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Virgin Galactic (and others) hope to launch the age of space tourism

Since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to slip Earth's surly bonds in 1961, fewer than 500 people have followed (space) suit. They have been astronauts and cosmonauts, by and large, who spent years in rigorous training for their missions.

Graphic: Space chase (PDF) Space chase A number of well-funded entrepreneurs hope to find business and profits in space. Among the leaders is Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which recently unveiled one of its spacecraft and its proposed tourist service. 1. The twin-fuselaged mother ship, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo, takes off like a normal aircraft. Slung beneath its single wing between the fuselages is SpaceShipTwo, carrying two pilots and six passengers. 2. At approximately 50,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo is released, its hybrid rocket motor igniting for 90 seconds, propelling the craft upward at more than 2,600 miles per hour. 3. At 328,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo crosses the Karman line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space. Passengers officially become astronauts. 4. At 361,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo reaches apogee, the highest point of its flight. Passengers experience approximately 4 minutes of weightlessness; pilots “feather” SpaceShipTwo's rotatable wings into the upright position for descent. 5. With wings feathered upright to increase aerodynamic drag, SpaceShipTwo begins its circling descent. Re-entry is slow and gentle enough that atmospheric friction does not necessitate safety measures like heat-resistant tiles on the craft's underside. 6. At 70,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo's wings are returned to original position for an unpowered glide back to the spaceport and a traditional landing.

On two occasions, they have been businessmen who have simply spent money.

Being able to say you've been to space places you in fairly rarefied company. But maybe not for much longer. If all goes as planned (a big “if”), English business magnate Richard Branson and American aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan hope soon to begin sending hundreds, then thousands, of paying customers into space each year. Or at least the edge of space, a point that officially begins 62 miles straight up.

The first suborbital flights are tentatively slated for 2010.

“If our new system could carry only people into space, that would be enough for me,” said Branson recently, “because of the transforming effect it will have on the thousands who will travel with us.”

Of course, the notion of ordinarily earthbound folk jetting and junketing through the void is not new. Remember the Pan Am “space clipper” in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”? That was fiction. (Fact: Pan Am went out of business in 1991.)

But Branson, who oversees a multibillion-dollar conglomerate of airlines, media, transportation and other ventures, and Rutan, who designed the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, believe their joint endeavor – Virgin Galactic – is grounded in reality, but only in the metaphorical sense.

Said Branson, “2008 really will be the year of the spaceship.”

They took a major step toward proving it in July when Virgin Galactic introduced a key element of its future operations at the Mojave Air and Space Port, 95 miles north of Los Angeles. There, amid high-flying rhetoric and champagne fizz, Branson and Rutan debuted VirginMotherShip Eve (VMS Eve), a sort of aerial catamaran and the first half of their proposed ticket toward the stars.

Rather than launch passengers directly into space aboard an upright rocket, Virgin Galactic plans to employ two stages based on a concept successfully tested four years earlier with smaller prototypes developed by Rutan's company, Scaled Composites.

The first stage is VMS Eve, named after Branson's mother, a former air hostess. VMS Eve consists of four Pratt and Whitney PW308 turbo fan engines (up to 8,000 pounds thrust each) on two fuselages, the latter attached to a single 140-foot-long wing, which is about the same wingspan as a B-29 Superfortress bomber from World War II.

Graphic: VirginMotherShip Eve is a sort of aerial catamaran designed to lift a spacecraft to 50,000 feet. Virgin Galactic photos

Slung beneath the wing and between the fuselages will hang the second stage of the operation: SpaceShipTwo, or SS2, the craft that will actually carry six passengers and two pilots into space.

SpaceShipTwo, only 70 percent complete, was also at the Mojave ceremony but was kept under wraps. Rutan predicts it will be finished and ready for testing early next year. In its final form, SS2 will be about 60 feet long, about the size of a Gulfstream business jet, with distinctive rotatable wings. But it will be more rocket than jet.

Flight plan

In the Virgin Galactic scheme of things, space-bound passengers will board SpaceShipTwo and hitch a ride under the wing of VMS Eve to an approximate altitude of 50,000 feet, more than nine miles up, the upper edge of the troposphere, where the average temperature is minus-58 degrees Fahrenheit and atmospheric pressure is roughly one-quarter of what it is at sea level.

At this point, SpaceShipTwo will be released. Its hybrid rocket motor (running on a mixture of rubber and nitrous oxide) will ignite for 70 seconds, hurtling the craft at more than 2,600 miles per hour to a height approximately 68 miles above the Earth's surface. (Or about the distance between San Diego and Laguna Beach.)

Virgin Galactic British billionaire Richard Branson (left) has partnered with American aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan in an ambitious space-tourism enterprise.

With engine off, SS2 will sail through the apex of its parabolic arc. During the next four minutes, passengers will experience zero g's, weightlessness. SS2 is constructed to emphasize the moment: Its cabin will be fully pressurized to eliminate the need for bulky spacesuits. Seats will recline flat to provide maximum room for floating. Large double-paned windows encircle the cabin, offering 1,000-mile views of blue below and black above.

And the floor will be padded, just in case passengers don't get back to their seats before gravity reasserts itself. (They'll get about 40 seconds' warning.)

It is the return to Earth, however, that may be the most innovative part of the trip. With wings locked in their upright position, SS2 is far from streamlined, creating atmospheric drag and the so-called “shuttlecock effect.” The result: The rocket ship circles downward to Earth, like a feather fluttering to the ground.

By doing so, SS2 will avoid the fiery re-entry speeds that necessitate protective devices such as the heat-resistant tiles of the space shuttle, which begins its return to Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.

At 70,000 feet in the descent, the wings of SS2 rotate, flattening out to allow the craft to glide back to the spaceport.

Total trip time: Approximately two hours.

Pressing concerns

To be sure, space-tripping won't be as simple as catching a commuter flight to L.A. For one thing, there's the issue of gravitational acceleration. Virgin Galactic officials estimate that SpaceShipTwo's power ride will generate a maximum of 3.8 g's of force, head to toe. During portions of the descent, maximum g forces may reach 6, front to back.

Virgin Galactic VirginMotherShip Eve is a sort of aerial catamaran designed to lift a spacecraft to 50,000 feet.

In scientific terms, 1 g is equal to the normal acceleration rate that the Earth's gravity produces on any falling object, about 32.17 feet per second per second. The effect of acceleration upon humans varies. Some people naturally absorb increasing g's better than others, though it's possible to be trained to endure more.

At 2 g's, a person's body feels heavier. The face droops. There's pressure on soft tissues.

At 3 to 4 g's, it's impossible to stand up and difficult to move one's limbs. Vision diminishes.

At more than 4 g's, a person is likely pass out after 5 seconds without training and precautions.

Virgin Galactic officials say g forces won't be a big factor for passengers. Pilots will try to minimize the effects of accelerating speeds whenever possible. And SS2's fully reclining seats are designed to distribute gravitational forces broadly across the body to reduce their effect.

Still, it won't be possible simply to buy a rocket ticket at your local spaceport counter. For one thing, there aren't many spaceports, at least not yet. Since 1996, the Federal Aviation Administration's office for commercial space transportation has licensed five spaceports in the United States: The California Spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Spaceport Florida at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the Virginia Space Flight Center at Wallops Island, Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska, and, most recently, Mojave.

Virgin Galactic, however, plans to operate its main hub out of a new spaceport 45 miles northeast of Las Cruces, N.M. It says it also will operate a spaceport near Kiruna, northern Sweden, home of the world's first ice hotel.

The groundswell for spaceports is building elsewhere, too, with talk of future facilities in places such as Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, Scotland, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Finding a spaceport is just the first part of the trip. To fly Virgin Galactic, paying customers will have to undergo a three-day orientation and testing process.

Day 1: Basic orientation and medical tests, including a CAT scan and a possible ride in a centrifuge.

Day 2: An introductory test flight aboard WhiteKnightTwo, whose two fuselages exactly mimic the interior of SpaceShipTwo.

Day 3: Space flight.

Even if the body is willing, the wallet might balk. The price for Virgin Galactic's two-hour cruise is $200,000, which works out to $1,666 per minute, or $27.77 per second.

That's still a deal compared with the $20 million paid by Dennis Tito in 2001 and Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 to catch a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz craft ferrying astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. More than 100 people have reportedly placed reservations with Virgin Galactic and paid in full. At least 175 more have put down deposits of $20,000 or more.

Competing ventures

Virgin Galactic may be the first out of the launch site, but it probably won't have space to itself for very long. A study commissioned by the Personal Spaceflight Federation, a space business advocacy group, estimates more than $1.2 billion has been invested in personal space ventures. Much of that has come from starry-eyed investors like Branson, who has reportedly sunk at least $100 million into the idea.

(Branson can afford it. His estimated net worth, according to Forbes' 2008 list of billionaires, is $4.4 billion, making him the 236th richest person on the planet.)

But numerous other wealthy would-be space entrepreneurs are nipping at Branson's heels. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos last year tested a prototype for a personal space-travel vehicle at his ranch in West Texas. PayPal co-founder Elon Musk has a $281 million contract from NASA to develop a cargo service for the International Space Station. He's also working on his own spaceship. Jim Benson, the founder of CompuSearch, is promoting a space taxi concept. John Carmack, the co-creator of the Doom and Quake games, is experimenting with a new generation of space liners and moon vehicles.

Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America, figures to be waiting for the others to arrive: He's exploring the feasibility of orbiting inflatable hotels.

“Space is a potentially huge market,” said John Gedmark, executive director of the Personal Spaceflight Federation. “Besides tourism, there will be markets for carrying commercial loads into space, transporting scientists, testing military technologies.”

Gedmark predicts that once companies have established viable space businesses, costs will go down as more vehicles and services go up.

“The goal is to get the cost of spaceflight within reach of the average citizen, maybe in the tens of thousands of dollars,” he said.

Such a price may still be astronomical for most people, but for those who can afford it, the ride will likely be worth the weightlessness.

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