Hanging in the National Air and Space Museum’s Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall is SpaceShipOne, the winner of the Ansari XPrize in 2004. The $10 million prize was awarded for the first piloted, non-governmental spacecraft to fly twice in two weeks above 100 kilometers—the now widely accepted, if arbitrary, definition of where outer space begins. The XPrize’s aim was to stimulate private space tourism. A dozen years after the prize was awarded, we are still waiting for suborbital tourist flights to begin.
Julian Guthrie’s book about the XPrize, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Space Flight, is structured around intertwined biographical segments. The first half is largely about Peter Diamandis, the XPrize’s creator. The son of a doctor in the New York City suburbs, Diamandis was eight years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. He satisfied family expectations by finishing Harvard Medical School, but he remained obsessed with space.
When the “New Space” movement sprang up in the 1970s and 1980s out of frustration with NASA’s human spaceflight programs—stuck in low Earth orbit after the end of the Apollo missions—Diamandis became one of the movement’s most creative members. He and two friends formed Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, which targets high school and university students, and established the International Space University, which offers both a summer program and a master’s degree in space studies.
In the early 1990s, inspired by the Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh had won for the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, Diamandis decided to create the XPrize to stimulate spaceflight. However, he struggled for years to find sponsors for the prize money. Eventually he gave the Ansari family naming rights in return for a substantial donation. Diamandis then used that money to make a payment on an unusual insurance contract—effectively placing a bet that someone would win the prize before it expired at the end of 2004. If anyone successfully completed the challenge, the insurance payout would provide the $10 million reward.
The second half of the book features Burt Rutan, the famous aviation designer who created the prize-winning craft, and his team. Guthrie details the construction of Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, its test flights, the personal dramas of its pilots, and the team’s ultimate triumph. Alongside Rutan’s story, Guthrie includes chapters about Erik Lindbergh, who overcame physical disabilities to raise additional prize funds by restaging his grandfather’s 1927 flight, and other XPrize competitors, notably ones in Romania and Britain.
No one should mistake this work for history, or even objective journalism. Guthrie, an experienced freelance journalist, bases her account on interviews with participants she obviously admires. The subjects opened their diaries and personal documents to her—but those valuable sources deepen the book’s dependence on the principals’ points of view. The book also has an annoying quirk: Guthrie includes many asides in tiny print at the bottom of pages. But How to Make a Spaceship will be enjoyed by its intended audience and will provide a starting point for a more academic history.
One question Guthrie avoids is why a suborbital tourism market has been so slow to develop, despite the optimism in 2004. Clues can be found in SpaceShipOne’s test flights and in the 2014 crash of its successor, SpaceShipTwo, which resulted in the death of one of the copilots. Spaceflight was supposed to become routine, but Rutan’s winged design, with its unique mechanism for tilting the tail boom up during reentry, requires expert piloting. Piles of money are needed to build a spacecraft safe for tourists, and several suborbital ventures have already failed for lack of capital.
SpaceShipTwo continues because of the deep pockets of Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who bought the rights to Rutan’s technology for his company Virgin Galactic and who wrote the foreword for How to Make a Spaceship. However, Virgin Galactic only recently resumed test flights and may soon be surpassed by its rival Blue Origin, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin’s automated, vertically launched New Shepard rocket includes a booster that can be recovered and reused and a crew capsule for a parachute landing. It has already flown without passengers; Blue Origin plans to launch employees this year and tourists next year. Bezos and Elon Musk of SpaceX, who appear briefly in How to Make a Spaceship, have displaced Guthrie’s main actors to become the new faces of New Space. Perhaps the next few years will produce the space-tourism breakthrough that Diamandis has long tried to facilitate.
Michael J. Neufeld is a senior curator in the space history department of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He has authored or edited eight books, notably Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). His article, “The Difficult Birth of NASA’s Pluto Mission,” appeared in Physics Today’s April 2016 issue (page 40).
