Holidays in Space

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy first voiced a goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth". It captured the public imagination. It was like Columbus all over again and you felt you were riding on the crest of a wave of human achievement.

National pride had its part to play, of course. The Space Race was essentially between the two great superpowers, America and Russia, and everyone supported one side or the other as if it were a global football competition.

The culmination, as everybody knows, was Neil Armstrong, who on 21st July 1969 set foot on the moon for the first time ever and uttered those immortal words, "That's one small step for man but one giant leap for mankind."

Everybody thought that by the end of the century we'd be taking holidays on the moon - or at the very least on a space station - but somehow this has never happened. After that first momentous landing, enthusiasm for space exploration seemed to slowly fizzle out. True, a few more astronauts walked on the moon, and there is a space shuttle which flies up and down regularly; there's even a half-built space station, but it's nothing like we imagined.

So what changed? Did we become bored with space? Did the shuttle disasters shake our faith in the value-versus-cost of space travel? Or did problems on Earth get worse and make us try to sort out hunger and poverty before embarking on such a costly exercise as space exploration?

The answer is actually far more mundane than that and like many things, it all comes down to money.

Space exploration seems to be extortionately expensive. We see it as something quite different from anything that has ever happened before. The Wright brothers' first flight, for example, seems quite straightforward and inexpensive when compared to colonising the moon. Space travel, by contrast, can only happen if literally billions of dollars are poured into it - and that's something only the taxes of the very richest nations could ever finance.

Or so we think.

In fact, human flight was exactly the same as space flight in that it is a challenge which takes place at the very cutting edge of technology. There is no difference. The Wright brothers didn't need to be funded by a national programme paid by taxes and nor should space. If they had, we might still be waiting for the first package holiday to Spain instead of waiting for the first package holiday to the Moon.

The Wright brothers used their own money to fund their experiments and eventually, as we all know, they succeeded at Kittyhawk in 1903. What we don't know is that their modern counterparts are doing exactly the same thing all over the world right now. Inventive and creative people are experimenting with the technology of space flight day in and day out and what's more, they're funding their work through raffles and barbeques!

Occasionally we see one of them in that last amusing sport on the news. They are usually shown as harmless eccentrics and we have a quiet chuckle before the next programme starts. But in reality, they are getting far closer than we think to solving some of the problems of space flight.

One thing that is driving their enthusiasm is the "X Prize". You may not have heard of it because it's not widely publicised. The X Prize is "a $10,000,000 prize to jumpstart the space tourism industry through competition between the most talented entrepreneurs and rocket experts in the world. The $10 Million cash prize will be awarded to the first team that:

• Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)
• Returns safely to Earth
• Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks

There are several people trying for it and at least two of them might even win it within the next year or two. It may seem strange, amid publicity about the enormous costs of the Shuttle programme and the pickles that NASA seems to get itself into, to hear that inventive characters are competing for a prize in the same arena. But it's true.

There's nothing new about prizes. In fact, more than 100 aviation incentive prizes were offered between 1905 and 1935 and they were the fuel which created today's multibillion dollar air transport industry. Louis Bleriot competed in many competitions but the one we remember him for was his channel crossing in 1909 when he pocketed £1000 offered by the Daily Mail. The first transatlantic crossing was on 15th June 1919 when Alcock and Brown won £10,000, also from the Daily Mail. The achievements of these early aviators captured the public imagination and whetted an appetite for transatlantic travel that culminated in today's packed jumbo jets.

Don't underestimate the power of prizes. The spirit of adventure that has driven mankind since we first left the caves is alive and well. It thrives in individuals and small companies such as Logotron who continually push the boundaries at the cutting edge of technologies. And in the case of the people working on space travel, the winner of the X Prize may just catch the public imagination as Bleriot did and generate an appetite for space travel that may be taking us on package holidays to the Moon rather sooner than we thought.