My first memories of anything larger than myself are of the space program, specifically the Apollo/ Soyuz mission in 1975. Certainly other things were happening - fallout from Watergate, the implosion of America’s adventurism in Southeast Asia, Gerald Ford, Springsteen - but all my seven-year-old self knew was that one minute I was watching Captain Kangaroo arguing with a moose and the next I was seeing two space capsules closing like lovers in the depths of space. I had a dim inkling from Walter Cronkite’s sonorous tones that something amazing was happening politically, two bitter enemies on Earth making a gesture of unprecedented goodwill high above it, but what I knew for sure was that it was the coolest damn thing I’d ever seen.

Little did I realize at the time that I was watching the beginning of the end of the golden age of NASA. By 1975, NASA had flown all the people to the moon that it was going to. The gigantic pissing contest between the United States and the Soviets was over, and we had nothing left to prove. NASA’s future lay in something called the space shuttle, a reusable craft that was supposed to make spaceflight something we would all eventually do and lead to the construction of those big-ass orbital stations like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and from there (dare we say it?) to Mars. Instead, NASA became bloated with bureaucracy, the tired bitch of the aeronautics industry, forced to peddle its ass to anyone who needed a satellite installed and serviced. Our astronauts became TV repairmen, the shuttle their truck. The only time space travel makes TV anymore is when a shuttle blows up. Even the International Space Station, the grand hope of the ’90s, sits in the sky waiting for somebody to realize its potential. The simple fact is that if America’s future lies in space, we can no longer depend on the government to get us there. It chewed up its dreamers and spit them out a long time ago.

Geeks on a Mission

But while NASA was busy collapsing under its own weight, a marvelous thing happened. The geeks went private, earned billions developing and exploiting new technologies and markets, conquered the Earth, and have now set their sights on the wild black yonder. Inspired by the visions of the science-fiction writers and the heady days of Shepard and Glenn and Armstrong, a growing cadre of entrepreneurs has begun a new space race, chronicled by science journalist Michael Belfiore in his new book Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books, 2007).

In often breathless prose, Belfiore, a frequent contributor to Popular Science, takes us along to meet the people of the NewSpace community who are working hard to make commercial spaceflight a reality in our lifetime. We meet Peter Diamandis, founder of the $10 million X PRIZE for the first private vehicle to achieve suborbital altitude twice in a row, and Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, whose SpaceShipOne did just that in 2004. We are reintroduced to the colorful music/ aviation mogul and certified danger freak Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic aspires to be the first fleet of passenger space-liners, based out of Spaceport America, now breaking ground in the New Mexico desert. Belfiore talks to Elon Musk, who is using the millions he earned inventing PayPal and selling it to eBay to build reusable rockets to deliver payloads at a fraction of NASA’s costs. And there’s Robert Bigelow, whose parents once had a close encounter and who built his Budget Suites of America empire solely for the purpose of financing his own space venture: fully functional, inflatable (and affordable) orbital structures.

In the shadow of these heavy-hitters are the do-it-yourselfers and backyard rocketmen - like something out of Homer Hickam’s remarkable memoir Rocket Boys or last year’s The Astronaut Farmer with Billy Bob Thornton - striving to realize their own dreams of stratospheric glory. Some are retired astronauts who took a pay cut in order to fly something better than a desk, some are engineers looking for a challenge or rocketry enthusiasts building ballistic missiles in their garages and launching them off the backs of modified roach coaches. All of them are nuts, but it’s the best kind of nuts, a vision of conquering the so-called final frontier, plus the brains, guts and obsessive mania to realize that vision no matter what. The things that unite the moguls and the mom-and-pops of NewSpace are the siren call of the void, the singular need to have hundreds of thousands of pounds of fiery thrust at their backs to hurl them into it, and an unwavering sense of space as not only their destiny but mankind’s as well.

The Bottom Line

The payoffs for privatized spaceflight, meanwhile, are enormous. As Belfiore reminds us, Earth is an island of rapidly depleting resources in an infinite sea of bounty, of asteroids rich in minerals that actually can be strip-mined with impunity, of the zero-g environment that can facilitate manufacturing on a colossal scale, and of unlimited, unencumbered solar power that can be collected and broadcast to earthbound receiving stations from geosynchronous satellites with 98 percent efficiency and negligible environmental impact, thus effectively ending our dependence on current energy sources. These sound like sci-fi dreams, but in fact have been viable options using existing technology for the last 40 years, lacking only the necessary vehicles and the human drive to implement them.

In 2004, President Bush shocked the nation when he announced a mandate to ramp up the space program, revive moon landings, and work toward a manned mission to Mars in what he called the Vision for Space Exploration. True to form, however, his condition for this mandate, that it be accomplished using existing technologies and providers, revealed the plan for what it was, an election-year executive bone thrown to Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon - in other words, a renewed commitment to the Republican party’s business buddies at the expense of an already stalled and beleaguered NASA, an agency that approaches Congress every year with its pressurized helmet in its hand begging for funding that never adequately materializes.

If anything positive can be derived from the Bush mandate, it’s that there is still powerful mojo in appealing to our longing for space travel. Perhaps it’s simply that we Americans have been too long without a frontier. Maybe it’s that we can’t stand the growing threat of Russian cosmonauts and Chinese taikonauts encroaching on our lead in space. Or maybe it’s something even more primal, a basic human need just to go. As Belfiore’s wild and thrilling report shows us, we are poised to go, thanks to a handful of mavericks and crazy dreamers toiling in the deserts and plains and wide-open spaces, in pitched battle with jealous gravity in order to bring us the universe - at affordable prices.

John G. Nettles