The Starship Enterprise
FYI,
"The Starship Enterprise"
London Times Magazine
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1517581,00.html
: Space travel has long been the dream of millions, and the reality
: of a privileged few. But before 2010, six passengers will make the
: first commercial trip beyond the Earth's atmosphere — and they'll
: be travelling in 'the most ingenious aircraft ever designed', says
: Bryan Appleyard.
: This is Elbert L "Burt" Rutan, the hero of this story. He has long
: sideburns and eyes filled with a wild surmise. Your children and
: grandchildren may well be taught about him at school.
: And it was out here, at Mojave airport, a civilian testing site
: right next to Edwards, that, on April 18, 2003, Elbert L Rutan
: unveiled SpaceShipOne, probably the most ingenious aircraft ever
: designed, and White Knight, its airborne launcher, certainly the
: most beautiful.
: "Why this shape?" I ask Burt as we stand in a hangar contemplating
: the White Knight. Why not?" he replies.
: We fall silent for a few moments.
: "It's your masterpiece, Burt."
: "I know."
: He's not so keen on the aesthetics of SpaceShipOne, but he's
: positively aroused by its successor, a larger version, now at the
: design stage, which, under the brand name of Virgin Galactic, will
: carry about six paying passengers into space. Burt can't show me
: the drawings of the new ship, but you can tell he wants to.
: "It's a sexy-looking thing. It's something you look at and say,
: 'Wow! I want to fly that!' It's more than a coincidence that an
: aeroplane that looks good flies good too."
: Burt's sideburns are long and dandyish. They are there, I conclude,
: to absorb the excess Right Stuff that squirts daily from his ears.
: The first flight will be in about three years, if you believe
: Virgin, or "I'm not saying when," if you listen to Burt. It will
: carry — and this is very informed guesswork — William Shatner and
: Sigourney Weaver. Shatner is the favourite, as he will officially
: name the ship the VSS Enterprise. So both Captain Kirk of the
: Starship Enterprise and Ripley of Alien have signed up to pay
: $200,000 (just over £100,000) for the trip, but they don't yet know
: who will be on the first flight.
: Victoria Principal, the former Dallas star, has also signed up.
: Burt and Sir Richard Branson will be on board, as, I think, will
: Branson's dad, Ted. Bill Cullen, the 63-year-old chairman of
: Renault Ireland, might be there too; he's the only one of the
: 21,000 applicants for tickets who has paid the whole sum upfront
: and, boy, is he gagging to be there.
: "I certainly think it will be a spiritual experience," he babbles
: happily. "One great watershed for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey.
: That was something else. I saw that film 11 times.
: Nasa invested in the Space Shuttle, the ugliest and most pointless
: machine ever built. They told the US government it would be
: 10 times cheaper to put payloads in space with the shuttle than it
: had been with Apollo's Saturn V rocket. In fact, it turned out to
: be 10 times more expensive. They also estimated they would lose one
: shuttle every 100,000 missions. In fact, they've lost two in
: 113 missions. And yet still Nasa pours billions of dollars and tens
: of thousands of engineers into the doomed project of keeping this
: botched dump truck in space.
: "You can't fix it by throwing money at it," says Burt, "because you
: make something that's bad because it's too complex even more
: complex."
: On top of all that, Nasa, having become an insanely defensive
: bureaucracy, went out of its way to crush all opposition both
: within and without. Any rival trying to get into space more safely
: and cheaply was either absorbed or drained of cash and talent. With
: the collapsing Soviet Union all but dropping out of the space race,
: and China just clinging onto a precarious toehold, the whole
: extraterrestrial adventure seemed to be over. A sci-fi generation,
: now in their fifties and sixties, realised that their childhood
: dream of roaring rockets taking them up to wheeling orbital space
: stations and beyond was dead.
: Burt made sure that Nasa only heard about his project at the same
: time as everybody else — when he wheeled SpaceShipOne out on the
: tarmac at Mojave to be photographed by Aviation Week. He points out
: sadly that, but for Nasa, we'd be holidaying in orbital if not moon-
: based hotels already. He has no faith in George Bush's new decision
: to spend the next 20 years going back to the moon and then on to
: Mars, because it uses the same old dumb technology and keeps the
: government monopoly intact. But it doesn't matter, because Nasa
: won't survive the next 20 years. Burt thinks it is about to be
: wiped out by a sudden space explosion in the private sector. And so
: now, at 61, he expects to live long enough to see the first moon
: resorts.
: It all changed and, if Burt is right, Nasa's fate was sealed on
: June 21, 2004, when Mike Melvill flew SpaceShipOne up to 328,491ft
: and became the first civilian to fly out of the atmosphere, and the
: first private pilot to earn astronaut's wings. Burt, sadly, couldn't
: fly it; he had a heart attack in 1998 and now can't pass the
: medical to get his pilot's licence.
: Meanwhile, in London's Holland Park, Sir Richard Branson sits at
: the end of a huge table grinning and nodding. The old hippie trader
: is 55 this year, which puts him bang in the middle of the
: generation that felt let down by space.
: "I felt as a teenager that space was exciting and I've marvelled at
: it ever since. We have a wonderful telescope in Africa and my
: father spends a lot of time reading about space. One of his
: favourite quotes is that there are more stars in space than grains
: of sand on the Earth."
: Branson's Virgin being what it is — a let-the-good-times-roll
: product of 1960s idealistic hedonism, born as the lovely white
: Saturn Vs were blasting moonwards — it always seemed logical that
: it should be the first private-sector operator in space. In an act
: of wishful thinking, the name Virgin Galactic was registered as
: long ago as 1999. Burt was pondering space back then but nobody
: knew what he was pondering. Branson had been looking for a
: promising space project and had been taking an interest in a scheme
: called Rotary Rocket, also based in Mojave. He was later to ask
: Burt why all these space projects came out of Mojave. "Because,"
: replied Burt, "there's nothing else to do."
: In 2002, Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, a title so
: gratuitously cosmic that it seems to embarrass him, and Alex Tai, a
: Virgin pilot, were at Mojave discussing the Global Flyer when Burt
: suddenly showed them SpaceShipOne. He has, I noticed, this habit of
: insisting that he won't talk about future projects and then,
: suddenly, talking about them. Whitehorn and Tai were bowled
: over. "It was," says Whitehorn, "the most fantastic thing I had
: ever seen. It was like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It was
: something you couldn't see anywhere else here on Earth."
: Nevertheless, Whitehorn didn't think that Virgin could get
: involved. Branson, however, did. He usually does. His financial
: people know him as "Dr Yes (to Anything)", and space flight was a
: definite yes. The strange partnership of Branson and Rutan was
: coming together.
: But SpaceShipOne was the property of Paul Allen.
: It was Allen who had backed Burt's space project. But his intention
: had been just to win the X Prize. SpaceShipOne would then have been
: retired to the Smithsonian and that would have been that. In 2001,
: when the project got under way, it was a big gamble. There were
: lots of private space projects around, any one of which could have
: been successful. Now, the only other one everybody still talks
: about is Blue Origin, a scheme funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
: Based in Texas, this seems to be pursuing the conventional ground-
: launched-rocket route.
: Burt had never liked the look of ground-launched rockets; they're
: too risky because a momentary loss of thrust can destroy everything,
: and too expensive because you have to lift a huge fuel load from
: ground level. It was much better to launch from the air. By 2000,
: he had all but one of the engineering answers to the questions
: posed by air-launched manned space flight. There was one (literally)
: burning question left: re-entry. Dropping back into the Earth's
: atmosphere from space generates enormously high temperatures as
: increasing numbers of air molecules crash into the speeding ship.
: Burt wanted something better and then, one day, he found it. Legend
: says he woke his wife, Tonya, in the middle of the night.
: "Awww," says Burt, "I don't remember. I do generally do things
: early in the morning. It's my most creative time."
: Either way, what Burt decided was that his bird must have a feather.
: At this point it becomes necessary to get technical, so here we
: are, back at Mojave, strolling out of Burt's madly cluttered office
: into a hangar. The first thing I see is Proteus, a lovely, high-
: altitude plane that has been used, among other things, to monitor
: pollution all over the world. The second thing I see is a project
: for the Department of Defense. I could tell you what it is, but if
: I did I'd then have to kill you, so I won't. The third thing I see
: is SpaceShipOne and I can't help myself. My mouth goes dry and my
: knees weaken. It's not lovely like White Knight: it's just so, so
: cool.
: Basically an ovoid blob with a point at one end and a hole at the
: other, it has portholes scattered, apparently randomly, over its
: front end, and a complex combination of wings and tail booms
: sprouting out of the other. Its hatch is open and there, behind an
: improbably thin skin of carbon fibre, is the black, spartan
: interior. This is what space flight was meant to be: none of that
: fancy Nasa clutter, just pure engineering Right Stuff. All of which
: would mean precisely nothing if you dropped it from 350,000ft. It
: would plummet earthwards and burn up.
: And so his answer to the re-entry problem was purely aerodynamic.
: All we have to do, he explained to his stunned engineers, is
: "feather" the control surfaces by bending the plane in half.
: The whole tail assembly hinges upwards at an angle of 70 degrees.
: This turns the craft into a kind of shuttlecock. On re-entry, its
: surface heats up, but for less than a minute, not long enough to
: affect the structure. But then it simply floats downwards until it
: gets to 50,000ft. The tail is then straightened and it glides in to
: land. There is no possibility of pilot error on re-entry. In fact,
: once the tail is "feathered", the pilot can, as Burt says, "sit back
: and eat his lunch". There's nothing he could do even if he wanted
: to. Aerodynamics takes care of everything. Even if the rocket never
: fires or it fails before it reaches its planned altitude, the craft
: can still be landed safely.
: "A rocket," says Burt, suddenly didactic, "is a bomb with a hole in
: one end."
: Burt's bomb is made of rubber and, er, that's all. On launch this
: tube is filled with rubber. On firing, tiny solid fuel igniters
: scorch the rubber for one second and nitrous oxide, laughing gas,
: is blown through. This oxidises the rubber, which heats up
: explosively and accelerates SpaceShipOne to nearly 3,000mph, enough
: to propel it into suborbital space. The orange cable is a fibre-
: optic line that detects any breach in the motor and shuts it down
: at once. Unlike normal rockets, this "hybrid" booster can be turned
: on and off, and it contains no seriously dangerous fuel. The rubber
: is just rubber and the worst thing that nitrous oxide can do is
: make you laugh uncontrollably. The longest burn of this motor so
: far has been 80 seconds, enough to win the X Prize. But it could
: burn for 125 seconds, which would take the blob up to 500,000ft,
: almost 100 miles. What is not known is whether the feather could get
: it down from that height.
: Back in Holland Park, Virgin also like to say that this engine is
: environmentally sound, producing a fraction of the greenhouse gases
: of a conventional rocket. I put this to Burt.
: "Well, I'm no tree hugger," he grimaces.
: All of which is fine in theory, but theory has always been a very
: bad way to fly. Aerodynamicists can put everything into a computer
: and produce a simulation that works perfectly, but there's always
: something missing, some oddity only revealed by making the thing
: and flying it. The normal way to track this down is wind-tunnel
: testing. But Burt, being Burt, doesn't do wind-tunnel testing. He
: relies on his own aerodynamic genius and, in the case of
: SpaceShipOne, the courage of Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, his
: test pilots.
: "Sally's always been pretty relaxed about my flying — but she just
: about came unglued over this one," he says. So, were you, er, scared
: flying SpaceShipOne? "Damn right I was. It's high-risk stuff, but I
: love taking risks, that's what I do." Pools of Right Stuff are
: forming around my feet like rainwater in the desert.
: Melvill had to learn to fly the plane in the few seconds after the
: drop. This wasn't easy, as it flew very badly. They later decided
: this was because the tail was too small and it was extended outwards
: by 2ft on either side. This improved things, but flying the ovoid
: remains a specialised art.
: He came to work for Burt in 1978 when the company was known as the
: Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF). This designed planes for people to
: build themselves. Melvill had built one of these and, with Sally,
: he flew from Indiana to Mojave. Burt gave him a job. Now, 27 years
: later, he is arguably the most famous pilot in the world, deluged
: with awards and speaking engagements. It's totally changed my life,"
: he says. "I give presentations all over the place."
: Along with Binnie, Melvill flew what may well come to be seen as
: the most influential mission of our time. They broke the state
: monopoly on space and reignited the popular flame that Nasa's
: clogged bureaucracy had all but extinguished. So now, having broken
: and relit, what next?
: Virgin Galactic not only has a president, it also has a head of
: astronaut liaison, one Stephen Attenborough. He'd been working in
: the City, but he turned 40 last year and he decided it was time to
: live a little and, in October, he sat down with Will Whitehorn and
: talked himself into taking "the best job in the world". His key
: skill was dealing with "high-net-worth" — ie, rich — people. These
: would be the only ones who could afford the trip. They were to be
: lured primarily by a website, www.virgingalactic.com, but, in
: reality, no luring was needed. They poured in. Registrations have
: now reached 21,000.
: "I doubt whether all of them are high-net-worth people," says
: Attenborough, "and my initial task was to differentiate between
: enthusiasts and genuine long-term clients. About 33% of applicants
: came from the US, 15% from the UK, South Africa, Australia, Canada,
: France and then a long tail from just about everywhere in the
: world."
: The initial goal is to fill the first 1,000 seats. Some may well be
: Volvo drivers. In the US, Volvo is offering a Virgin Galactic ticket
: as a prize to people who take test drives. And, though Burt may turn
: awkward about this, the first flight is scheduled for spring 2008.
: Initially there will be just one ship, but this will rise to five.
: Branson is very excited by the numbers involved.
: "Nasa has never been interested in sending humans into space," he
: says. "It's been a very closed, privileged shop. Only about
: 400 people have become astronauts in the last 50 years.
: We will make 1,000 astronauts in our first year." Alex Tai, Virgin's
: operational head of the programme, breaks in. "No, no, we start off
: with one flight a week through the first year — that's 250 people
: and that may come down to 200. As we see the safety and reliability
: and we're confident of it, then we'll scale up."
: Either way, the goal is to fly once a day and then the prices will
: start to come down.
: "Most people's grandchildren should be able to go into space," says
: Branson. "Millions will be able to afford it if we are right in our
: calculations. Taxi drivers will be able to go into space."
: Where they will fly from is still being discussed. Burt wants the
: spaceport to be in Mojave because, he says, the weather is stable,
: unlike, he adds pointedly, Florida. I suspect the truth is he wants
: to fly from Mojave because that's where spaceships belong. But
: almost every state in the union, and most of Australia, seems to be
: bidding for Virgin Galactic's business.
: The basic experience is this: White Knight's bigger successor will
: fly you up to 50,000ft. It will drop you, and the rubber will fire.
: You will experience high acceleration forces and, as the engine
: cuts out, the sky will go dark. As the ship reaches the top of its
: trajectory, you will experience five minutes of weightlessness and
: then, as it re-enters, you will feel high deceleration forces. Then
: you will glide back to base. The whole thing will last between two
: and three hours, and the time spent in space will be about
: 20 minutes.
: Virgin is working on gilding this lily. A three-day or one-week
: spaceport experience will be offered with high G-force and
: weightless training in small jets. On board you will lie in a flat
: bed that moulds to your body shape and you will have a personal
: console that can video everything. In the weightless phase, your
: straps will automatically unfasten and you can float around the
: cabin. A cable will then pull you back on to your bed and you will
: be automatically strapped back down. And so on. Is it enough? Those
: 21,000 seem to think so, but will they still think so after the
: first thrill wears off?
: The question is vital for Virgin, which is investing $120m, but
: even more so for Burt. For the company is committed, if the flights
: are a commercial success, to investing in the next phase
: — commercial orbital flights. At this point things start to get
: tricky, even for Burt. To achieve orbit you need to be moving not
: at 3,000 mph but at over 17,000 mph. You need 350 times the energy
: involved in SpaceShipOne. And the feather won't work for re-entry
: from orbit — though, in fact, Burt seems to be thinking about a
: re-entry system that would include the feather in its second phase.
: He says mysteriously that he's solved one of the problems in his
: head, but he doesn't say which one. If he had solved all the
: problems, he says, he wouldn't be bothering with this suborbital
: programme, he would be going straight for the big one.
: If orbital flight comes off and your grandchildren are holidaying
: in orbit or on the moon, they will have first heard about Burt in
: school. If not, he'll be a footnote, though a big one. Either way,
: he's still the hero of this story. So what is it with Burt?
: Well, there are two Burts, both of them obsessives. The first is
: the wide-eyed boy who used to build model aeroplanes and experiment
: with their aerodynamics. This was the Burt that took me round the
: hangars and stared in wonder at White Knight. The second is the
: Burt with whom I had lunch — in his case, navy-bean soup and beef
: tacos — at the Voyager restaurant at Mojave airport. This is a
: colder, harder Burt, caustically analytical of the failings of Nasa
: and fiercely dismissive of governments' abilities.
: "They should have gone into a smoke-filled room before the Shuttle
: flew and admitted to themselves that they'd f***ed up."
: He looks on the era of paralysis caused by the Space Shuttle with
: dismay and contempt, and he believes that now the state monopoly
: has been broken, the real golden era of space is about to begin.
: "In 1908, Wilbur Wright flew his aeroplane near Paris and the whole
: world started to look at it differently. They thought: if this guy
: who owns a bicycle shop in Dayton can do it, so can we. Within four
: years there were hundreds of different types of planes in
: 39 different countries. There were two factories in Paris that
: built 500 planes! All from nothing in four years!"
: Something like that four-year phase may be about to begin in space
: and that would make Burt the Wilbur Wright of rocketry.
: Since the heart attack, he says he's slowed down, started playing
: golf and "eating right". Inside his chest there's a pacemaker and a
: stent (a tube inserted into an artery). He's on borrowed time.
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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