seven nations have declared their intention to participate in the quest for the prize.

However, only one team is currently flight testing hardware, Scaled Composites and it is the team an outsider would most likely handicap to win. Scaled is the home of aeronautical design genius Burt Rutan, builder of the round-the-world-unrefueled Voyager aircraft. The SpaceShipOne spacecraft project is being underwritten by Microsoft co-founder (and billionaire) Paul Allen to the tune of at least $20 million according to some estimates. SpaceShipOne has already taken one test flight to Mach 1.2 and 68,000 feat, propelled by a unique rubber and nitrous oxide rocket motor.

Unfortunately, SpaceShipOne sustained wing damage when its landing gear crumpled upon gliding in from its December 17th test flight, but repairs are expected to be easy and successful.

On the other side of the coin - and maybe a little too many late-nights with the Jolt - is Armadillo Aerospace's entry. Co-founder of id Software (Doom, Quake) John Carmack is pumping his time and energy with a small group based in Mesquite, Texas to build a hydrogen peroxide-fuelled rocket. Passengers will experience up to 3 Gs of acceleration, 5 Gs of deceleration, and hang facedown for about 5 minutes before touchdown before the crushable aluminium nosecone crunches to absorb landing. It doesn't sound pleasant.

Finally, some mystery surrounds Amazon.Com founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space launcher company; Blue hasn't declared for the XPrize, but is hiring propulsion engineers and looking for systems and aerospace engineers to build, as the web site says, "real hardware". µ

See Also
John "Quake" Carmack edges closer to manned space mission