SpaceShipTwo and the promise of commercial space travel

Five years ago, with the winning of the Ansari XPrize, hopes for commercial space travel seemed to soar as high as the space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, that had flown the series of sub orbital flights in the summer and autumn of 2004. Now, with the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, hope has taken another step toward reality.

SpaceShipTwo, which has been under development the past few years by Scaled Composites, will take two pilots and six paying passengers on sub orbital barn storming flights. For two hundred thousand dollars, anyone can experience micro gravity and witness the curvature of the Earth, experiences hitherto only reserved for astronauts flying on government space craft.

The first commercial flights past the one hundred kilometer mark will likely take place in 2011, after an extensive testing regime. As with SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo will be taken to a height of about fifty thousand feet by a mother ship, the White Knight Two, and then released as it fires its rocket engines.

Ironically those flights will be just fifty years after the first space flights by Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepherd. Why it will have taken so long for commercial space flight to begin will likely be argued about forever by historians. What is inarguable are the implications.

Addendum 12/08/2009: SpaceShipTwo was rolled out last night in a wind storm that cut the celebration short. However, the first true commercial spaceship was christened the VSS Enterprise, named after the famous TV star ship.
What is significant about SpaceShipTwo is not that it will allow rich people to take sub orbital joy rides. SpaceShipTwo is not, the hyper rhetoric on the Internet notwithstanding, the “space ship for the rest of us.” The ticket price will likely remain out of reach for most people.

The significance of SpaceShipTwo is that it is a step forward toward the day that ordinary people can buy a ticket and fly to the final frontier. History has always shown that one of the useful roles of the well heeled is the ability to try out new things when they are still expensive and rare, in this case space travel for fun. As private space travel becomes more common, the costs come down, and it in turn becomes more available for more people.

And one can already envision future space ships, which can fly all the way to low Earth orbit, perhaps to visit orbiting space hotels. Beyond low Earth orbit lays the Moon, then the planets, then the rest of the universe.

What can be done for fun can also be done for business. Ideas for using sub orbital space craft for research are already being discussed. NASA, which had hitherto been cool to the idea of commercial space travel, has partnered with private business to build commercial space craft under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program. Even NASA sees the promise of affordable space travel, freeing it up for the cutting edge of exploration.