People have been spending their time for 50 years saying
"Well if we just inspire enough, and educate enough
the space frontier will be opened."
Our 50 years are up.
Steve Jobs did not sit around saying,
"If only we inspire enough people to think computers are important
we'll have a computer revolution."
He just made one.
I want us to have a frontier in space.
I want to live in the society that has a frontier.
And if the only way to get that is to build it, then I'm going to build it.
Out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, you will find the Mojave Space Port.
Now before you get too excited, don't think "Jetsons."
Think more like dusty airstrip and you're more in the ballpark.
Occupying a little WW2-era hangar right off the runway is a company called XCOR Aerospace.
And they have a vision for what could be the world's first space airliner.
This is Jeff Greason, one of their co-founders.
Like many born during the Apollo era, Jeff grew up believing
that it was only a matter of time before mankind, spearheaded by NASA,
would begin colonizing outer space.
I don't ever remember not believing that there would be a frontier available to us in space.
I don't ever remember not expecting that I'd get to work in it.
But when I was growing up it didn't seem like working in the rocket industry had much point.
There was this thing that we now call the Space Shuttle
that was supposed to solve the space transportation problem.
It is the worst disaster in the history of the American space program.
President Reagan has just declared a week of mourning for the seven astronauts
who lost their lives on their way into space this morning.
The day Challenger was lost I came down and everyone was watching TV
and it wasn't more than about an hour that I saw the first indication
that it was a problem that everybody had known the space shuttle had that was so serious
that we just assumed that an organization like NASA would have fixed it.
Not only had NASA known about that problem and not fixed it,
they had known about lots of other problems and not fixed them.
And that really was the moment where I said, you know,
it doesn't matter how much money Congress does or does not give NASA,
this agency is not going to get me off this planet.
And I said, I want to live in the civilization that knows that our possibilities are limitless.
And the only way I know how to do that is to get the transportation to get there.
So I sat down and started writing business plans.
The way to make money in space transportation
is the way to make money in any other kind of transportation.
It's what in the airlines is called the "Southwest Airlines" model.
You keep the wheels in the wheel well.
The vehicle is not making any money sitting on the ground.
Every minute that it's not in the air gathering revenue is a minute wasted.
How fast can we fly?
How quick can we turn it around?
How few people can we take to turn it around?
It was a really cool idea.
But before they could go and get investors
They had to prove they could actually build a spaceship.
So they took an ordinary airplane and they turned it into a rocket.
And then they did it again with a bigger plane and a bigger rocket.
Year after year, they kept plugging away, kept showing the world that they knew rockets.
Each success brought them a little closer towards their goal of building the spaceship
that they are calling the Lynx Mark 1.
We want transportation to and from orbit to be cheap enough
and reliable enough and frequent enough
so that all of these things that people dream about in space can actually happen.
They can't happen right now because the cost is too high, the risk is too high,
and you have to wait too long for your chance to fly.
The Lynx is intended to fly up into space and right back down.
It doesn't go fast enough to go all the way around the planet
but because it can do it with such a small ship
and because we can fly that ship so frequently, four times per day,
the cost of doing each flight gets to be very low.
We've designed every part of this system to, first of all, be very reliable.
Be highly resuable.
And when I say resusable, I mean you go fly, you land, you put more fuel in it,
and you go right back up.
It should operate like your car, it should operate like an airliner.
No different.
On average, NASA's shuttle traveled to space about four times a year.
The Lynx is designed to go to space about four times a day.
Yeah the missions are much shorter and much simpler, but imagine the kind of breakthroughs
that we'll start to see when we are leaving our planet with that kind of frequency.
Air travel used to be something only crazy inventors did.
And then it was a government thing.
And now it's at the point where the everyday person is going via air travel
all around the world.
And it's not a big deal.
It's something we just do.
I do think that one day, space travel will be normal and until that happens I can't give up.
So when is the Lynx Mark 1 going to take flight?
Well, nobody is really sure.
XCOR recently announced that they are delaying its launch to begin developing
a liquid hydrogen engine for the United Launch Alliance.
But one thing is sure, Jeff won't quit until we have regular, affordable access to space.
My son was not very old, probably four or five,
when he looked atme one night and said, "Daddy, is it really true
that they used to go to the moon when you were a boy?"
And, of course I told him it was.
But it's really frightening that that question could even be asked.
That's what a dark age is.
A dark age is not when you have forgotten how to do something,
it's when you forgot that you could.
People look at things like going to the moon
and they don't even know that that's a thing that can be done.
We did do them.
We can do them.
We just have to decide to do them.