But others were willing to put their doubts aside. Among them was Richard Branson, who in early 2002 dispatched Will Whitehorn to Mojave to meet with Rutan on unrelated business. Branson was helping fund a Rutan aircraft called the GlobalFlyer, which was intended to beat the Voyager's round-the-world time. Whitehorn, a Virgin senior executive, was getting a tour of Scaled's facilities when he glimpsed a bus-size, bulbous, and altogether strange-looking aircraft. "I asked Burt what it was, and he said, 'It's a spaceship," Whitehorn recalls. Flabbergasted, Whitehorn told Rutan that Branson had long been looking to fund a venture that could produce a rocket capable of carrying a handful of people at a time into space. Branson had even registered the company name, Virgin Galactic, back in 1995. Rutan said he wasn't at liberty to talk -- both he and Allen were obsessively secretive about the project -- but promised to tell Whitehorn more when he could.
In April 2003, Rutan went public with his plans and started flight-testing the White Knight, the big, spindly aircraft that would carry SpaceShipOne under its belly to 46,000 feet and loose it. Six months later, SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier in its first manned flight, something no private aircraft had ever done. In May 2004, the vehicle reached an altitude of 212,000 feet, nearly two-thirds of the way to space. A month after that, SpaceShipOne officially became a spacecraft, just cracking the 62-mile mark, and making its pilot, Scaled general manager Mike Melvill, the world's first civilian astronaut. Finally, on September 29 and October 4, SpaceShipOne reached space twice more, and Mojave Aerospace Ventures captured the X-Prize. Rutan wasn't just running a private manned space program. He was running a private manned space program that was taking in money.
The notoriously secretive Paul Allen had revealed himself as SpaceShipOne's backer after the December 2003 test flight. A team of Virgin executives scrambled to Seattle to meet with him and open negotiations over a spaceliner successor to the spacecraft. They eventually struck a deal that has Virgin paying up to $21.5 million over 15 years for vehicles and technology to Mojave Aerospace. And that's just the beginning. "We're prepared to invest another $100 million to develop this business," says Whitehorn, a director of Virgin Galactic. The first five-passenger flights are planned for 2008, and Virgin Galactic has set ticket prices at $210,000. It's a hefty fee, but Whitehorn says more than 7,000 would-be astronauts have added their names to a waiting list on Virgin Galactic's website. "I just appointed our head of astronaut relations to arrange for them to make deposits," says Whitehorn.
Is there really a market for the sort of spaceline that Virgin is conjuring? Space-travel boosters love to quote surveys showing that the great majority of Americans say they'd want a ticket to space. But the numbers drop pretty fast when certain niceties are specified -- such as $100,000-and-up price tags, the likelihood of severe motion sickness, dizziness, and acceleration-induced unconsciousness, as well as an unknown but certainly less than trivial chance of being incinerated in a rocket explosion or errant atmospheric reentry.
SpaceShipOne itself suffered several such problems in its three space flights, including the loss of its navigation system, a sudden lurch that carried the ship some 30 miles off course, the buckling of the aircraft's skin from the rocket motor's heat, and an uncontrolled wobble that spun the craft around at high speed some 20 times before pilot Melvill -- he flew the first prize-winning flight, Binnie the second -- stilled it, possibly just in time to prevent a fatal tumble. Even when it's functioning properly, SpaceShipOne is racked by violent vibrations during the long minute or so when the rocket is firing. And reentry is worse. It seems like a lot to put up with to achieve a few minutes of weightlessness and a glimpse of space.
Mojave Aerospace quotes a study commissioned by Virgin indicating that there are 15,000 people in the United States alone who would shell out more than $100,000 for a ticket to space. Other studies have been less optimistic. Futron, a market research firm in Bethesda, Md., did a survey in 2002 that suggested only about 820 people worldwide would be willing to pay $100,000, once they understood the likely discomforts. The numbers dwindle as the price approaches $200,000. Longer term, assuming safety and comfort improves and ticket prices drop, Futron sees as many as 15,700 people flying to space annually, representing up to $786 million a year in revenue. MIT aerospace professor John Hansman, who enlisted a group of students to study the space-tourism business using a ship much like Rutan's, is skeptical of even Futron's scaled-back projections. "We looked at the business case and decided it wasn't sustainable," Hansman says. "This is a glorified amusement-park ride. There's a market for the first few people to get their astronaut wings. But I'm not sure how much someone would pay to be the 1,123rd person to get to 100 kilometers."
