All aboard the space bus

This year could finally see mankind scratch that space-bound itch and develop commercial, manned space-flight. But, says Russ Swan, that may not be what it seems…   

The age-old dream of spaceships being like buses is finally coming true, but not necessarily in the way we expected.  

We thought the space shuttle would be the vehicle to make off-planet travel cheap and routine, but this turned out to be expensive, complicated, and tragically unreliable. No, the way in which space craft have become like buses is that you wait ages for one to come along, and then six come at once.  

And, just like public transport, they all display banners saying 'Sorry, not in service'. 

There is at present only one way for a human to get into orbit, which is riding a Soyuz from Baikonur in Kazakhstan – unless you are Chinese, in which case the only way is riding a Shenzhou from Jiuquan, Inner Mongolia.   

That is about to change, and it looks like 2019 is the year we will finally see a new fleet of shiny crew-rated rockets. Half a century after humans left footprints on the moon, space is about to become much more accessible.  

Much whooping and hollering greeted the successful launch of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo last month, only nine years later than Richard Branson promised. It's a significant engineering achievement, but not quite what it seems. 

The craft is a development of SpaceShipOne which, in 2004, won the Ansari X-Prize for taking its pilot over the threshold of space – 100km altitude – twice within two weeks.  

SpaceShipTwo's December flight reached a maximum altitude of 83km – 17km short of the internationally-defined boundary. That didn’t stop Branson proclaiming that history had been made with a 'human spaceflight' that really wasn't.  

Nor did it stop both Nasa and the US Federal Aviation Administration endorsing the claim, announcing that pilots Mark Stucky and Fred Sturckow would be awarded astronaut wings for their adventure. Their motivation is clear: once again they can say that a US-built machine has carried US astronauts into space, even if nobody else acknowledges this short sub-orbital hop. 

It looks like 2019 is the year we will finally see a new fleet of shiny crew-rated rockets. Half a century after humans left footprints on the moon, space is about to become much more accessible

Branson boasts that he has spent about a billion dollars on his vanity project and, with each flight capable of carrying six passengers paying $250,000 each, the prospects for any financial return look bleak. He'd need to make around a thousand successful flights to break even – three times as many as all the crewed flights in history so far. 

At least Branson has a semi-working vehicle, which is more than can be said for Xcor. This space tourism start-up promised sub-orbital flights in its Lynx rocket plane, and persuaded 282 people to part with $100,000 each for a ride that never materialised. The company went bankrupt in late 2017, the latest in a parade of failed private space endeavours.  

Meanwhile, the bad boy of international high-tech business Elon Musk has been tweeting images of a shiny 1950s comic book spaceship called the Starship Hopper under construction. Surprisingly wrinkly, it looks like a polished-up grain silo with fins. It will reportedly be used only in the atmosphere to test take-off and landing systems.  

Elon, mate, I had a space hopper back in the 1970s. It was orange and when it went wrinkly you knew you had a problem.  

Musk's other spaceship, Dragon, is earning its keep as a reusable commercial cargo vehicle and has made 17 successful flights so far (plus one failure). A crew-rated variant is scheduled for launch next month, although without people on board. This, at last, could be the private vehicle to take people to the ISS and back. 

But in the race to build a true space bus, to take ordinary folk over the Karman Line and into the wild black yonder, the quiet man of the private space race may yet come through with a late winner. The world's richest person is the squillionaire Jeff Bezos and, like his fellow entrepreneurs Branson and Musk, he has high ambitions in space.  

His Blue Origin company promises to do for private spaceflight what online retailer Amazon did for shopping: make it easy and cheap (partly, it must be said, through questionable tax arrangements). The New Shepard rocket is, according to reports, just about ready for its first passenger-carrying suborbital flight. It might look like a penis (seriously, it does) but it has one quality that makes me hope it succeeds.  

Un-crewed test flights have taken it over the 100km line, and some have carried a crash test dummy. Demonstrating a sense of humour not common in this area, that dummy is called Mannequin Skywalker.