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The Lure of the X-Prize
by Russell Still
as printed in AutoPILOT Magazine, September 2003

It is a rare night when I see the moon without making a mental comment to myself. It's always the same one. "People have actually been there." I must have pondered this hundreds of times by now, yet I am still amazed that humans could do such an audacious thing. Apollo 11 launched from the Kennedy Space Center exactly thirty-four years ago to the day, as I write this. And in four more days, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the first human landing on an extraterrestrial world will be celebrated. But that, it seems, is just the beginning of the story.

In 1996, a man named Peter Diamandis publicly announced a new competition. It had occurred to him that Charles Lindbergh was competing for a prize when he made the famous flight across the Atlantic. Perhaps Lindy would have done it anyway. Certainly someone would have. But the challenge of competition must have fueled the endeavor. The goal of Diamandis's competition was to incite people and companies to take the next step in powered flight - to develop and demonstrate new methods of transporting human passengers off the earth and into space. Not astronauts or space scientists - passengers. Anyone who could afford the ticket. Diamandis called his competition the X-Prize. The winner would take home $10 million. Since then, over twenty organizations have signed on.

The requirements for capturing the X-Prize are a bit more complicated than simply lofting a human being into space and getting him safely back down. The privately funded vehicle must reach a minimum altitude of 100 kilometers - 62 miles - carrying from one to three passengers, and reenter the atmosphere and land safely. How the contraption gets there and how it gets back is pretty much up to the imaginations of the competitors. But then comes the hard part: they must duplicate the feat with the same craft within two weeks. The key design factor thus becomes repeatability.

One of the really interesting things about the X-Prize competition is that the contestants are doing basic research. Many will spend much more than $10 million in development costs. And the methods used to achieve the goal need not have any commercial feasibility at all. Ultimately, the winning organization may never even become a commercially viable carrier. They are doing it because it is what's next.

"The X-Prize is going to prove the concept. It's not about identifying the next PanAm," says Rick Searfoss, the X-Prize's chief judge. "I think it will free up a lot of new venture capital. People who weren't sure about the concept before will realize that there is a new marketplace to be exploited."

Searfoss, an Air Force Academy engineering graduate, ex-fighter pilot, and veteran Space Shuttle commander is well qualified for his new role. He knows aerospace engineering and big project management inside and out. Rick believes there are a lot of small start-up companies eyeing the new market for commercial spaceflight.

"They've just about reached a critical mass. They are the innovators, the little guys. It isn't going to be the Boeings or the Lockheed-Martins that go out on a limb with something like this."

And so the X-Prize is really about innovation. About the human quality called imagination and the human instinct to succeed. The X-Prize competitors have created a virtual circus of wildly creative ideas.

From Bath, Michigan, Acceleration Engineering is developing a methane/liquid oxygen rocket called Lucky Seven. Their sleek metallic vehicle looks like something envisioned in the 1940s. The 29 foot rocket will climb under power to an altitude of thirty-two miles, they hope, and ballistically coast the remaining thirty miles. Lucky Seven will return to Earth under the shrouds of a parafoil. I use "they" in the figurative sense. Acceleration Engineering is made up of one person, Micky Badgero. He is building the vehicle in his garage.

Advent Launch Services, based in Houston, has come up with a really unusual concept. Their vehicle launches from under water. The idea is the brainchild of James Akkerman, a former, but longtime, engineer with NASA. The engine creates a gas bubble and the spacecraft climbs out, cloaked in it. After arcing above the sixty-two mile mark, it flies back as a winged glider, landing safely on the water from whence it departed. A team from Virginia has designed their entry around a customized Sabre-40 business jet. Modified with an attitude control system and three rocket engines, the hybrid will reach a top speed of mach 2.97 before coasting over the top. After 80 seconds of return freefall, the vehicle will transition to atmospheric flight and a normal jet approach to a runway landing.

By no means is the competition limited to U.S. concerns. The British company, Bristol Spaceplanes, has designed an extremely sophisticated aerospace plane. Powered by two FJ44 turbojet engines, it will depart from a runway like a conventional jet aircraft. After the air-breathing phase of the flight, a Pratt & Whitney RL 10 rocket is scheduled to take over and power the craft the rest of the way into space. Thirty minutes later, with mission completed, the pilot flies the craft back and lands on the same runway. An Israeli team has developed the idea of raising a small rocket into the stratosphere under a huge helium balloon. When the rocket is launched, it will already be a third of the way there. Some Canadians have opted for a 54-foot, two stage rocket, oddly reminiscent of the old German V-2 series. And herein lies one of the reasons judges are needed.

"Launching twice within two weeks is not good enough," Rick Searfoss notes. "They have to use the same vehicle and it must retain 90% of its original mass." The Canadians will have to not only reuse the second stage crew section. They will also have to reuse the original first stage booster. The Israelis will either have to reuse the balloon, or hope it amounts to less than 10% of the original mass.

Imagination aside, it is clear that some teams have a better chance at success than others. As Rick says, "There is a wide variation in the progress of the various teams. It's an open competition and we want to encourage people to try. That's what it's about. But, realistically, some teams have a good shot at it, and some don't have a snowball's chance in hell."

One of the most popular frontrunners has to be Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites. Most general aviation pilots will be familiar with his EZ series of homebuilt aircraft. Non-pilots may well remember the flight that his brother, Dick, made with co-pilot Jeana Yeager. The pair flew another of Burt's designs, the Voyager, non-stop around the globe in 1986.

Burt seems to have an eye for the weird. His aircraft are always recognized by their unusual shapes. The Scaled Composites entry is, thus, usual in being unusual. It consists of a carrier aircraft, very Rutanesque in appearance, called the White Knight. The crew of the twin-boomed jet flies in a central gondola, P-38 style. Numerous portholes surround the cockpit giving it the compound-eye appearance of mutated spider. Slung beneath is the spacecraft itself, dubbed simply SpaceShipOne.

The carrier jet and spacecraft are profiled to depart the Mojave runway in much the same fashion that the B-52s used to launch with their X-15 payloads some forty years ago. For sixty minutes, the pair climb away from the desert. At an altitude of fifty-two kilometers, White Knight releases SpaceShipOne and the tiny ship's proprietary engine ignites a mixture of non-toxic fuels. Following its brief journey above the 62 mile boundary, SpaceShipOne should glide back to a controlled landing on the parched runway.

For Burt Rutan, and probably most of the other X-Prize contestants, it's not about the money. Indeed, it has been estimated that Scaled Composites will spend upwards of $25 million in development costs. What it is about is being first. And Rutan makes no bones about that. He has publicly stated that he would like to make the flight before the Wright Brothers' anniversary. He probably was speaking for many when he said, "I strongly feel that, if we are successful, our program will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight."

In December of this year, the world will celebrate the centennial of powered human flight. Of that historic hundred-year period, we have been a space faring people for nearly half. It is simply astonishing to consider how much we humans have accomplished since the Wright Flyer first sailed into the North Carolina sky. The X-Prize may well invoke our first glimpse into the next historic century. It will be a time when the lines between aviation and spaceflight become blurred, one merely an extension of the other.