Not 'gonna be a long, long time' till you can be a rocket man

"You need a strong, growing US space transportation system, and the federal ... decision that it's in the national interest to fund ... a second generation reusable launch vehicle to supplant the shuttle at a sufficiently low cost that it would be commercially viable," he says. Out of that effort would come the rocket or rockets that would service commercial passenger flights.

He likens the effort needed to one the US Air Force undertook in 1951, when it began developing an aerial tanker to refuel jet fighters and bombers. The result, he continues, was the KC-135, known commercially as the Boeing 707, the first commercial jet to be used worldwide.

The government is moving in that direction with NASA's Space Launch Initiative. The agency has budgeted $4.8 billion through 2006 for the development of safer, more reliable, and cheaper follow-ons to the shuttle. It looking beyond the SLI to a program designed to develop a third-generation of launch vehicles.

Others are not waiting for the government to act. Some 20 companies and groups worldwide are in a competition for a $10 million purse offered to the first firm that can build and fly a two-stage, reusable rocket that can carry three people on a suborbital flight and be refurbished for its next flight within two weeks. Yesterday, a Canadian team paraded a mockup a 60-foot-long "Canadian Arrow" through the streets of Manhattan in a pitch coinciding with Mr. Shuttleworth's launch.

Known as the X Prize, the contest is modeled after the prizes that stimulated growth of commercial aviation early in the last century, says X Prize Foundation president Peter Diamandis.

Noting that Charles Lindbergh's record-breaking trans-Atlantic solo flight was a response to the offer of an aviation prize, he adds that within six years of that flight, commercial passenger flights became common. He expects a similar commercial response after his prize is issued.

"People paid what for them were large sums of money" to fly with early-20th century barnstormers "to see the world from 2,000 feet," he says. He expects a similar response when an X Prize winner emerges. Indeed, Space Adventures already has payments from roughly 100 customers willing to fly with astronautical barnstormers once a winner emerges, perhaps as early as 2004 or 2005.

The contest already is stimulating a range of related efforts, ranging from states trying to set up space ports for tourism flights, to Federal Aviation Administration development of licensing requirements for private commercial launch facilities and passenger operations.

Where Dr. Diamandis sees relatively short-term opportunity, however, others suggest a viable space-tourism industry is still a decade or more away. "It will happen," he says, "but not in the time frame that will please tourism's advocates."

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