Rutan speaks

Last night in Mojave I saw SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan give a talk to high school students who'd made 4.0 grade averages. Rutan told them what to expect as they came out into the workforce.

"When you get back from four or five years of college, Mojave's going to look a whole lot different. Now, that's really quite something to say, because if you go back five years ago, Mojave didn't look a whole lot different."

In fact, the place hasn't changed much since Rutan moved there to set up shop in 1974. He said he regretted not doing more to help the town over the years. "I remember being quoted in a magazine once saying it's a crummy little desert town, and I've had to face up to that quote for a long time. But have to say, I live in that crummy little desert town, and I think it's very special."

Now, though, real progress is on the way. Rutan said he's identified $1 billion in private money committed to the blossoming commercial spaceflight industry around the world, and that's just what's been publicly pledged.

"You can also conclude that most of the folk, if they had any brains, would not announce what they're going to do, and what commitments they're going to do, and to tell their competition what they're going to do. And you can guess, and you'd guess right, that roughly three or four times the amount of money that you see being committed is actually being committed."

What's that mean for Mojave? "I think there is a reasonable chance that Mojave will be for space flying what Silicon Valley is for the big industries of the last two decades."

The first order of business is to attract the workforce needed to build up this new industry, and Rutan's been having a very hard time doing that, not the least of reasons for which is the effect Mojave has on many newcomers.

"We used to keep a record of this," explained Rutan, "and that is: if you come from out of state to work at Scaled composites, how long continuously does your wife cry after she sees Mojave? [Laughter from the audience.] The record was seven and a half weeks. I like to think that even though it hasn't looked a lot better since I got here in '74, that a lot of that's going to change.... There needs to be better housing here, and there needs to be some other things to do such that people look forward to living here."

In addition to hiring all the help he can find to build new spaceships, Rutan's also building up Scaled's physical plant. "We have already more than doubled our shop space just in the last eight months on Mojave airport and we'll be building one or two new buildings over the next six to nine months." Eventually a hotel, a space passenger terminal, and training facilities that include a centrifuge will support two to four spaceflights a day out of Mojave Spaceport.

As for the question on everyone's mind, what SpaceShipTwo will look like, Rutan gave little away. "We are back in hiding, like we normally are. Occasionally you'll see some promotional stuff coming out of one of the spacelines, but we in general don't feel that's the right thing to do. So don't expect us to be doing any announcements or promotions or inviting the press in to look at our progress and so on. We feel it's best to let our competition think that we've quit. You just get a lot more fun showing somebody stuff that they don't expect. I will not talk about the schedule of our program, because if I get late I have to hunt up all those people and tell them why I'm late."

He did say that SpaceShipTwo's larger size relative to SpaceShipOne will allow passengers to float around the cabin. Instead of rocketing to space from the skies over Mojave as SS1 did, SS2 will drop from its White Knight 2 carrier plane over the Pacific Ocean. It'll boost into space while pointed back toward land so that by the time it leaves the atmosphere it'll be over the San Joaquin Valley north of Bakersfield, California. It'll reenter north of the town of Tehachapi, to glide back to landing where it took off at Mojave Spaceport.

The spaceship will be able to travel 200 miles from boost to landing, and the thinking is that flying over ocean, land, mountains, desert in a single flight will give passengers the best possible views.

Taking a jab at the proposed Southwest Regional Spaceport in New Mexico, Rutan said "Some people have read the papers and think we're all moving from Mojave to New Mexico. That's not true at all. I have no intention of going to New Mexico; I don't think it'd be a very good place to do a spaceflight. I believe when I get out of the atmosphere I want to see the oceans and the mountains, not just the kind of crap you can see from New Mexico."

Radio Mojave

If you want to find out what's going on in Mojave, California, birthplace of the commercial space age, stop in at the Radio Shack on Highway 14 and ask for Jim.

Jim Balentine, the warm, big-hearted owner, grew up in Mojave, and with little prompting, he'll tell you about the days when the airport was just a closed military base. When he was a kid, he and his friends raced land sails up and down the runways and played in foxholes left over from military maneuvers.

Mojave is a fun place to live, says Jim, especially if you love airplanes. Just hang around long enough and you'll see craft unlike any others in the world. Jim took photos of SpaceShipOne's carrier plane, White Knight, months before its official roll-out.

Jim's on the airport board and he's a general aviation pilot himself. He'll be glad to sell you a CB scanner and tune it to the airport tower for you.

He sees a bright future for the airport, and by extension the town itself. Commercial spaceflight could turn into one of the world's biggest industries, he says, and Mojave will continue to foster its greatest innovations, though its capacity for passenger spaceflights will be limited. That's because the airport's mission is to focus on flight test, not routine operations.

Jim pointed me to the air/spaceport's mission statement on its website:

"Foster and maintain our recognized aerospace presence with a principle focus as the world's premier civilian aerospace test center while seeking compatibly diverse business and industry."

That last, about "compatibility," is key. Too much routine traffic, and businesses conducting flight tests will have to look elsewhere for unrestricted airspace.

Mojave rising

One of the things I'd like to do in my book is show how the emerging commercial spaceflight industry is changing a dusty little frontier town in California.

Mojave has been a crossroads all its life, a stopping place on the way to someplace else. Mule teams, trains, trucks, airplanes have all left their indelible marks on the town. Now it's a crossroads to space. This newest mode of transport has set in motion what could become the biggest transformation of all.

I'm spending time in and around Mojave this week to try to capture the character of the place and where it might be heading. I've been talking with locals, people who grew up there as well as those who moved there anywhere from 8 years to three months ago. Some highlights from yesterday's visit:

--Quote of the day (from a new resident): "Mojave is a toilet bowl." Perhaps half of the 3,000 residents are unemployed and drug use is a problem says the new resident. A lot of the town's buildings are in various stages of collapse. At first glance, you wonder why the hell anyone would choose to live there. And yet....

--It's a true frontier town, an edge, with all that entails. Another person I spoke with yesterday moved there 8 years ago and now it's home and she loves it there. You can see over the horizon in Mojave, look over the edge of the world and begin to see what might lie beyond. That puts an electric charge in the air that I can feel even on a day trip.

--The place is on the upswing. New single family houses are going up on the edges of town, and developers can't keep up with demand from engineers and others hiring on to new space companies like Scaled Composites and XCOR. One new hire I talked to at XCOR spent three weeks trying to find some place to live, any place.

--Too much development, and of the wrong kind, could ruin the features of Mojave that make it ideal for commercial spaceflight. Yet prosperity must include development. So there's tension between those forces. Ideally, says one of my contacts, Mojave will become a destination for space tourists, media, and spectators, who will spend money there, and then leave.

UPDATE AT 1:35 FROM MOJAVE AIR/SPACEPORT: Bill Deaver, editor and publisher of the Mojave Desert News has just set me right on a couple of points...Unemployment here is only 8 to 10%. And something that really pisses him off is East Coast journalists breezing through here and calling the place "dusty." Oops! Sorry Bill!

One-man space bureau

I don't know how he does it, but Jeff Foust, an analyst at Futron Corporation, has managed to establish himself as a one-man space bureau covering everything from space tourism to NASA space probes and space law. And he's damn good at it.

Foust's Spacetoday.net distills the important space news from around the Web several times a day--a feat which in itself prompted me to ask him about his staff. Which he doesn't actually have; it's all him. Foust's online Space Review does feature contributions from other writers, but he writes for that one too. I never leave home without Space Today; it's my home page. I also look to the Space Review for some of the best commentary in the field.

Foust also runs a political space blog and, now, a personal spaceflight blog at personalspaceflight.info. He's blasting away on that one now, even as I type this, reporting from the Space Access conference in Phoenix. Needless to say, it's already one of my must-read blogs, along with Clark Lindsey's HobbySpace, Dan Schrimpsher's SpacePragmatism, and Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings, among others.

And all this with a day job. Okay, I'm jealous. But I bet he doesn't have a 10 month old baby daughter who loves cheese and shrieks with delight at a dog wagging its tail. She's mine. All mine.

Rocketplane on the runway

I'm on assignment now for a Popular Science feature on Rocketplane-Kistler. I have Rocketplane's Chuck Lauer to thank for that one--he just kept at me until he got me out for a visit to Rocketplane HQ in Oklahoma. And boy, am I glad he did.

As far as the press is concerned, Rocketplane has been something of a dark horse in the suborbital tourism market, overshadowed by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and his contractor, Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites. But that's about to change.

Virgin's planning for a rollout of its SpaceShipTwo tourist vehicle in late 2007. Rutan himself tells me he doesn't like to publicly commit to dates as a general rule because he doesn't like to break promises. Seems prudent, given the delays common in the rocket business.

That said, Rocketplane is planning for test flights in early 2007, with the first revenue flight before the year is out. If they make it, they'll beat Virgin to the punch and generate a lot of great press in the process. Judging from the quality of people I met in Oklahoma, I'd say they have an excellent shot at it.

Rocketplane Passenger Number One, Reda Anderson of Los Angeles, thinks so too. I spent a good bit of time with her in Oklahoma and I learned a lot from her about the customer perspective on the emerging commercial spaceflight industry. For example:

--Weightlessness isn't an important part of the experience for Anderson. She figures she can take a parabolic flight like that offered by Zero-G Corp if she wants to go weightless. No, it's the view of Earth from space she's after, and so she doesn't care whether she's able to get up from her seat on her suborbital flight or not.

--Anderson is into "world-class events." Like being one of the first on a suborbital passenger ship. And diving to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic wreck firsthand, which she did last summer. These kinds of pioneering experiences often come with primitive accommodations, and she doesn't mind that a bit. She's not after a resort experience on these trips. If she has to pee in the bush on a trip through the wilds of South Africa, why then, so much the better; it's part of the appeal.

--Being able to quiz engineers at length about the choices they're making during the design process, thumping on test hardware, asking pointed questions about the risks involved, all were important to Anderson in deciding to put her $20,000 deposit with Rocketplane. She made her money in real estate, not intangibles like stocks, and she likes to invest in things she can touch and see up close. As I found out myself, that's Rocketplane all the way.

In fact, with SpaceShipTwo coming together behind locked doors, it looks to me like Rocketplane's going to be where the action is in commercial spaceflight in the coming months. Watch them closely.

SpaceShipTwo development is closed to the press, but I don't know whether prospective customers have access. I have a query into Virgin on that and I'll let you know what I find out.

Did I mention Anderson's 66 years old? She wanted me to guess her age, which I refused to do for fear of offending her. I needn't have worried since I would have guessed mid-fifties.