‘Line three’
'Have you ever thought about going into space Richard?’
‘(chuckles) If you’re building a spacecraft I’d love to come with you on it’.
So began virginal tycoon Richard Branson’s long journey
from weightlifter of women to soothsayer of space.
‘In a year’s time… In the last few months… Early next year… Very few months…
Sometime next year… By the end of the year
we should be taking members of the public into space’.
But we’re still waiting …
So why are there still no tourists in space?
Apart from this guy ...
The history of space exploration
has been dominated by governmental agencies in Russia
and the US, but the new millennium was supposed to herald the commercial space age.
Private companies, helmed by billionaires like Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,
have spent the intervening years talking up their wildly different technologies.
So which type of space travel are we talking about?
Here’s the earth, with some random things of increasing height on it.
A man. A giraffe. The Tianzi garden hotel.
When we get to mountains, height magically becomes elevation,
and here’s an aeroplane operating at such an elevation, it becomes altitude.
Here’s Richard Branson waving from a hot air balloon.
You have to get up to here before Nasa will call you an astronaut,
despite the arbitrary yet globally acknowledged boundary of space, the Kármán line, being here.
It’s an altitude that Virgin Galactic haven’t guaranteed - but Bezos and Blue Origin have.
Both companies are therefore working on suborbital spaceflight.
To get into orbit you have to be all the way up here,
along with the International Space Station, Sputnik and Starlink.
For reference, here’s the moon, here’s Mars, and here’s the Tesla.
Suborbital was seen as the first step.
And this would start to generate income for companies
on which they could build new transportation systems
and have eventually orbital flight.
But shouldn’t this have happened by now?
Virgin Galactic’s notoriously publicity shy leader certainly thought so,
but optimism bordering on hubris is nothing new in the space industry.
‘We choose to go to the moon!’
The space race itself was basically a cosmic propaganda war,
but in the late 60s the lines between fantasy and reality began to blur.
Flying high on their completely fictional
successes in the burgeoning industry as depicted in 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Pan Am were quick
to offer bookings for the ‘first moon flights club’.
‘I have here a reservation for a flight to the moon’.
93,000 names went on the waiting list for trips projected
to fly around the turn of the millennium.
And they may well have done, had Pan Am had not gone bust nine years earlier.
Meanwhile hotel chain Hilton had serious hopes for some form of lunar b&b ...
‘Well, right now that’s not an actual destination’.
‘That wasn’t the point - I said I wanted Hilton on the Moon’.
Nowadays of course Hilton has two Moon hotels …
Unfortunately, they’re both just outside Pittsburgh airport.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s when Nasa unveiled its new shuttle that the first civilians
in space became a serious proposition.
‘Today I’m directing Nasa to choose as the first citizen passenger
in the history of our space programme, one of America’s finest. A teacher’.
There were some people that were against it,
they felt it was a political stunt by Ronald Reagan
because it was an election year.
But it opened things up. It made people start to think, boy,
if a teacher can fly, maybe someday I can fly.
But it was not to be.
The Challenger disaster of 1986 - which killed winning teacher
Christa McAuliffe and her crew mates, effectively ended the programme.
It took a long time to kind of process all that, you know,
were we wrong to fly teacher, was it too early?
So if Nasa wasn’t going to fly
a civilian to space ... could anybody else help?
Ah yes.
In 2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Tito blasted off to the ISS aboard the Russian Soyuz rocket.
‘Dennis, how are you?’
Here you had Russia, a communist country,
getting into commercial space way before America was willing to do it.
And I thought the fact that somebody who was willing to spend millions
and millions of dollars of their own money to go, actually showed the value of spaceflight.
But was this actually tourism?
I really don't like the term 'space tourist'.
Anousheh Ansari travelled to the ISS aboard the Soyuz rocket in 2006,
becoming the 4th and first female, private citizen in space.
I would much rather call it space explorer or some other term that fits the danger involved,
the training and preparation involved ... — It's a fair point.
Dennis Tito and his ilk had far more active roles in their trips than, say, Yuri Gagarin,
who was very much a passenger as well as a pioneer.
Although both Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX
are currently working on returning paying customers into orbit,
such trips bear no resemblance to our cultural understanding
of what tourism looks like.
At the end of the day, if you pay 50 million dollars
to go into space,
you can call yourself whatever you want.
But the first seven self-funded space cadets did not herald a new dawn.
When we quit flying shuttles, we didn't have any way to get
astronauts to the space station.
Instead of flying tourists, Russia decided they're gonna
make those seats available for America
because they could actually charge more.
For regular civilians who still dreamed of space travel,
the private sector was showing signs of life, propelled by the Ansari-sponsored X Prize.
People would tell me I'm crazy, that this is not possible.
Large governments spend billions of dollars and we're asking people to build
a spaceship literally in their garages.
But that spirit of entrepreneurship told me otherwise.
‘It’s away’.
In 2004, SpaceShip One, designed by aviator Burt Rutan,
became the first private, crewed vessel in space.
The X prize had a winner.
And so, it seemed, did the commercial space race,
with a new company, Virgin Galactic,
promising to take Rutan’s technology to the masses.
Or at least those with a quarter
of a million dollars burning a hole in their pockets.
So, why are there still no (very rich) tourists in space?
Because it still remains to be expensive.
It's the technical challenges of making sure the vehicles
can be reused and refurbished and turned around again on an economical basis
and that they're safe.
‘Good evening, Virgin Galactic
was hoping to turn tourists into astronauts within months,
but today the project was dealt a serious setback’.
Flying to space is dangerous. It's taxing on the body.
You're basically strapping yourself to explosives.
But Virgin Galactic has been resisting that temptation to just start flying passengers
and are doing a lot of test flights.
Even once we start flying, what happens after the first accident?
How will the public react? Will the companies be able to recover?
But there are good reasons to think that we really might finally be on the cusp
of something - insert pandemic caveat here.
Nasa itself has pivoted to a more collaborative approach,
declaring the ISS open for business in 2019.
Among the first visitors will be a reality TV show winner,
some Estee Lauder skincare products and somewhat inevitably, Tom Cruise.
‘Aaargh’.
With plans for a new private space station underway,
Nasa’s return to the moon slated for 2024 and trips to Mars
with SpaceX perhaps a little further away,
this decade should finally see the commercial space industry achieve lift off.
In a certain way, the new propaganda is all this hype about space tourism
and it's going to grow old if we don't start flying next year.
‘We should have a permanently occupied human base on the moon.
And send people to Mars’.
I sometimes wonder,
do we hurt our own industry by over promising and under delivering?
And I think that certainly has happened with space tourism.