Commercial space travel: what it might feel like

BY MARK BROATCH

Suddenly there's silence. For about 45 minutes you and the five people strapped in beside you have been cruising with a steady rumble up to 15,000m above the earth 50,000 feet in pilot talk well above where standard jet airliners criss-cross the sky.

Your spacecraft, the sleek grey carbon composite SpaceShipTwo, has been hitching a ride beneath the wings of a white double-hulled carrier plane, WhiteKnight. Then your spacecraft is released.

For five seconds, nothing, only the altitude counter telling you gravity is taking hold. Then you are thrown back in your seat. The hybrid rocket at your back has kicked in, and you are hurtling near vertically at three times the speed of sound.

One kilometre every second. For 90 seconds, you shoot up to 110km into the atmosphere, the very edge of space. The sky has gone from endless blue to inky black. WhiteKnightTwo and Spaceport America, in the New Mexico desert, have receded into the distance. "It's like a tsunami sweeps through the cabin," says test pilot Brian Binnie.

Then the rockets stop. There is no noise, no vibration, it's calm. And you are weightless. The captain gives the signal, and you can leave your seat, float to the portholes in the 3m-high cabin and enjoy the view.

Above is the black emptiness of space and the unblurred twinkle of stars, below the slow blue-and-white curve of the living planet you call home, wrapped in the thinnest denim-coloured wisp of atmosphere. Everyone who has been to space says this experience changes them forever; finally you are finding out for yourself.

Then, after a few minutes, you must return to your seat. The seats recline to a lying position as SpaceShipTwo starts its descent even though the wings have flipped up to give the pilots greater control and slow the fall, it will still exert five or six Gs on your body. As the wings tilt back and you glide back safely to the spaceport and down the runway, just over two hours have gone by. Your loved ones are waiting.

IT'S A good thing Ron Stroeven is not worried about having to wait until SpaceShipTwo is pronounced fit to take paying guests to experience the trip into space just as the test pilots have. It could be 2010, when the flamboyant founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, will turn 60. But it will probably be 2011. The company expects to do up to 18 months of test flights before taking people into space. White Knight Two made its debut flight just before Christmas last year.

Stroeven, who runs a successful international software business out of Auckland, has paid half his fare of $US200,000, his promptness putting him in the first 400-500 group of passengers sorry, astronauts to go.

"I'm a naturally patient guy," he told the Sunday Star-Times at a recent event for would-be and paid-up space customers at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

A trip is two years of anticipation, 10 minutes of space travel, but a lifetime of memory, says Stroeven, and he means every word. Plus, having a statistical kind of mind, he'd prefer to not be in the first tranche, given that there may be a few kinks to iron out. The death of a passenger or, even worse, the crash of a craft could put the scheme back years. Last month, the left tail of WhiteKnightTwo scraped the ground during its fourth test flight in the Mojave Desert.

Stroeven, one of four New Zealanders already committed to spending a small fortune to touch the edge of space, is just the kind of passenger apart from celebrities like Paris Hilton, Sigourney Weaver and Kiss's Gene Simmons, whose names have been bandied over the years Virgin Galactic must love. He's serious, patient, focused. Despite Virgin founder Branson's blandishment at the Sydney event via a video link to "have a drink, or two, or three, or four, or five, on me", Stroeven stuck to water.

But Stroeven also loves fast cars and rollercoasters. And Star Trek. He first read about the idea of space travel in The Economist.

"I thought, hell, I could even do that." He signed up just over a year ago, but says it would have been cheaper to have paid the lot given the subsequent sinking of the NZ dollar.

Also at the Sydney launch was Christchurch-based rocket entrepreneur Mark Rocket, born Stevens, who, like Christchurch real estate agent Jackie Maw and Central Otago artist Makouri Scott, are in the first 100 to go due to signing up so early. The three South Islanders and one North Islander reinforce the country's reputation as early adopters. Australia, with five times the population, has 11 would-be astronauts.

There are dozens of private spaceflight companies, and several in the hunt to take paying passengers on sub-orbital flights, including Space Adventures, which took billionaires Mark Shuttleworth and Dennis Tito in Russian craft to the international space station. But Branson appears to have the jump.

SpaceShipOne, the current test craft's predecessor, also designed by pioneer Burt Rutan and flown by Binnie, won a $US10m prize for being the first private craft to fly twice beyond 100km in a fortnight. And Virgin claims to have sold 300 tickets already, raising millions to help speed development. Tens of thousands have signed up to the scheme in principle.

In April, the company announced that flights would also happen out of Sweden, which is planning to build a spaceport. So outside of paying the Russians $US20m to spend a week in the space station, many space fans with the cash which is little more than the price of a top-line performance car clearly think Branson is their best bet.

SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnight test pilot Brian Binnie astronaut No434 and with 21 years of flight-test experience under his belt believes there will be competing space airlines within five years, and within 10 years there will be the possibility of our children going into orbit within their lifetime. In 15 years there will be "resort hotels" in space.

Binnie, 55, who grew up near Aberdeen, but spent 20 years in the US Navy, said at the Sydney event that spaceports are being considered around the world, including Dubai. The one in New Mexico, which was designed by URS/Foster + Partners, is currently in construction and is likely to house the New Zealanders during their three days of training.

Artist Makouri Scott, who saved for three years to afford the trip and planned to sketch his sub-orbital experiences, said an incentive for his trip was to bring attention to environmental issues.

On that front, Virgin has been typically proactive, stressing the minimal environmental impact of the flights and noting its other green efforts, such as trial flights using sustainable biofuels (see sidebar). Lachlan Thompson, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Melbourne's RMIT University, backed the company, telling the Star-Times that the energy used in the space shuttle could launch a thousand Virgin space flights and was far less environmentally damaging than the millions of ordinary plane flights, and the likes of coal-fired power stations.

Australian super-greenie Tim Flannery has been criticised for getting involved with Virgin Galactic, his role branded as "an extreme form of greenwashing" by Australian environmentalists.

But Flannery said that if air travel can be transformed from a "fairly highly polluting" technology of the 1950s into a much more sustainable technology, it will be a "truly revolutionary" change for our children and grandchildren. He expanded upon green pioneer James Lovelock's Gaia concept of the earth as a living organism. The internet was giving the planet a kind of global consciousness, he told the audience, and when, in our children's or grandchildren's time, we will be able to regulate gases in the atmosphere, then Gaia will truly become an intelligent creature "and we'll be its brain".

Flannery said the iconic view of the curve of the earth from space gave us a new sense of what it means to be human. He hoped the thousands who planned to fly into space would come back similarly inspired.

The cost of flight

Astronaut and Virgin Galactic test pilot Brian Binnie is typical among those involved in private space travel in thinking that Nasa's role as designer, producer and customer for space craft is less than cost-effective. He says each flight of the space shuttle cost $US1b, "give or take". So the cost per astronaut is about $US100m. For fun, he's calculated that it takes 6.6 gigajoules to get a person into space. That converts to about 1830 kilowatt hours, Which means that, when worked out at a typical Californian electricity rate of 6c a kilowatt-hour, getting a person into space should cost $US109.86.

There's a "huge design space" between Nasa and other space companies, he says. The crew hatch for the shuttle, which opens outward and needs fancy technology due to internal pressurisation, cost perhaps $US35m to build. SpaceShipOne's cost $200 and uses a padlock to stop people trying to get out during the flight.

Carolyn Wincer, Virgin Galactic's London-based head of astronaut sales, and a Kiwi, says carbon emissions of a space flight passenger are less than a first-class passenger flying from London to New York. The craft's hybrid motor is fuelled by a combination of an ingredient in tyre rubber and nitrous oxide. Its byproducts are water vapour, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen, not environmentally perfect, but preferable to those of the shuttle's solid fuel boosters of burning the potentially hazardous ammonium perchlorate and aluminium.

Virgin, like Air New Zealand, is also trialling sustainable biofuels in its jets. Lachlan Thompson, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Melbourne's RMIT University, says the energy used in the shuttle could launch 1000 Virgin space flights. He suspects if Virgin ramps up its operations it is likely to move to a hydrogen-oxygen fuel source, producing only water as a byproduct.

Thompson says even if Virgin Galactic launches three flights a week out of 10 countries, its environmental impact will be tiny compared to the billions of tonnes of polluting gases from conventional air travel and coal-fired power stations. Thompson, who admits he's no greenie, says instead of focusing on such developments we should be planting trees on a global scale and cleaning up power stations.

Greenpeace NZ's Bunny McDiarmid says space flights are going to happen, so the ideal is that "everything we do has to be seen through a climate-change lens". If it's not going to be beneficial, we should seriously look at whether we should do it, she says. Thompson suggests putting into place a monitoring programme to measure space flight emissions.

Mark Broatch travelled to Sydney as a guest of House of Travel, exclusive NZ agents for Virgin Galactic space flights. To see a video of the planned flight, see http://visitspace.com.au/videos.html

- © Fairfax NZ News