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Burt Rutan Ignites A Rocket

By Simon Patkin

Quite rightly, Inc Magazine has named Burt Rutan its Entrepreneur of the Year. Just two months ago in the Mohave Desert, Rutan and his team of American space heroes blasted themselves into history by winning the Ansari X-prize – a cash prize of $US10 million for the first privately funded team to send a manned mission safely into space and back again. A feat they had to do twice in 14 days to win. In the process, they lit another rocket.

Straight out of science fiction and classic British boy’s own stories, English entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson has since announced Virgin Galactic’s plans to launch 3,000 people into space at a cost of around $US200,000 each. His first spaceship will be named the VSS Enterprise and England's first knight of derring-do plans to board that maiden flight into orbit. Commercial flights are slated for 2007 using spaceships that Branson plans to order from Rutan. Others such as Jim Benson, whose company SpaceDev (Stock symbol SPDV.OB) provided the rocket technology for Spaceship One is also planning his own spaceships with added plans to mine the sky.

This glorious future was previously the province of NASA, which mesmerized the world with the Apollo landings. The achievement of landing a man on the moon was truly one great leap for mankind with Neil Armstrong showing the world real American heroism.

Sadly, but not surprisingly NASA has since squandered their opportunity. As science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle notes in his book Life Among the Asteroids, NASA went from a mission-orientated organization of engineers out to conquer space in the 1960’s, to an organization of bureaucrats out to conquer each other in their own petty turf wars.

Spending over 250 billion dollars since Apollo, they have built five shuttles that can be sent 300 miles up and back to a station that does not even have enough people to properly keep it alive. Further evidence of this sick NASAtopian tragedy was a 1998 high profile junket trip to space. Could anyone imagine that after sending up Astronaut John Glenn in 1962, the President of the United States in 1998 would have hailed it as a huge achievement to send up Senator John Glenn 38 years later?

The torch of American derring-do has now passed to Burt Rutan. His Spaceship One has bought us to the doorstep of the stars for a second time with nothing to stop us but the twisted minds of petty bureaucrats. Private space travel is still a very delicate new baby best kept out of the hands of undeserving senators. It will be very risky and needs people like Rutan, Benson and Branson who can take and be rewarded for these kinds of risks. Indeed, all three are showing the world what happens when humans are free under the capitalist system to use their minds to set amazing new goals.

There are huge opportunities in space that will pay the risks off many times over, including the moon and Mars. The asteroid belt contains the essentials for human survival including water (for drinking, fuel and oxygen) and building materials. Pournelle notes that one asteroid four miles in diameter can hold enough metals such as iron, copper, zinc and aluminium to supply Earth for a year and there are over 100,000 asteroids in the asteroid belt alone. The person that can bring this metal back to Earth fastest will probably be the first inter-planetary gagilllionaire. As a very minor Spacedev shareholder, I hope it’s Benson.

NASA has failed its mission and should have no part in the opening up of the solar system to private exploration and exploitation. The industrial revolution was only achievable through the capitalist system – the moral foundation of which is that each person is entitled to the fruits of their own labour. From both a moral and practical view, property rights in space must also be protected. This is what helped fuel the industrial revolution and they are even more essential to the space revolution. More X-prizes will further boost this industry. They should include ownership of the moon, Mars and other objects within the solar system to those entrepreneurs that land there first. That would really light a rocket or two.

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