While Sen. Bill Nelson pushes his "compromise" plan for space exploration, private entrepreneurs are moving ahead with ventures that threaten to leave Florida and NASA eating stardust.
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic completed its inaugural crewed flight this month, lifting off from the Mojave Spaceport in the California desert.
Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic airlines, has collected $45 million in deposits from 350 customers eager to tour the edge of space at speeds exceeding Mach 3. Branson expects his spacecraft will be up and running by 2012.
Most significantly, Branson and co-developer Burt Rutan have embarked on their venture by keeping their distance from NASA.
According to the corporate flight plan, Branson's SpaceShipTwo will be carried by the mothership to an altitude of up to 50,000 feet, then released before its rocket engine ignites for a high-speed ascent into space, where passengers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness.
The mothership, a four-engine jet dubbed WhiteKnightTwo, carries the spaceship on the center of its wing between two fuselages.
The aircraft has made 33 flights and its testing is "substantially complete," said Stephen Attenborough, an executive with the London-based Virgin Galactic.
Unlike some private space concerns that hope to leverage their efforts with government funds, Virgin is going its own way. The independent bent is reinforced by the latest politicking on Capitol Hill, where Nelson, D-Fla., offered amendments to the Obama administration's space legislation.
The Nelson plan would accelerate development of a NASA heavy-lift rocket by pulling $13.8 billion from research and development, including commercial crew funding.
That shift concerns Space Florida President and CEO Frank DiBello, who complained that it would "be paid for by ... technology development and the commercial crew venture, for which the Kennedy Space Center was to be the manager.
"A delay in the commercial crew component places onerous restrictions" on future NASA launch initiatives, DiBello added.
In a July 21 article titled, "How Obama Let Down Mr. Spock," Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins wrote, "Since we last checked in, the industry has placed a big bet on Mr. Obama and a modern-day reprise of the Air Mail Act of 1925, which helped loft the early airline industry.
"As with so many business hopes for President Obama, that bet is now coming up snake eyes. Sen. Nelson is in control, and Job One is preserving in amber the existing pattern of NASA employment, regardless of whether anything productive is achieved."
So, increasingly, private ventures are looking to build their own future, free from the vagaries of politics. But there are limits.
"Many of the New Space companies have made it thus far by consuming the fortunes of celebrity entrepreneurs like Pay Pal co-founder Elon Musk (SpaceX), Amazon's Jeff Bezos and game designer John Carmack," Jenkins states.
"That can't go on forever."
But Branson, with his ship's successful 6-hour and 12-minute flight earlier this month, is determined to send private space flight to the new frontier without government strings attached.
Another space cowboy, Jeff Greason, CEO of rocket maker XCOR, knows the headwinds his industry is facing. Persistent rumblings about safety continue to dog private ventures, as if to say that only a government-sponsored agency can be entrusted to do the job right.
"I can't state strongly enough that at the present time the industry faces irresistible pressure to strive for the safest possible operation that's economically achievable," Greason testified at a House hearing last year.
Can this business model fly?
"Unless these voices start to be heard, two things are certain: Taxpayers will shell out a lot of money that will end up wasted when the next NASA funding crisis (hits). The other certainty is that the space entrepreneurs had better start scrambling for fresh capital and private customers if they want to keep their dream alive," Jenkins advises.
For its part, Space Florida says it is open for business. The agency recently landed the rights to operate Space Launch Complex 46 for commercial liftoffs at Cape Canaveral.
DiBello said Space Florida will aggressively pursue private ventures, and aims to conduct launches within a year of a signed contract.
As Jenkins observes: "Even some in Mr. Nelson's home state of Florida have begun to doubt the senator's priorities, suspecting they have more to gain from a thriving private market in affordable space travel than from another NASA budgetary blowout that leaves nothing sustainable in its wake."
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Contact KenricWard at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 559-4719.
