Spaceflight gets down to earth with everyman designs

Meanwhile, in the US, the Federal Aviation Administration is weighing two launch-license applications and is expecting a third soon for craft "that could be used" for the competition, according to spokesman Chuck Kline. "We've been working with a number of the contestants" to help them factor federal licensing requirements into their plans, he says.

X Prize Foundation President Peter Diamandis said in April he expects to see the first attempts within 12 months. When asked during a recent phone interview if any of the teams had given the foundation the required four month's confidential advanced notice of a launch, he pauses briefly, then replies: "I can't say."

By Jan. 1, 2005, a winning team will have to have launched twice within two weeks and carried three humans, or one human and enough ballast to equal two others. The people must land safely and the launch system's components must survive intact enough to allow the two-week turnaround. The goal is to reach an altitude of 62 miles - roughly the altitude Alan Shepherd reached during the first Mercury mission in 1961.

In the end, Mr. Diamandis says, the prize hopes to foster space tourism as part of a larger commercial market. The foundation is also looking to establish an annual competition similar to the venerable Oshkosh Air Show or the Formula 1 races, which spur developments in aircraft and automobiles. As that becomes a regular event, he says he hopes that TV revenues and income from corporate sponsors will allow the foundation to funnel more money into developing cheaper, more reliable reusable rockets for people and cargo.

John Hansman, an aerospace engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is cautious about commercial viability, however.

In student design competitions aimed at meeting the X Prize's objectives, he notes that while students come up with intriguing designs for spacecraft, their business plans look less promising.

"There is a question about whether the mission" of up-and-down suborbital flight "is sufficiently thrilling" to generate much of a tourism market, compared with a less-risky trip in planes that fly parabolic patterns so that passengers can experience weightlessness, he says.

In one sense, the X Prize's latest board of trustees member, Dennis Tito, already has lifted the space-tourism bar high above suborbital space. In 2001, Mr. Tito became the first "space tourist," with his $20 million ticket to ride a Russian Soyuz spacecraft up to the International Space Station.

"It will be hard for anyone interested in space tourism to match his trip," Dr. Hansman says.

Still, he tips his hat to competitors. "It's very hard to do what they are trying to do without a NASA-like level of investment," he says, adding that it keeps the goal of broader access to space on the public agenda.

Indeed, the prize's founders see it as only a first step toward making orbital flight a reality for the public. Noting that it took time for technology to evolve from that used by Charles Lindbergh during his transatlantic solo flight - itself a competition entry - to the venerable DC-3, the da Vinci Project's Freeney says, "I suspect you'll see us move up the scale" from suborbital to orbital flights in 10 to 15 years.

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