|
 |
|
|
By Glen Sparks
Once again, space doesn’t seem so far away. On a cool, clear morning in the Mojave Desert, on Oct. 4, test pilot Brian Binnie blasted off on a thrill ride aboard SpaceShipOne, otherwise known as The New Spirit of St. Louis. He headed to 46,000 feet in the carrier plane, White Knight. After dropping out of the belly of White Knight, he rocketed into space. Binnie, a test pilot and an Ivy League graduate, flew SpaceShipOne to about 354,000 feet, or 26,000 feet higher than he needed to capture the
coveted Ansari X Prize. Just five days before Binnie’s historic flight, fellow test pilot Mike
Melvill had traveled to 337,500 feet, completing the first leg of the Prize.
Set up in St. Louis in 1996, the X Prize Foundation promised $10 million to the first team to fly 328,000 feet (100 km) into space in the same piloted craft, two times in two weeks.
SpaceShipOne, built by maverick aviation designer Burt Rutan, displaying the logo “The New Spirit of St. Louis,” beat out more than 20 other teams. Now, at least one multi-millionaire is placing orders to build spaceships, and it might not be long before travel agencies begin taking reservations for vacations to space.
“Oh, yes, people are going to take vacations in space, absolutely,” says Gregg Maryniak, the executive director of the X Prize Foundation. “One of the most amazing things about this is not that it is going to happen. The most amazing thing is that it has taken this long. The technology has existed for a long time. Now, private enterprise is making this all work.”
 Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh, addresses reporters and guests at the announcement of the X Prize on the Arch grounds in 1996. |
|
Maryniak is selling space, the flat-out, goose-bumpy, gee-whiz, exciting future of space travel. Surveys indicate that seven out of 10 people in developed countries hope to take a ride in space, says Maryniak, who compares a space vacations to other exotic destinations.
“Look, this is something that is going to be a once-in-a lifetime thing for people,” Maryniak says. “Do I want to go up? Of course, I do. Could I afford to do it if it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? No. I could afford it, though, if it costs as much as my hail-damaged car.”
Records indicate that fewer than 440 people have ever traveled to space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin did it first, on April 12, 1961. Maryniak says, “Each and every (astronaut) has said that it is a life-changing experience and that they want to go back.”
Confirming this, Melvill said after his flight, “It was awe-inspiring. Beyond description, beyond anything that I can tell you about.”
| Legendary aircraft designer and developer Burt Rutan speaks following the successful final flight on October 4th in Mojave, CA. British billionaire Sir Richard Branson looks on. |
|
If not for the X Prize, the search might still be on for the first re-usable, affordable commercial spacecraft. Erik Lindbergh, grandson of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, has said, “The X Prize is an event that has the potential to capture the world’s imagination and shift people’s interest from conflict and war to an adventurous goal.”
Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, agrees. “The X Prize is something that got people going,” he says. “It motivates them. No pun intended, but the sky’s the limit.”
Diamandis, 43, created the idea of the X Prize. The son of a Greek immigrant and physician, Diamandis grew up on Long Island, N.Y. He possesses a bundle of energy and plenty of ambition—along with a medical degree from Harvard University and an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At one time, he wanted to be an astronaut.
Later, his interests took him away from NASA and into the private sector. He founded Micro Satellite Launch Systems, a company which aimed to send satellites into low orbit. Later, Diamandis also started Zero-G Corp., a Florida company that offers the strong of stomach a taste of weightlessness on board a modified Boeing 727. These rides are similar to the ones NASA uses to prepare astronauts for space.
“I see myself as an adventurer, an explorer,” Diamandis says. “I wanted to go to space, but I had decided that NASA would not be the way to go. I knew that if you wanted to really get space travel going for everyone, it needed to be through private enterprise.”
Diamandis and Maryniak discovered their mutual interest in space while working together at the Space Studies Institute (SSI) at Princeton University. SSI scientists hope to meet the energy needs on earth by harnessing resources in space. Maryniak, who describes himself as a “space geek,” headed the program.
Now 50, Maryniak was raised during the golden era of American spaceflight. At eight, he cheered John Glenn, the first American to travel in orbit. At 15, he and his family gathered around the living room television to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. At 16, Maryniak rooted for the crew of Apollo 13 to make it home after a series of disasters struck the aborted moon mission.
Maryniak, who grew up some 60 miles west of Chicago, couldn’t sign up for enough math and science courses at school. Unfortunately, budget cutbacks in the 1970s ended the Apollo program. The last man to step on the moon, Gene Cernan, did so aboard Apollo 17 in 1972.
In the following years, Maryniak, like Diamandis, concluded that private enterprise, not the government, must take the lead in getting people into space. He handed Diamandis a copy of “The Spirit of St. Louis,” the book that Charles Lindbergh wrote after his historic transatlantic flight. The book describes over 100,000 adoring fans greeting Lindbergh at Le Bourget airfield in Paris, 33 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds after he took off on a drizzly morning at Roosevelt Field in New York. The Parisians chanted “Vive Lindbergh!” and “Vive l’Americain!” New Yorkers treated him to a ticker tape parade. Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Medal of Honor; Time magazine pronounced him Man of the Year for 1927.
In addition to lifelong fame, “Lucky Lindy” also earned a $25,000 cash prize, courtesy of French-American hotel owner Raymond Orteig. The Orteig Prize was for the first person who could fly solo nonstop from New York to Paris, and was funded by the original Spirit of St. Louis Organization, made up of local businessmen organized by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce.
After reading Lindbergh’s memoir, Diamandis had a stroke of brilliance. “Let’s offer a prize (to encourage space travel),” Maryniak remembers Diamandis saying.
But the two needed money and a headquarters. Civic leaders across the country lobbied on behalf of their cities. Diamandis wanted the X Prize headquarters to be in Seattle or Los Angeles, two giants in the aerospace industry. Doug King, president of the St. Louis Science Center, suggested a different aerospace capital. He wanted the X Prize people to set up shop in St. Louis, where the original Mercury and Gemini capsules had been constructed, and where Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems and Phantom Works have thrived. King and Maryniak credit the late Al Kerth for driving the idea.
Kerth, a public relations executive and the secretary of Civic Progress, listened to Diamandis talk about his vision. Excited, Kerth joined forces with King, Bryan Cave Chairman Walter Metcalfe Jr. and St. Louis RCGA President Richard Fleming to convene a special dinner at the Racquet Club, where 75 regional business leaders were introduced to the concept of the X Prize. By design, this was the same location where Harold Bixby, president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, and other civic leaders had joined in 1927 to raise $15,000 for Lindbergh’s mission.
The modern dinner was every bit as successful. Energized by the X Prize’s promise, about 50 area business and civic leaders formed the New Spirit of St. Louis Committee. Celebrities also responded. Best-selling writer Tom Clancy admired the medals and ribbons that contributors could get for donating $25,000 to the X Prize Foundation. Clancy wrote a check for $100,000 and ordered four. Tom Hanks, star of the 1995 space epic “Apollo 13,” is another supporter.
| Anousheh Ansari was the lead investor of the $10 million prize, the Ansari X Prize. |
|
But the X Prize Foundation’s big break came in the spring of 2002, when Anousheh Ansari, an electrical engineer from Dallas and a multi-millionaire after cashing out of a telecom business, donated enough money to fund the rest of the $10 million prize.
The world’s top rocket builders set their sights on the X Prize, including the legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan, president of Scaled Composites, who had built many cutting-edge aircraft in his career. There were 26 competing teams from seven nations, including: Argentina; Canada; Israel; Romania; Russia; United Kingdom; and the United States. In 1986, his Voyager plane set a record by going around the world without refueling. For his next project, he wanted to create something that could send people into space. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, invested the money Rutan needed to build the $30 million SpaceShipOne.
SpaceShipOne, which can carry a pilot and two passengers, is not a sophisticated piece of machinery. Weighing just 6,600 pounds with a full tank of fuel, it was once described as “a shockingly simple machine.” In a throwback to the days before modern “fly-by-wire” systems, SpaceShipOne’s control stick and rudder pedals move simple rods and levers.
Following the mandatory test flights, Melvill headed to space on Sept. 29. He took off from the Mojave Desert Airport, about 80 miles outside of Los Angeles. During the ascent, at the edge of the atmosphere, something went wrong. SpaceShipOne began rolling uncontrollably, spinning around its longitudinal axis some 29 times. Melvill righted himself before making a safe landing.
Rutan said later that the rolls did not cause any “significant structural stresses.” He elected to go again on Oct. 4. If he needed to abort the flight, he could still re-schedule it a few days later. But Binnie didn’t encounter any problems as he hit a speed of Mach 3.6 and broke a world record for suborbital flight.
An excited Maryniak co-hosted a live Web cast from the Mojave. “The people who are doing this, the designers like Burt Rutan, and the pilots, are pioneers,” Maryniak said. “They are bringing space closer to everyone.”
King agrees. “We are headed into a new chapter in space exploration,” he says. “This (the awarding of the X Prize) is just the beginning.”
Again, Maryniak mentions Lindbergh. “Lucky Lindy” did not just win a prize and global adoration. He jumpstarted an industry.
In his Pulitzer-prize winning biography, “Lindbergh,” author A. Scott Berg reports that airplanes were carrying 97,000 pounds of mail a month in early 1927. Later that year, they were carrying 146,000 pounds a month. Applications for pilot licenses rocketed 300 percent in the United States in one year. The number of airports doubled in three years.
Lindbergh said that St. Louis should be the “aerial cross-roads” of the country. Just a few weeks after Lindbergh had concluded a nationwide tour, St. Louis began work on a municipal airport. Mayors from across the United States wanted Lindbergh to visit their cities and help boast prospects of airport construction.
“The boom started, but it kept going and going,” Maryniak says. “It didn’t fizzle.”
Maryniak says this same sort of thing can happen again. Speaking from his office at the non-descript X Prize headquarters in Chesterfield, he believes St. Louis could be a candidate for a regional spaceport. High-tech rockets and tourism also might mean more high-paying jobs for the region.
The dreams are becoming reality. British billionaire Richard Branson has unveiled plans to start a “$100 million space airline,” Virgin Galactic. He is paying Rutan to build SpaceShipTwo. Flights are expected to start in 2008 and cost space vacationers about $200,000 each.
“This is going to get bigger and bigger,” Diamandis says. “This is just the beginning.”
Rocket scientists continue working. The Da Vinci team, based in Canada, hopes to use a helium balloon to lift a rocket and then shoot it into space from 80,000 feet. Another team, Canadian Arrow, has built something similar to the old Mercury Redstone rocket that blasted astronaut Alan Shepard into sub-orbital flight. The 54-foot, two-stage machine launches above water and uses large parachutes to slow it before splashdown. Some teams believe that the best option is a spacecraft that takes off on a conventional airport runway.
“Which will be the final design that ultimately takes people into space?” asks Maryniak, who is sure that trips to space will, like fancy new electronic products, quickly come down in price. “Who knows?”
Diamandis sees the progress and the enthusiasm for space travel and says, “Prizes work. It’s unfortunate that prizes do not play a greater role in advancing science and technology. You get such a broad range of possible solutions to a problem. People want to compete.”
Rutan and Allen collected their $10 million X prize and a five-foot tall trophy at a ceremony in early November at the Science Center. Maryniak has an important message for St. Louis. If rockets do indeed start taking visitors on starry vacations, St. Louis should get much of the credit.
“St. Louis has done it again in the aerospace field,” he says. “St. Louis still has moxie and has people who take risks.”
LUCKY LUEPKER
By Glen Sparks
Especially in the last decade of his long life, Martin Luepker Sr. spoke about the big, blue skies of the 1920s, a little bi-plane called the “Canuck,” and the aviator he knew as “Slim.”
 St. Louisan Martin Luepker Sr. had a barnstorming business with “Slim”, a.k.a.: Charles Lindbergh prior to his historic transatlantic flight. |
|
“If he could find someone to tell his story to, that would make his day,” says his son, Martin Luepker II, the owner of the Feasting Fox Restaurant in south St. Louis. “Get him in front of his friends at the Knights of Columbus or the bowling team, and he might tell stories all night.”
Leon Klink, Martin Sr.’s good friend, bought the Canuck in 1923. He wanted to fix it up and sell it at a tidy profit. But he and Luepker didn’t know how to fly. To get the Canuck off the ground, the duo needed help. Ask “Slim,” one man at Lambert Field suggested.
Yes, “Slim,” could fly. The 6-foot-3 Charles Lindbergh, 21, from Little Falls, Minn., had started flying about a year earlier. He had come south in 1923 to find work as a pilot at Lambert. The top fliers at Lambert couldn’t stop laughing at the modest plane that Slim flew, though.
He needed a bigger, faster airplane. Klink and Luepker needed an instructor. It didn’t take long for the three men to get together, and for Lindbergh to take the Canuck for some spins above St. Louis.
The future hero followed a strict schedule: fly during the day and sleep in an airline hanger at night. The Luepkers often invited him for dinner at their south St. Louis home. “As I understand it, he was part of the family, but other families may have invited him over, too,” Martin Sr.’s grandson, Martin Luepker III, says. “The life of a flier.”
To make a little money, Slim went barnstorming. Just about every county fair in the 1920s booked a barnstormer. Fairgoers handed over five bucks and risked life and limb to take a ride in Lindbergh’s “flying coffin.” Luepker acted as a one-man support team. While Lindbergh and Klink flew ahead, he threw repair parts, some extra gasoline and assorted gadgets and gizmos into a Cadillac and trailed behind. The partners could make $300 on a bright, clear day.
Luepker and Klink often celebrated their success with a bottle of whiskey. Lindbergh, soon to be a hero to every man, woman and child in the United States and beyond, never imbibed. Lindbergh didn’t drink whiskey and he didn’t guzzle beer. He didn’t puff on cigars or cigarettes, either. Heck, he didn’t even cuss. “(He was) a little quiet, I think,” Luepker III says.
The trio drifted apart before Lindbergh took off on his historic transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Luepker got out of the aviation business and went to work at the family heating and cooling store. But he kept on telling the tale. He died in 1996 at the age of 88.
“Everyone knew he was the furnace man,” Luepker III says. “Everyone knew him as the furnace man who knew Lindbergh, if you want to go a little bit further.”
BIG DREAM, BIG CHECK
By Glen Sparks
Pictured with the $10 million Ansari X Prize check are, from left: Burt Rutan; Gregg Maryniak; Paul Allen; Bob Weiss; and Peter Diamandis. In the background are members of the Parkway West High School marching band. |
|
The winning Ansari X Prize team collected a $10 million check on a beautiful Saturday morning on Nov. 6 in St. Louis. Some of the world’s top aviation experts and business moguls gathered on the athletic field at St. Louis University High School for the ceremony.
Speakers praised St. Louis for
making the X Prize possible. The X Prize headquarters are in Chesterfield and prominent local St. Louisans, including St. Louis Science Center President Doug King and Enterprise Rent-A-Car head Andrew Taylor, make up the New Spirit of St. Louis Foundation. Each member of the foundation contributed $25,000 to help fund the X Prize.
“Thank you, St. Louis,” X Prize Chairman Peter Diamandis said. “Thank you, St. Louis.”
Diamandis announced the creation of the X Prize at a May 18, 1996, press conference underneath the Gateway Arch. At the time, the X Prize didn’t have anywhere near $10 million and there were no teams competing for the prize. “We had a dream,” Diamandis said.
Burt Rutan, the legendary aviation designer, put that dream into action. The founder of Scaled Composites, an aerospace firm in Mojave, Calif., Rutan created the plane that pilots Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill flew into space.
Rutan said he plans to devote the rest of his career to designing spaceships. St. Louis may play a prominent role once again in the history of spaceflight, Rutan said. Engineers at the old McDonnell Aircraft Co. built the original Gemini and Mercury space capsules.
“Companies (such as Boeing Corp. in St. Louis) are going to be building spaceships in a few years. They just don’t know it yet,” said Rutan, who worked on the F-4 program at McDonnell in the 1960s and the F-15 program in the ‘70s. “It’s like IBM. It didn’t know in the early 1970s that it would be building low-cost computers for people. Much of it (St. Louis’ ultimate role in building spaceships) depends on the efforts of the community.”
Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of the Microsoft Corp., funded the Scaled Composites team. He said at the ceremony that traveling to space fulfills a basic human desire. Richard Branson, another very rich man and the founder of Virgin Atlantic Airlines, plans to sell tickets for sub-orbital spaceflights at about $200,000 a person utilizing Rutan’s technology.
It is no longer a matter of “if” people will go on vacations to space, Diamandis said at the ceremony. “It’s a matter of ‘when.’”
Diamandis said, “St. Louis is not just the simply the Gateway to the West, but a Gateway to the Stars.”
Richard Fleming, president of the St. Louis RCGA, commented on the rich aerospace tradition in St. Louis. “We are even richer now thanks to the X Prize.”
Decades ago, the original Spirit of St. Louis funded Charles Lindbergh’s flight from New York to Paris. On Saturday, Lindbergh’s grandson encouraged everyone to reach for the stars.
“Isn’t this amazing?” asked Erik Lindbergh, who serves on the X Prize Foundation’s Board of Trustees. “This has opened people eyes to what is possible. The greatest accomplishment in all of this is that it has gotten kids to dream about space travel.”
Lindbergh added, “We absolutely could not have done this without the support here in St. Louis. |
IMPORTANT DATES IN AVIATION AND SPACE EXPLORATION HISTORY
NOVEMBER 21, 1783
Frenchman Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’ Arlandes are the first humans to travel in a balloon. They were airborne for 25 minutes above Paris and landed five miles away.
OCTOBER 22, 1797
Andre-Jacques Garnerin makes the first parachute jump. He drops about 2,300 feet over Monceau Park in Paris in a 23-foot diameter canvas parachute with a basket attached.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1852
Jules Henri Giffard is the first to fly in a balloon powered by steam engine. The “dirigible” reaches 6.7 mph on a flight from Paris to Trappe, France.
JULY 2, 1900
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany flies the first of the rigid-frame airships that bear his name. He travels three miles.
DECEMBER 17, 1903
Orville Wright takes off from Kitty Hawk, N.C. in the first-ever machine flight. He and his brother, Wilbur, had built the biplane. Orville traveled 120 feet in 12 seconds.
MAY 21, 1927
Nearly 150,000 screaming fans greet Charles Lindbergh as he lands in Paris, a little more than 33 hours and 3,614 miles after taking off from Roosevelt Field in New York.
JULY 15-22, 1933
Wiley Post flies a Lockheed Vega named “Winnie Mae” solo around the world (15,596 miles) in seven days, 18 hours and 49 minutes. In 1935, Post and the great humorist Will Rogers perished in a plane crash in Alaska.
OCTOBER 1, 1942
Robert Stanley, chief pilot for Bell Aircraft Corp., is the first American to fly a jet, the Bell XP-59 Airacomet, at Muroc Army Base, Calif.
OCTOBER 14, 1947
The legendary U.S. Air Force pilot Charles “Chuck” Yeager reaches Mach 1, or the speed of sound, flying the X-1 research plane above the high desert of southern California.
OCTOBER 4, 1957
The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial space satellite.
DECEMBER 10, 1958
National Airlines (later Pan Am) offers the first domestic jet passenger service in the United States, between New York City and Miami.
APRIL 12, 1961
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is the first person to travel to space, aboard Vostok 1.
MAY 5, 1961
Alan B. Shepard Jr., aboard St. Louis-built “Freedom 7,” is the first American to fly in space. |
|
|
|
|
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
