A small Poway, Calif.-based aerospace firm called SpaceDev, which makes components and vehicles for trips to space, was selling a satellite launch–the rights to name the mission, and to send a custom payload into orbit around Earth.
Several companies tried to grab the unusual opportunity. When the auction ended Thursday, the highest bid came in at more than $300,000; unfortunately, not enough to meet SpaceDev’s minimum price for launching such a flight. Still, SpaceDev CEO Jim Benson says the auction stunt was a success in one respect: it connected his firm with prospective customers who didn’t want to publicly bid on the mission but who might, in private, serve as viable alternatives to the arduous process for financing new trips to space. “We didn’t really expect to sell the mission,” Benson says. “That would have been icing on the cake.”
Benson, 58, is a former high-tech guy who couldn’t handle retirement in Colorado (too much snow) and who now may be the scrappiest, most resourceful space entrepreneur in the country. From his offices outside San Diego, the energetic, excitable Benson dreams of not only going to space himself but renewing the country’s push into the final frontier–a drive to be led by private companies instead of stodgy government bureaucracies like NASA. His five-year-old firm has already put one satellite into space, won more than $15 million in government contracts to manufacture other small space vehicles and begun to design its own low-cost, high-performance rocket, the Streaker. Its most impressive achievement was announced in October: SpaceDev won the competition to make the rocket motors for Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the craft that within the next few months could make the first, historic voyage into space by a private company.
Benson’s long-term goals are even grander: he wants to ensure humanity’s future in space. A technology “roadmap” on the SpaceDev web site starts with the production and delivery of micro satellites–which weigh less than 250 pounds and cost around $7 million, a 10th of conventional costs–and ends around 2025 with orbital space planes, space tourism and self-sustaining human settlements on other planets. “We are in the business of profitably building a private space program one step at a time, within the private sector and not on the backs of the taxpayers” says Benson from the International Lunar Conference in Hawaii, where he was giving a speech on property rights in space. “The ultimate goal is humans living, working and playing in space.”
Benson and his 30 employees operate out of 25,000 square feet of office space outside San Diego. The Southern California fires recently missed SpaceDev by a mere 100 yards. Many of his employees are rocket engineers who stayed in the area after defense contractor General Dynamics sold its rocket business to Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) in 1994.
Benson’s motives are rooted not in cash prizes but in fulfilling the dreams of his Kansas City childhood. After reading Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi masterpiece “I, Robot” in 1955, a 10-year-old Benson signed up for the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club. One of the (presumably many) privileges of membership was the receipt of a wallet-size card that promised the owner’s name would be added to a reservation list for moon tours, once such a service was offered (it was only a matter of time, they thought). He has copies of the card in his wallet and framed on his office wall.
He started SpaceDev with his own money in 1997 because he was tired of waiting for someone else to fulfill the promise of that membership card. One of his first moves was to capitalize on the innovation left over from the previous waves of private space companies that had failed to deliver on their promises and run out of cash. The America Rocket Co., AMROC, spent 10 years and millions of dollars trying to build so-called hybrid rocket engines that proved less toxic than solid fuel and more stable than liquid fuel. AMROC went out of business in 1995 after proving neither and casting doubt on the effectiveness of such fuel mixes. Benson bought AMROC’s intellectual property for a song and with new technology and tests at SpaceDev proved that combining liquid and solid fuel was stable, safe and efficient enough, at least, to get small payloads into orbit.
With that success, SpaceDev caught the eye of Burt Rutan. Rutan is famous as the designer of the Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling. Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, is also pursing the X Prize. It needed the motors to safely propel its sleek, white ship, SpaceShipOne, to an altitude of 60 miles. Benson’s hybrid motors, to be shipped to Scaled’s Mojave Desert headquarters later this year, will burn nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) and tire rubber.
When the rockets are tested during flight for the first time later this year, a human test pilot will be strapped into the spacecraft. Benson dismisses the possibility of catastrophe as a risk to be endured on a dangerous new frontier. “You do everything you can to reduce risk,” he says. “You can’t ever completely eliminate it. But if we are going to start a new space-tourism industry, a multibillion industry, it needs to be done in the private sector.”
Benson himself even wants to be among the first to fly on the new spacecraft. He’s entitled–just check out the old, frayed membership card in his wallet.
