Infinity or Bust

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Three years later the private space race kicked off when headlines celebrated the winners of the $10 million X Prize, a contest created to jump-start commercial space flight. In October 2004, SpaceShipOne, a project bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, won for designing the first privately funded spacecraft to cross the 62-mile threshold into space twice in two weeks.

Virgin Atlantic's daredevil CEO Richard Branson quickly signed on SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan to build a fleet that will ferry customers paying $200,000 a pop to suborbit, where passengers will experience weightlessness, by the end of the decade.

Elon Musk of PayPal fame is working on sending spacecraft into orbit through his company Space Exploration Technologies (called SpaceX). He's framed his ambitions as a first step toward ensuring a spacefaring civilization that could survive Earth's demise. Another siliconaire, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, has built buzz for his Blue Origin venture-which aims to launch tourists into suborbital bliss from the company's West Texas spaceport-mainly by being secretive about it. Several states are gearing up to cash in on the new industry by allocating tax dollars to build their own spaceports. And Budget Suites of America CEO Robert Bigelow is working on lodging. He successfully launched a one-third-scale model of his inflatable hotel, Genesis 1, in July. (Ironically, the project was initiated at NASA, which abandoned it in 2000 and then sold Bigelow development rights.)

The possibilities to capitalize don't end there-there's lunar and asteroid mining, advertising, solar power collection, and more. After Las Vegas played host this summer to the first of two conferences highlighting space's commercial prospects, a city newspaper's editorial page crooned: 'When flexibility and innovation are called for, nothing has ever succeeded like the profit-seeking free market.'

Despite all the dreams the free market seems set to fulfill, however, the reliance on a capitalist mentality carries familiar pitfalls. In Space: The Fragile Frontier (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2006), author and space technology consultant Mark Williamson warns that our commercial endeavors are already wreaking environmental havoc. Littered with human-made space junk, Earth's orbit could prove dangerous not only to government endeavors, such as the space shuttle and International Space Station, but also to commercial satellites. With more and more entities laying claims to space, Williamson warns that development and exploration guidelines must be laid down 'before the 'final frontier' becomes a lawless, selfish, and untamed frontier.'

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print