Reprinted from: Advocates for Self-Government - Liberator Online (10/7/2004)

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, UNBELIEVABLE NEWS

by James W. Harris

Victorious Space Entrepreneurs Must Now Conquer Gov't Regulation

It's official: you can now buy tickets for an upcoming flight into space.

A new frontier for all mankind was blasted wide open Monday October 4, when the private spaceship SpaceShipOne reached a record altitude of 69.7 miles above the earth, then safely returned.

In doing so, the SpaceShipOne team won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for being the first private company to send a manned rocket into space twice within 14 days.

The goal of the X-Prize was to encourage private commercial spaceflight -- and now that dream is rocketing forward.

SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan says now his goal is to develop a space tourism industry at least 100 times safer than NASA's projects -- one that will also be safer than the first commercial airliners.

Virgin Atlantic airlines owner and renowned entrepreneur Richard Branson -- who several years ago said he was a libertarian -- has formed a partnership with SpaceShipOne and hopes to have a commercial spaceflight venture, Virgin Galactic, in operation by 2007, with multiple "spaceliners" and bases in several countries.

Indeed, he's already selling tickets -- and people are buying. The cost for the inaugural trip? Around $200,000 per person. Branson and Rutan both plan to be on that first flight.

Branson says their new venture will launch thousands of people into space in the next few years.

"We've had about five million hits on the Internet, of which 5,000 people said they'd be willing to pay the kind of money we're talking about," Branson said.

Branson said the initial high cost of tickets will quickly drop as the technology matures, just as has happened in so many other fields.

"It's an adventure where we hope to make money, because I don't think space has a future unless people make money," Branson said. "And the money we make will all be plowed back into developing space travel further."

Ironically, the principle challenges this new generation of space entrepreneurs face could well be government-erected barriers.

Speaking before a U.S. House of Representatives committee in June 26, 2001, the Cato Institute's Edward L. Hudgins made this clear:

"America's general regulatory regime -- and that part of it in particular that governs commercial space activities -- is the principal barrier to the expansion of those activities. If such a regime were in place earlier in this century, civil aviation would not have developed as it did and air travel might be as rare as space travel. If such a regime had been applied two decades ago to emerging personal computer, software and Internet firms, the communications and information revolution would have been stillborn."

However, we don't think anything will hold back humankind's expansion into space -- not even bureaucracy. This is indeed a dream whose time has come.

Sources:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/ss1/041004branson.html
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/108772/1/.html
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-eh062601.html

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