Billionaires Joyride to Space. What Technology Did They Use?

As billionaires chase each other into space for no apparent reason, we are left to consider what might be interesting in the technology each has chosen to use.

The three billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, are among the world’s richest men. Each has more money than nations and more than they can spend in their lifetimes. The common methods of wealth dissipation available to the super-rich, yachts, private jets, sports teams, islands are insufficient, so they have come to man’s final frontier.

We are reminded of another billionaire, Bill Gates, also siphoning off his wealth, but choosing to spend his billions to fight poverty and disease worldwide.

But rather than go mad thinking of how others should spend their money, let us focus on the present assignment, finding out more about the technology involved in the billionaires' space race – despite the distraction, their high fives and this brazen admission of self-indulgence:

“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,” quipped Jeff Bezos after his 11-minute space joyride. The backlash was swift.

“Space travel isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,” answered Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer, pointing out that “billionaires flying into space” had “no scientific value.”

A Little History Wouldn't Kill You

By contrast, Blue Origin and SpaceX offer the experience, some of the rigor and most of the risk of being a real astronaut. No doubt, two smart and self-directed men, Branson and Musk, who in their genius, have seized on the clearest solution and that is to get to space directly, vertically, the shortest path between two points a straight line, Occam’s Razer and all that. Of course, it must be a rocket. None of this dilly-dallying, travel in an airplane that by design needs to go forward a lot so it can go up a little. We’re going straight up, my well-heeled friends, and we are going on a rocket!

We’re not pausing to look at the rear-view mirror, the history of rocketry.

The first rockets may have been used as early as the 10th century by the Song dynasty in China (the same place that gave us gunpowder) to make “fire arrows.” Modern rocketry is credited to Wernher von Braun and it took off, as it were when Germany revived the rocket’s use as a weapon in World War II. The pointed, aerodynamic nose cone of the lethal and brutally destructive V-2 rocket was filled with an explosive warhead, inert until detonated.

From the Right Stuff to the Stuff of Vanity

The first race into space started when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, followed by the race to put a man in space. Someone had the brilliant idea of putting flesh and blood where previously had gone high explosives on top of a thin cylinder of sheet metal filled with rocket fuel. We tried desperately to control the enormous amount of chemical energy to make sure it went out the nozzle in a measured manner, a task for which the rocket often proved woefully inept. The film of explosions on and off launchpads was far too numerous. Death stalked the early “volunteers,” later dubbed astronauts, who were recruited from those who welcomed risk, saw deadly risk as to the supreme test of their manhood, and who were to become the heroes of Tom Wolfe’s bestselling The Right Stuff, which forever glorified the Navy's fighter test pilots.

Richard Branson got the bragging rights by having the first private space company to carry ordinary people (all non-astronauts, including himself) into space on July 11. Not quite space, was the immediate response by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Shepard team, informing us that space starts at 100 km above the Earth (more on that later).

The carrier plane, called White Knight Two (a nod to Sir Richard Branson’s knighthood, perhaps?) looks like two jet planes welded together at their non-swept wingtips. Each fuselage has a full cabin. One fuselage has an interior similar to the spaceship (called VSS Unity or SpaceShip Two) that it carries aloft and is used for training. The other fuselage is planned for cheap seats, sold to space tourists on more of a budget, on flights up 18 km (60,000 ft), roughly twice the cruising altitude of a commercial flight -- not even close to the Kármán Line, but still a pretty good view.

What is the Kármán Line?

In the 1900s, Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán rather arbitrarily determined the delineation between atmosphere and space occur around 50 miles up – about 80 km -- above sea level. It was later moved up to 100 km, if for no other reason than to produce a nice round number. However, agencies in the US recognize the original distance of 80 km as where space begins.

Keep in mind no sharp distinction occurs at the Kármán line, whether it is at 80 km or 100 km. The air molecules gradually become less and less at that kind of distance.

European agencies, including the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), define space as beginning at 100 km up.

The carrier plane, White Knight Two, is three times the size of the Ansari-prize winning, Burt Rutan design it is based on. Both White Knight Two and SpaceShip Two are built by Scaled Composites. Richard Branson formed The Spaceship Company in 2005 to fulfill his space travel dream, keeping 70% interest in the company, with the remainder went to Scaled Composites.
The passengers on SpaceShip Two, soon-to-be space travelers, fly up to the release point in a manner very similar to normal commercial flight, sitting comfortably upright. Everything changes upon release from the carrier plane (called an air-launch) when the pilot takes control, ignites the rocket engine and points the nose straight up. Seventy thousand pounds of thrust produced in about one minute will propel the spacecraft to Mach 4 and feel like 4Gs. Its fuel spent, the spaceship continues up due to momentum to an apogee 85 km. Yes, we know, Mr. Bezos, short of the Kármán Line.
The passengers will have four minutes of a feeling of weightlessness from the time the engines are cut off to the end of their free fall.

Are They Really Weightless?

The altitude at which suborbital flights like Branson’s and Bezos’ top off are not enough to be gravity-free. At a hundred kilometers above sea level, you have most of the gravitational acceleration still in effect (9.4 m/s2 vs 9.8 m/s2). The maneuver of pointing any craft straight up, cutting off power and free-falling is the time-tested method for simulating weightlessness used to train astronauts.

For a few minutes, the seatbelt sign goes off and Virgin Galactic passengers are free to float around the cabin.

Elon Musk’s trip to the International Space Station, which is four times higher, will let its space tourists get closer to being truly weightless and for much longer (more about that later)

What Goes Up…

The spacecraft, which had been transported, ascending, then descending, its tricked-out wings swept back with upright winglets with stabilizers, undergoes a dramatic transformation. After the seatbelt light goes on, the winglets rotate 90 degrees about the beam of the spaceship, letting the surfaces that were once stabilizers produce maximum drag. Virgin Galactic calls this descent with drag “feathering.” The drag orients the spaceship level to the Earth and descends slower. The passengers will begin to feel more of the force of gravity during feathering, but buckled up and seated upright, they can enjoy the view from their window seat.

Then the pilot rotates the wingtips of SpaceShip Two back into their original position to glide to a landing at Spaceport America, "the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport," in New Mexico. SpaceShip Two does an unconventional three-point landing using a ski where the nosewheel should be. It acts like a brake, says Virgin Galactic. Why not use a brake, we have to wonder?

The wings were activated by pilot error before feathering was needed in 2004. The sudden drag at Mach 0.92 mph ripped the spacecraft apart, killed one pilot. The other pilot parachuted down but sustained serious injury. After the crash, Virgin Galactic assured that safeguards would be put in place to prevent the wings from unlocking before feathering on subsequent missions.

The rocket engine used by Virgin Galactic is a bit unusual. It uses solid fuel. Virgin Galactic switched to a polyamide-based plastic fuel from previously used rubber-based hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB. The engine uses nitrous oxide (N2O) as an oxidizer. Without the N2O the fuel does not fire, so cutting off the flow of N20 acts like an off switch. Normally, solid-fuel rockets cannot be turned off.

Total flight time: about 90 minutes. Cost: $250,000.

Bezos’s spacecraft is the New Shepard, its name coming from Alan Shepard, America’s first man in space.

The multistage rocket has an overall length of 18 m (60 ft) and a diameter of three to three and a half miles. It is fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and therefore, could be considered a green vehicle, its only exhaust byproduct being water.

A conventional booster rocket follows a long tradition of manned rocket flights such as NASA’s. The civilian passengers of New Shepard will have to sit on a launch pad and sweat ignition and lift-off -- just like real astronauts.

Murphy’s Law. Heard of It?

But perhaps the biggest difference between manned space missions by a government space agency and Blue Origin is that Blue Shepard will be the first fully autonomous spacecraft with humans aboard. Odd that full autonomy comes to Bezos’ space enterprise before it comes to his shopping service. Fully autonomy will allow tourists in space that would otherwise be denied, a concept Blue Shepard’s maiden voyage seemed eager to demonstrate with its first voyageurs, which included an 82-year old, a teenager and a businessman.

We found little about the autonomous space vehicles system onboard the Blue Shepard and are left with a big question. No pilot or astronaut onboard may be fine for suborbital, 11- minute flights when everything goes according to plan – but what if it doesn’t? When engineers consider all that can go wrong, worst-case scenarios, they design redundant systems, plan escape routes, overdesign, do endless simulations, play what-if games with each other and with themselves during sleepless nights… and still depend on the final fail-safe, a well-trained human being that has memorized every procedure, been tested to stay cool under pressure and observed to be resourceful. Some of the best AI on Earth, such as that used on AV systems, is still glitchy and can fail -- fatally. In space, the ill-fated Apollo 13, which suffered an explosion of its oxygen tanks on the way to the moon, was lucky to have veteran astronaut Jim Lovell on board to bring his entire crew of three home unscathed, after a multitude of improvisations, including using the LEM for life support and duct-taping CO2-scrubbing filters to the air supply so they wouldn’t all die from asphyxiation. With freezing fingers, astronauts wrote down page after page of emergency instruction from ground control. Sleep starved, they were able to perform critical calculations to correct their trajectory. Throughout their ordeal, expertly documented in Lovell’s book initially called Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 then shortened to just Apollo 13, there was no panic and not a single swear word was uttered.

The Blue Origin Rocket

The traditional manned space flight makes use of one-shot hardware, all of it unusable after a single-use, all very wasteful. The Blue Origin rocket is designed to be used multiple times, falling back to Earth gently under parachutes. Some of the rocket boosters have already been used as many as seven times during tests. Reusing hardware will certainly decrease the cost of space tourism over single-use hardware but we expect the Virgin Galactic concept of a jet-powered carrier plane and winged, gliding spaceship to withstand much more reuse and consequently, make space tourism much less expensive than the pure rocket approaches of Blue Origin and SpaceX.

Blue Origin’s rocket launch will be able to punch its passengers higher than Virgin Galactic’s. The capsule will be released from the booster at a speed of about Mach 3 and continues its ascent until its apogee of 106 km above sea level. Did we mention that Blue Origin will go past the Kármán Line?

After the capsule is separated from the booster, the booster drops down to Earth-like an arrow that refuses to turn, its vertical position assured by “wedge fins” and air brakes, surfaces that are lifted from the top of the rocket to create the drag, then, at the last moment, further slowed down by a blast from its rocket engine, which has saved just a bit of fuel for this purpose.