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Space Tourism

STAR WARS by Seth Linder

Space RaceIn the final months of World War Two, a race with great significance for the future of the world was being pursued through the war-ravaged countryside of Germany. Wernher Von Braun, the charismatic designer of the Nazis's last great hope, the deadly V2 rocket (the first rocket to reach the outer fringes of space), was desperately trying to lead his team of engineers away both from the rampaging Soviet troops and the deserter-shooting SS, while simultaneously being pursued by US intelligence and Stalin's secret police.

A few weeks later: Having lost Von Braun (now safely in the US with his 100-plus team), Stalin plucks Sergei Korolev, Russia's most brilliant rocket engineer, from the Gulag, where he had been imprisoned on false charges, to lead Russia's post-war adaptation of the vital V2 rocket technology.

It might sound like a wartime thriller, but these extraordinary scenes from the first episode of the new four-part BBC drama documentary series, ‘Space Race', actually mark the origins of the greatest, and most expensive, scientific endeavour man has ever undertaken. From this action-packed opening, this first-ever British/Russian/German and American co-production charts each dramatic twist and turn of the race, each spectacular success and crushing disappointment, until its final denouement as Neil Armstrong takes his ‘great step for mankind' on the surface of the moon. At the core of the story is the rivalry between Von Braun and Korolev, strikingly similar visionaries who would ultimately drive the respective US and Russian space programmes, persuading their superiors that space exploration had a value far beyond the military need for the ultimate in rocket technology.

Little wonder that producers, Deborah Cadbury and Jill Fullerton-Smith, long interested in the subject, believed this was the ideal project to further develop the drama documentary style that had proved so successful in their previous series, ‘Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.' ‘What makes the story so dramatic,' Cadbury says, ‘is that the space race came to define the rivalry between the two great superpowers and the contest between capitalism and communism during the Cold War, yet it is driven by the bizarre rivalry between these two men, one of whom (Von Braun) did not even know of his rival's name.'

As the photogenic Von Braun cannily used the American media to push his dreams for space exploration in defiance of an initially reluctant Pentagon, Korolev struggled against an equally unwieldy Politburo in conditions of utter secrecy. “He was a shadowy figure,” Cadbury says. “His identity was a closely guarded secret. He was never publicly acknowledged, even after the great successes. He was simply known as ‘the Chief Designer'.”

One reason for this secrecy was that the race for space was irrevocably intertwined with the deadly battle for arms supremacy between the two great superpowers, hence the close involvement of the military on both sides. The Russians were terrified their leading rocket scientist would be assassinated by American intelligence. For twenty years, he was constantly shadowed by a KGB minder.

Indeed, while both Korolev and Von Braun dreamed throughout their lives of exploring the furthest reaches of space, the initial research into rocket technology was in order that they might carry nuclear warheads. “In the early 50's, Stalin asked Korolev to develop a rocket large enough to deliver a nuclear weapon to the US, “ Cadbury says. “He had to rethink rocket technology. This, in turn, led to a rocket (the R7) that could deliver a satellite into orbit and ensured the Russians had a host of firsts in the race.”

These included the 1957 launch of Sputnik (the first satellite in space), the first dog in orbit, the first man (Yuri Gagarin) and woman in space, the first satellite to orbit the moon and the first to photograph its dark side. Fearful of the military ramifications of these technological triumphs, not to mention their propaganda value, the US government finally got behind Von Braun and began to claw back the Soviet lead. After President Kennedy's 1961 exhortation to Congress to land a man on the moon before the decade was out, the huge disparity in funds (neatly summed up by Russia's answer to the US's million dollar development of the gravity-defying pen – a pencil) began to tell. Working in intolerable conditions and facing deep internal rivalries, Korolev and his team began to fall behind.

Only when Korolev died in 1966, at the premature age of 59, did Von Braun discover the identity of his great rival. The race itself would end just three years later, as the world watched the 20 th centuries' most spectacular event – Armstrong and Aldrin's moonwalk - on television.

Though we might know the broad outline of the story, what makes ‘Space Race' such fascinating viewing are the new insights into the two men, particularly the little-known Korolev, gained from unprecedented access to archive material and conversations with his ex-colleagues and daughter. “We found a huge amount that had never seen the light of day before,” Cadbury says, ‘so we could build up an intimate portrayal of him. Much of it is very compelling, such as his relationship with one of his closest colleagues, (rocket engine designer) Valentin Glushko (whose denunciation, under torture, had sent Korolev to the Gulag in 1938), a relationship based on jealousy, rivalry and mutual dependency.”

Despite the enormous pressure - failure could result in sinister threats to Korolev from Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's Chief of Secret Police – Korolev emerges as a sympathetic character. And his rivalry with Von Braun had one positive outcome. Desperate to follow the US progress in the Western media, Korolev employed a translator (played by emerging Russian film star Maria Mironova), with whom he fell in love and married.

Revelations of Von Braun are equally striking. While the US ‘Operation Paperclip' (allegedly named for the paperclip on each wartime file that needed whitewashing) protected the aristocratic Von Braun's reputation during his lifetime, recently declassified records show his co-operation with the SS management of the V2 factory that saw over 25,000 concentration camp enlisted workers die in inhuman conditions.

The series was shot in Romania, which series director Christopher Spencer says, was ideal, and not merely for replicating the grim Soviet bloc architecture. “We found locations for the alpine scenery for Von Braun's escape, desert locations for Houston and Cape Canaveral and Bucharest University was an ideal double for NASA in the 60's.”

Spencer, who trawled Moscow for actors with good English, says authenticity was key to the success of the series. “Our research unravelled so many intimate details and dramatic meetings with major characters we were able to be both rigorously authentic and yet more dramatic than has been the case previously with this genre. In the end the great advantage of our approach is the way this enormous story, the most important, gigantic and costly enterprise of the last century, is unlocked by examining the psychology of these two driven men.”

Space Tourism article By Seth Linder

Space TourismImagine this. At 500,000 feet, your spacecraft leaves the mother aircraft that has been carrying it from the launch. The engine roars and you are pinned to your seat as the rocket ignition propels you at three-times the speed of sound, travelling faster than a bullet. Entering true space, you unstrap your seat belt and float in weightless freedom, gazing out of panoramic windows at the awesome sight of the solar system revealed in astonishing clarity and the curvature of the earth, beneath the thin blue line of the atmosphere, 100 kilometres below. Here's the twist; you are not a NASA-trained and funded astronaut, but an ordinary, if very well-heeled, tourist. Incredibly, according to entrepreneur Richard Branson, who reveals his extraordinary plans for space tourism in a new Horizon documentary on commercial space travel, this day trip with a difference is not just a pipe dream for the future. As Will Whitehorn, the president of his ambitiously named company, Virgin Galactic, tells Radio Times, commercial flights are planned within the next three years.

“What we are looking at is the liberalisation of space”, Whitehorn, enthuses. “This will be a new era of space exploration, propelled, not by governments and military considerations, but commercial companies catering for a new breed of tourist.” And if the price for your three-and-a-half-hours journey (just five minute of which will be weightless) is a pretty exclusive $200,000 (£115,000) including three days training, Whitehorn envisages that figure falling significantly over the next decade, thanks to economies of scale, allowing the potential market to widen considerably.

Branson's dream of space travel began while watching Armstrong and Aldrin's walk on the moon in 1969 with his parents. “I vowed then I would follow them into space, though it has taken a little longer than I thought,” he says today. The big leap forward came when Virgin Galactic, founded to investigate the possibility of commercial space travel, linked up with pioneering US aeronautical designer, Burt Rutan, in 2004. Funded by co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, Rutan had designed a remarkable new kind of spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, to compete for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize (for the first private spacecraft capable of flying above the planet's atmosphere carrying a pilot and two passengers, and repeating the feat within two weeks). SpaceShipOne won the competition in October, 2004, weeks after Rutan, Branson and Allen had officially joined forces.

“Burt's designs have changed the dynamic of space travel and opened up the potential for commercial space tourism through improving safety and lowering cost, the two vital barriers,” Whitehorn says. Carried to the edge of space by an aeroplane, SpaceShipOne's rocket motor is propelled by a combination of rubber and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), which Whitehorn says are both safer and more controllable than previous rocket fuels. Rutan's wing feathering technology ensures a heat-free re-entry and, once the craft has changed into a shuttlecock shape, ensures it literally glides back to port without the need for mission control. Challenged about the environmental impact of the new craft, Whitehorn insists that being re-usable and low on toxic emissions, it would take 150,000 launches of VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise, the craft Rutan has designed for commercial travel, to match the damage caused by a single shuttle launch.

With test flights for the Enterprise planned for 2007, Branson believes commercial flights could begin as early as 2008. Just a few days ago the Governor of New Mexico announced plans for a $200,000 million dedicated spaceport from which the new craft will eventually launch. But with such substantial costs involved, can Virgin Galactic really make this dream commercially viable? “Absolutely,” Whitehorn says. “There has been amazing interest. We've already got £10 million in deposits. We've had people from all walks of life signing up including actors (fictional space veterans Sigourney Weaver and William Shatner), architects and business people. Stephen Hawking has approached us to see if it would be technically possible for him, which we think it will be.”

The surge of interest, Whitehorn believes, is triggered by ordinary people reclaiming a dream lost in decades of stuttering NASA projects and exploration by robots rather than man. “Since Yuri Gugarin went into space in 1961 less than 500 people have followed him. We will starts with two flights a day carrying six passengers and I expect to have 50,000 people in space within a decade.”

This is merely stage one. VSS Enterprise is sub-orbital, it's successor, on whose design Rutan is already working, will be orbital, a genuine private space shuttle. Whitehorn says Richard Branson has pledged to invest any profits from the first stage into developing the orbital craft, which, with the ability to carry satellites and cargo, he believes will have great scientific value too.

Whitehorn, who has put the case for space travel before the US Congress (which has now changed the US constitution to accommodate the development of commercial space travel), says this will be Virgin's flagship project for the future. “There are amazing developments already happening in the US”, he says. “An inflatable space hotel is being developed outside Las Vegas and space ports are being planned around the world. We are taking space exploration away from governments and the taxpayer and bringing commercial principles to open up space for everyone.”

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