Space travel dreams get a reality check

By Leonard David

updated 9:48 p.m. ET July 5, 2007

ASPEN, Colo. - Public space travel is a going and growing industry, but with a number of hurdles to overcome before becoming a sustainable and profitable marketplace.

There is already more than $1.5 billion invested in new air transportation ventures and an estimated $1 billion in new commercial space ventures. But in the blossoming market for tourist-class space passengers, much needs to happen — from harnessing the technology and dealing with regulations to dealing with finances and satisfying customer needs and desires.

Public space travel experts gathered here at "Flight School 2007 — Flying: Beyond A to B," a workshop for commercial space and private aviation ventures, held June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute. The unique gathering was hosted by Esther Dyson, an imaginer specializing in the computer industry and entrepreneurial investment.

Trial and error
"On the one hand," Dyson told the Flight School audience, "there is the optimization of air travel. Then there's private space travel on the other. You have many, many problems in common starting with financing, finding customers, running your businesses, marketing ... defining what your business is," she said.

Although public air transportation and space travel businesses cater to different customers, there's room to learn from one another, Dyson said. Moreover, there are opportunities to overcome the obstacles, she added.

"Ironically, it is precisely because space travel is defined as not transportation that it can escape the heavy regulation that governs air transportation ... and that it can be tried at all, and be practiced enough to become safe enough," Dyson told Space.com.

"In other words, if it [space travel] were defined as useful, it would have to be much safer. But the only way it can get safer is through trial and error. In fact, we need a little more trial and error in aviation, not on the safety side, but on the business model side," Dyson emphasized.

More routine, more common, more accessible
There is a need to go beyond sitting around crunching numbers and carrying out viewgraph rocket engineering. To get safe, you've got to fly, said Jeff Greason, president and chief executive officer of XCOR Aerospace in Mojave, Calif.

"You have to find out what the problems are. And you have to fix them to drive them out of the system," Greason said. "XCOR people turn wrenches and make rocket engines. That's almost a deliberate choice on our part. We don't want to take the specialness of the space experience away. But if it doesn't get to be more routine, more common, and more accessible, then there's no business there."

The space travel business model is evolving, observed Rich Pournelle, XCOR's director of business development. "As an industry, we're very much in a transitionary period in that some people have flown demonstration vehicles and shown that this kind of stuff can be done. But not a single one has flown a revenue flight, in terms of transporting people into space."

For the last 40 to 50 years, there's been a dumbing down of the aviation enterprise, suggested Peter Diamandis, chairman and co-founder of the X Prize Foundation. It has moved methodically onward over those decades.

What is happening now, Diamandis said, is that there's been a vacuum created where regulation has been reduced, or where new technology has come in. Furthermore, there's a third dimension in that dot-com capitalists have come in and are willing to take risks.

"The 'Very Light Jet' market and the private aviation market are being born almost at the exact same time ... and for many of the same reasons as the personal spaceflight industry," Diamandis said. "People want the chance to personalize aviation and personalize space. There are people demanding it."

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