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Mars Panel Sees Affordable Space Travel

Posted on: Wednesday, 24 March 2004, 06:00 CST

ATLANTA - Everyday space travel could become affordable for tourists and sightseers within a few years, entrepreneurs and scientists contended Wednesday at a hearing on travel to the moon and then to Mars.

Space flight needs to become more of a private industry that is profitable for businesses and practical for people who aren't professional astronauts, said Peter Diamondis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

"What we need is a vibrant, real marketplace," said Diamondis, whose foundation is offering a $10 million award to a team that can pull off a space flight twice within two weeks. "We need thousands and millions of flights."

The meeting at the Georgia Institute of Technology is part of a series of public hearings before a presidential commission about the feasibility of the moon-Mars idea. The commission will report back to the president in June.

The panel said NASA should bid out many of its needs to private industry.

"We're looking for the model by which the private sector would invest in this," said commission chairman Pete Aldridge. "It does have something of value to the entrepreneurial spirit."

If private companies get involved in space travel, technology and safety will advance more quickly than it would relying on NASA alone, Diamondis said.

But private involvement has been too tall an order so far.

"We need to have a positive example of one company that has started up and done well in space. All of them have failed," said Elon Musk, founder of a company called SpaceX and the PayPal Internet commerce Web site. He spoke via satellite from Los Angeles.

Progress is difficult, Diamondis said, when whole programs stop after a disaster like the Challenger or Columbia explosions.

Space travel would become more reliable if it were more common, said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, a company that works with commercial rocket engines and liquid rocket fuel. He said the current 1-in-50 chance of a catastrophe is unacceptable.

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On the Net:

Moon-Mars commission: www.moontomars.org

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