Travelling to space on a budget?

Not many of us have a spare quarter-of-a-million dollars to blow on a half-hour joy-ride.

It seems that nobody has told this to Richard Branson.

After the gleaming white craft he had hoped would one day take him to the edge of space came crashing to the ground, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other, Branson pledged to press on with Virgin Galactic — whis “grand project” that he hopes will give the “millions of people who would like to a chance to slip the surely bonds of earth”.

Branson sees himself as a pioneer, democratising spaceflight, eradicating the monopoly held by governments with tens of billions of dollars to throw at their enormous space programmes. Yet while the cost of a trip is certainly far lower than the tens of millions that space tourists have paid for a ride on a Soyuz to the International Space Station (ISS), it still remains affordable only to celebrities and wealthy business people with several orders of magnitude more money than they know what to do with.

Will future generations really see this as the start of a new dawn in spaceflight, or just a pointless and extravagant white elephant?

Branson’s unimaginatively named SpaceShipTwo (operated by the inaccurately named Virgin ‘Galactic’) has several significant innovations that make it rather different to conventional space launch systems. Instead of taking off using rockets, SpaceShipTwo is first attached to a plane and released when it reaches a high enough altitude.

From there it travels to space using its own small rockets. When it’s time to come back to earth, the rear part of the wing folds up, slowing the craft down and avoiding the enormous temperatures experienced by the heat shields of conventional spacecraft.

This approach dramatically reduces the costs involved, and mean that the entire setup is completely reusable.

Virgin Galactic isn’t the only company trying to commercialise space travel though. Two companies have set (massively over-)ambitious deadlines to send people to Mars. Dennis Tito’s Inspiration Mars is planning a 500 day return trip for two astronauts to fly around Mars in 2018. Mars One is planning to not only land people on the surface in 2024, but also set up a permanent colony there, while filming it all for a reality TV programme. Their budget is just 6 billion dollars, vastly less than the 100 billion estimated by NASA for a similar project.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very doubtful that either of these projects will ever happen.

One company though, has proven that private companies can successfully carry out space flight in the long term. Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, the South African billionaire behind PayPal, SpaceX has developed a successful rocket and a spacecraft, Dragon, which has already been used to launch satellites and transport cargo to the ISS, and is intended to be used in the future to carry astronauts. What SpaceX has already achieved makes even the most outlandish goals set out by Virgin Galactic seem quite trivial.

And yet, unlike those planning missions to Mars, what both these companies appreciate is that for space travel to progress, there must be a sustainable business model behind it. Since the end of the space race and the cold war, space has changed from the final frontier to be conquered to something we can use and develop to improve our lives through enhanced communications and navigation.

But as governments become weary of spending tens of billions of dollars on such huge projects, commercialising seems the only way that humans will ever make space travel truly sustainable and affordable in the long term. Perhaps we could finally achieve those lofty ambitions of a permanent presence on Mars, or mining comets for minerals that are rare on earth.

I just don’t think the way to do this is with the world’s most expensive roller coaster.

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