Odyssey October 2002: President's Message

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Editor: Kris Cerone

President's Message

By Steve Bartlett

A running gag in the popular comic strip Dilbert has one of the characters, Dogbert, scheming to separate fools from their money by any means available. His latest approach offers the hapless well-to-do the opportunity to throw their cash down his "rat hole" instead of wasting it in their own half-baked plans.

In a recent edition, a balding man with a large bag of cash (who looks suspiciously like Dennis Tito) can't decide whether to throw his $25 million down the the rat hole or to spend it to ride a Russian rocket into space. Dogbert asks the man "What about the poor?" and the the man replies, "Do they have rockets?!?!"

While the strip is funny, it also raises some important questions about space tourism in its current form. The present version of space tourism has a very small number of individuals (i.e., Tito, South African Mark Shuttleworth, and recent contenders Lance Bass and Lori Garver) spending upwards of $25 million for a ride aboard a Soyuz ferry craft and a week's stay aboard the International Space Station.

These are essentially "one-shot" flights on expendable launchers. The money goes to the cash-strapped Russian space industry, mostly to pay the workforce there. Once the money is spent, it's gone with little tangible to show for it. It doesn't continue to accrue benefits for the people involved or much of anyone else in the long run. In that form, there probably aren't enough wealthy people around the globe to make that a viable business for any period of time.

One has to wonder what might happen if the Tito's, Shuttleworth's, Bass's, Garver's and others who could pull together good-sized cash outlays pooled their monies and built a well-financed space tourism company. It's raisson d'etre would be to develop and fly a fleet of reusable orbital or suborbital launchers. Such a business could dramatically reduce the cost of tourist flights while creating a large demand for them. It would provide a continual stream of funds for those running it, new technology and operational schemes for such a craft, and develop a new set of potential markets outside the current aerospace sector.

Some might argue that a version of this has already been attempted and failed: Andrew Beal spent many millions of his own money to develop the Beal Aerospace line of launchers. The company developed facilities and successfully tested large-scale propellant tanks and engines for their first flight, only to give up before finishing the job.

But Beal may have failed because he had his eyes set on the wrong market sector, one for which he did not have adequate financing. Beal sought to corner the market on launching large communications satellites for geostationary orbit. Such a market requires very large launchers, large launch and manufacturing facilities, large amounts of propellants and other fluids, large investments in launch insurance, and other sizable expenditures.

I would suggest that had Beal looked to launch smaller rockets, say of the Delta II class, he might have put satellites in orbit much sooner and for a much smaller cash outlay. At the same time, he would have put in place much of the infrastructure he would later need as his capability grew to accommodate larger and larger payloads. Similarly, if a space tourism company started with smaller, more modest goals and payloads, it might succeed with far less funding and in a fairly short period of time.

So instead of sending their money down the current space tourism "rat hole" the present crop of space tourists/entrepreneurs could become the next Boeing's or Lockheed-Martin's of the space industry.