The road to rocket rides is now paved

Not only has the road from Truth or Consequences been paved all the way to Spaceport America in the desert state of New Mexico but the saucer shaped terminal hangar facility construction contract has just been awarded.

A slight glitch prevents me from reporting on this in person but the most important thing to happen in public air transport this century, the start of ‘joy flight’ rocket rides into space is getting closer.

The Spaceport is taking shape and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two is expected to begin its sub orbital test flights in the New Year.

The Virgin Galactic flights involve the rocket ship, SpaceShip Two, being dropped from the ‘mothership’ WhiteKnight Two at 50,000 feet and then boosting itself into a sub orbital trajectory for a few minutes of zero G sightseeing at an apex of more than 100 kilometres above the earth before some very positive G manoeuvres precede a gliding descent back to the spaceport.

The paying passengers; so far more than 300 have paid deposits, and tens of thousands have registered interest, are likely to start taking the $US 200,000 ‘joy flights’ in 2012.

There are of course differences between rocket rides and the joy flights that became a major phenomenon some 90 years ago. The joy flights took off from paddocks and dusty main streets, not a spaceport. In Australia in those times you would find the pioneer aviators, including Charles Kingsford Smith and Nancy-Bird Walton touting for business at country fairs and in the pubs and at race meetings. Some of the joy flight outfits like Diggers Aviation, run by those who learned to fly in the Great War, were itinerant businesses like the circuses, working the the thrill and dare factors for all they were worth, to keep alive the dreams and plans of the early aviators.

The joy flights lifted the curtain on public scheduled air transport. The rocket rides are literally the lift off to public space transport, including sub orbital flights to any point on earth in less than two hours, to space factories, orbital hospitals and micro gravity medical procedures, perhaps even to helium 3 mining on the moon, and eventually to other worlds.

For what is at present a recently built 3000 metre runway, pits for various rocket pads and cooling ponds and a sprawl of builders trailers, Spaceport America is also a focus of entrepreneurial competition. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic operation is the anchor tenant in the New Mexico Spaceport Authority’s facility.

But he has been joined by Rocket Racing Inc and Armadillo Aerospace who plan a radically different thrill ride, a vertical take-off launcher with a 360 degrees panoramic window for those on board, and who say that they can cut the price per passenger by half.

Who would have imagined an LCC type challenge in public space flight so soon?