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By Root 1479 0

that Dennis Tito, a former aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who had amassed his self-made fortune by applying his methodical approach to building an investment firm, was pushing hard to become the first American space tourist. The ticket was to be brokered by Space Adventures, Ltd., the premier space tourism agency to which I had coincidentally lent my name over the last several years as an advisory board member. The destination was the International Space Station. The only difficulty I had with the itinerary, in spite of my general support of international cooperation in space, was the mode of transportation. He would be hitching a ride on board the Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of nearly $20 million. Dennis would have to go to Russia to make his American dream come true.

Dennis moved from his 30,000-square-foot Pacific Palisades mansion located on a hill overlooking the ocean to a tiny, bare apartment in Star City, the Russian cosmonaut training headquarters outside Moscow. He completed his training with two Russian cosmonauts, and on April 28, 2001, they launched from the same pad from which Sputnik, history’s first flight into space, had lifted off. It was also the same pad from which Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel in space, took off forty years earlier, on April 12, 1961.

A couple of months after Dennis returned from his mission, both he and I appeared before congressional subcommittees to answer questions about space tourism. Dennis had successfully opened a door to space tourism; now I just had to find a way to make it affordable to more people. The committee asked me to address three questions specifically:

What types of activities will be enabled or enhanced by space tourism?

What are the major hurdles that must be overcome before the space tourism business can be self-sustaining?

What role should the Federal government play in promoting space tourism?

For me, these three questions were like a volleyball hanging over the net, just waiting to be spiked. I began by explaining to the congressional committee that space tourism was the key to generating the high-volume traffic that could bring down launch costs. NASA’s own research had suggested that tens of millions of U.S. citizens wanted to travel to space, and that the number would increase immeasurably if the global market were included. This volume of ticket-buying passengers could be the solution to the problem of high space costs that plague government and private space efforts alike.

I emphasized, though, that if we were to avoid the mistakes of the past, it was imperative that we involve the private sector. The needs of the commercial space tourism business must be central as we define the next generation of reusable space transportation. The next vehicles must be designed with the flexibility not only to satisfy NASA’s needs, but to meet high-volume commercial tourism requirements, and the private sector must be responsible for operating the system.

I admitted quite candidly that I had an ulterior motive for promoting space tourism, that my goal really was to get the United States back in the space exploration business, to begin again to discover what was “out there” in the final frontier.

“My passion about this,” I acknowledged, “springs from the way that large-scale space tourism leads to space infrastructure that enables broader national goals—such as a return to the moon and the exploration of Mars.”

In answer to the committee’s first question, I expressed my strong opinion that if the government would get out of the way, space transportation could evolve into a normal industry. “It will become like the rail, pipeline, ship, highway, and air traffic systems,” I told the committee members. “They all have vast markets, low costs, high reliability, full reusability and routine operations. Today, space transportation is characterized by small markets, high costs, high accident rates, wasteful expendability, an inability to operate on a routine schedule, and continuing loss of market share to foreign suppliers.