Private space industry looks for liftoff

If the historic flight of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne this week represented a giant leap for everyman's access to space, the next big milestone already looms on the horizon.

Falcon 1, an unmanned rocket built by a small company in El Segundo, Calif., is set later this year to carry an experimental satellite to orbit for the Defense Department - a historic vote of confidence in a privately financed rocket that hasn't even flown yet.

Like SpaceShipOne, the Falcon was developed using money from private investors and nary a federal dollar. If it's successful, the rocket would prove that it's possible to dramatically cut the cost of lifting objects into orbit - a cost that many say is the single largest economic barrier to building factories and labs in orbit, colonizing the moon, or sending humans to explore the solar system.

Together, SpaceShipOne and Falcon 1 make clear that space is no longer the exclusive domain of NASA or big-buck aerospace firms. These and other upstarts, in fact, may figure prominently in the future expansion of America's space industry, especially if the Bush administration proceeds with plans for private companies to play a significant role in its mission to send humans to the moon and, perhaps, to Mars.

The upstarts - many headed by visionary entrepreneurs who have left the Internet boom for the allure of space - are bringing fresh ideas. From inflatable hotels, labs, and office space in orbit to "space tugs" that can extend the operating life of critical communications satellites, these newcomers are "bending metal" on projects they hope will help turn private investment into a powerful engine for space exploration and development.

"I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration," says Elon Musk, who founded and heads Space Exploration Technologies, the company that developed Falcon 1 and is building a more powerful sibling.

Many of these companies are children of the Internet and computer booms of the 1990s. Part entrepreneurs and part visionaries, former high-tech executives who sold their businesses and looked for new challenges have found them in spaceflight. Mr. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen (who underwrote Mr. Rutan's effort) all made fortunes working for or owning computer or Internet companies and are sinking that money into space projects.

These entrepreneurs represent latter-day Carnegies, who are pouring money into ventures less for immediate gain than because they feel the work needs to be done, says George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society, a space- development advocacy group in Washington.

In other cases, executives start companies after methodically looking for a potentially profitable market no one else is tapping.

Orbital Recovery Corp., for example, is building space tugs that would dock with expensive communications satellites and provide the fuel, electricity, and guidance systems to keep them operating far longer than their original onboard support systems would have allowed.

"This is simply a business," says Philip Braden, who heads the British firm. "The fact that it's a space business makes it sound exotic. But we look at it as a lucrative opportunity."

For all its Wild West appearance, the alternative aerospace industry has some economic targets to shoot for, according to a pair of reports from the US Commerce Department's Office of Space Commercialization.

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