SpaceShipOne

The supersonic passenger aircraft, Concorde, flew its last scheduled commercial flight on 24 October 2003. The next day The Times featured a report by Giles Whittell which described a new spacecraft called SpaceShipOne:

Concorde dies, and with her a little of the test pilot in all of us. We don’t fly supersonic any more except to drop bombs. We don’t go to the Moon anymore except by robot. We don’t visit the Mariana Trench beeause we can’t be bothered. We won’t use the Shuttle for much longer because we’re too scared and not sure what it was for in the first place. The age when nations launched great technological schemes that were defiant but still admirable has ended. The age of zombies is upon us, and we are the zombies.

All of us? Not quite. In a corner of the United States, a group of men in flying suits and baseball caps is on the verge of doing something only military‑industrial superpowers once did. The men plan to go into space, any day now, in a three‑person rocketplane built entirely and not a little mysteriously with private funds. Powered by rubber and laughing gas, the rocket will scream up to a place 12 times higher than Everest, where the sky is black and Earth is like a big blue ball, then float back down like a shuttlecock.

I have seen a test flight, and it works. We were in a supermarket car park a few weeks ago in the Mojave desert, 100 miles (160km) north of Los Angeles. Nearby, in one of the world’s largest airliner storage depots, dozens of jumbos were waiting patiently for a global economic upturn, their windows whited out. But it was not one of these that appeared suddenly over the flat horizon of the supermarket’s roof. It was something alarming and jurassic: a mutant pterodactyl with two tails, papery wings and portholes covering its snout. It gave out an alien rasp and seemed to climb as fast as a kite in a gale without ever actually pointing skyward. It kept climbing, spiralling above the desert until it disappeared into a do. Before it did I grabbed my toddlers in turn and made them look. They seemed irritated, but some day they will thank me.

They will do so even though I am exaggerating what we saw. It was not the rocketplane, it was the mother ship. The spacecraft, being built largely in secret by Burt Rutan, America’s most remarkable aerospace designer, is dropped from a mother ship at 50,000ft (15,200m) and ignites its rocket engine there. And it is almost ready to go. Since that day in the car park it has been carried up, dropped and guided successfully back to Earth. All that remains is the space shot itself, a 120‑mile parabolic flight that gives the pilot and his passengers three minutes of weightlessness and an extraordinary view. It is said that there are 10,000 people willing to pay $100,000 each for such a trip.

In a sense we have been here before. In the 1960s NASA built a spaceplane called the X15 that broke its own speed record repeatedly and almost killed Neil Armstrong before being grounded in the shadow of the giant ballistic missiles that became the preferred method of slipping Earth’s surly bonds in both the US and the Soviet Union. But that was a government effort. The race now being run is to put the first non‑government astronauts in space, and we flight geeks know all about the other entrants. They are scattered across America, Russia, Australia and even Britain, competing for the X Prize, a $10 million wad being offered by a St Louis consortium to the maker of the first private reusable spacecraft.

They are tinkering with old German V2 designs, high‑altitude balloons and sleek space taxis that look magnificent on paper. But they are mostly dreamers, which is what makes Rutan’s effort so remarkable. The signs are that he will actually pull this off. He recently chose a rocket‑engine supplier after letting two rivals duke it out for a year with cheap, simple and apparently revolutionary designs that literally burn rubber. He has also won certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for Mojave’s remote municipal airport to double as a spaceport. Rutan’s spaceship is fetchingly called SpaceShipOne – and if it goes where it is meant to, it could be as history making as the Mayflower . Its first brush with the cosmos will be the moment decisions about the shape, size, use, risk and ultimate destination of manned spacecraft are yanked from politicians, bureaucrats and taxpayers and taken on by tycoons, visionaries and egomaniacs. A coalition of the ultra‑cautious will give way to a rabble of the driven.

The comparison Rutan likes to make is not with a 17th‑century boat but with the age of magnificent men in flying machines (c 1908–12) “when the world went from a total of ten pilots to hundreds of airplane types and thousands of pilots in 39 countries”. Either way, he sees his mission in grand terms.

And why not? He has an unmatched record of building and testing experimental aircraft without the loss of a single life: 23 different planes over a period of 21 years, including the Voyager, which circumnavigated the globe without refuelling in 1986.

He also has “the customer”. This is the man paying for SpaceShipOne. At least, we think he is a man, and we think he is Paul Allen, the co‑founder of Microsoft who no longer works there and instead spends his time investing in an eclectic and often blatantly fun array of West Coast projects, ranging from Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks studio to the resuscitation of the Portland Trailblazers, a pro basketball team. But this is only a rumour. Rutan’s people only ever refer to the customer as “the customer”, rather as if he were Ernst Stavro Blofeld and they were building Moonraker.

Eventually the customer will take delivery and bounce around near the edge of space until he gets bored. Or, like many wealthy people, he may just like to watch.

There will be carping. Cynics have noted that none of the X Prize entrants offers the prospect of orbital spaceflight and few could be used to launch even the smallest satellites. Initially the only commercial use would be for joyrides for the ultra‑rich, and even these could end in tragedy. “This is dangerous stuff,” the X Prize’s organiser said last month. “People might die.”

Rutan admits that his goal is not to push back the frontiers of science or make billions by mining asteroids, but only to inspire. That vague, that simple. If NASA had admitted as much about the Shuttle, the loss of two crews might not have seemed such a tragic waste. As it is, the people who put Armstrong on the Moon are out of the hero business. It has been privatised.