Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (24 page)

“When I heard about the X-Prize flights and what Burt Rutan was doing at Mojave, I had to see it for myself,” says Anderson.
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After witnessing the historic flight of
SpaceShipOne
and the winning of the $10 million Ansari X-PRIZE, Anderson struck up a conversation with Chuck Lauer, the business director of Rocketplane.

“After the Rutan flight,” says Anderson, “I wrote on the back of Chuck Lauer’s business card ‘Reda Anderson to be Rocketplane’s 1st customer.’ I signed it, wrapped a dollar bill around it, and handed it back to Chuck.” Lauer, with a shocked expression, examined the offering, and said, “This looks like it has all the elements of a business contract.” And with a handshake, he had signed up Rocketplane’s first passenger, making Anderson the first person to sign a contract to go into space on a commercial vehicle.

Anderson’s motivations are complex but generally mirror what Futron predicted. Above all, Anderson values the experience of doing things that other people say can’t be done. “I like world-class events,” she says. Since she has already taken the ride on the Vomit Comet, it’s not the weightlessness that draws her to space. “I am mad that I am born with this short time frame. That irritates the hell out of me. My first question to God when I get to Heaven if there is such a place, I will ask he, she or it, ‘What is this 70-year life span? There is so much to do and only 70 years to do it.’” Anderson points out, “And I have to sleep one third of the time and bathe. What a waste of time!”
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As two of the first space explorers of the twenty-first century, Anderson and Ansari are iconoclasts by virtue of their willingness to challenge conventional notions of what people can do. They see challenges differently than most people and do not let the fear of uncertainty (or failure) prevent them from taking risks. That they are women—and in Ansari’s case, a woman from an Islamic country—underscores the uniqueness of what they are doing. Anderson, however, does not wear the feminist badge. For her, life is too short and the universe too large to waste a minute worrying about cultural or religious hang-ups. But she is not blind to the risks of this endeavor. When pushed on the issue of the possibility of death, she said, “I can’t really think of it that way. I don’t want to die. I want to come back in better shape than when I left.” Referring to the relativistic time dilatation of
spaceflight, she says, “At the speed I’ll be going, I will pick up a few nanoseconds of time relative to the folks on the ground.” But what if the odds of crashing were fifty-fifty? “I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t think the odds will be that bad.”

A Reality Check: The Risk Manager

Not everyone involved in private spaceflight is an iconoclast. This is a good thing, too. Although Anderson was probably correct in her assessment of the odds, you need someone to keep an objective eye on the actual risks. The odds are in her favor that her maiden voyage will be fine. But as David Dreman and Bill Miller illustrated in chapter 5, the perception of risk may be very different from the actual risks. This is where an objective third party comes in. With private spaceflight, the looming prospect of catastrophic failure casts a shadow over the rocketeers’ enthusiasm. The risk of death, however, is very real, and is part and parcel of space exploration. Even Rutan’s perfect safety record was tragically shattered on July 26, 2007. While engineers at Scaled were performing a static test of the engine that was to power Branson’s spaceship, the engine exploded, overturning cars and killing three people.

You cannot escape the fact that the romanticism of spaceflight is due, in large part, to the fact that astronauts put their lives on the line with every mission. The private spaceflight industry must walk a fine line between making it safe enough for citizens and maintaining the image of frontier explorer. The most common motivation, according to the Futron study, was the opportunity to become a pioneer (i.e., an iconoclast).

Enough people have been into space that we have a pretty good sense of the risk. For U.S. launches of all types of rockets (manned and unmanned), there has been about a 9 percent failure rate. The most common cause of failure is a propulsion malfunction, which typically results in the destruction of the rocket and its payload. For manned
spacecraft, the numbers are better, although whether they are good enough is a matter of personal opinion. The space shuttles have flown 115 missions, and two have had catastrophic malfunctions, for a failure rate of about 2 percent. Exact figures are not available for the Soviet program. Of the 450 or so people who have made it into space, approximately 25 have died in space-related accidents, giving a risk of death closer to 5 percent. For comparison with a similarly risky activity, climbing Mount Everest, 1,496 people had made the summit through 2001. During that same period, 172 people died in their attempts, for a death-to-summit ratio of 11.5 percent.

Ray Duffy, a senior vice president of Willis Inspace, insurance broker for the aerospace industry, knows these facts well. He is not an iconoclast. He places insurance programs for them. The absence of data and test flights in this new generation of private vehicles makes evaluating a risk an actuarial nightmare. “You can’t do it,” he says. That doesn’t mean that insurance policies won’t be written. “I believe there will be third-party liability coverage, but because the risks are unknown, the premium will be set by what the market will pay. Since these companies are small, and there aren’t many of them, this means that there won’t be enough premiums booked to pay the limits of liability in the event of a loss. In fact the global annual premium collected for all launch liability coverage is less than $10 million. The losses will then be paid by premiums collected for other aerospace risks.”

It’s more complicated than that. In the event of a failure, Duffy says, “lawyers will be lining up to sue everyone down the line from the prime to the guy who makes some widget used on the rocket. Will the part suppliers ask for indemnification from the prime? They should.”
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Rockets are a bit like automobile models and computer software in the sense that early versions have the highest risk of failure. Most rocket failures occur during the first three launches, and after that, bugs tend to get worked out, resulting in more reliable rockets. As a result of this failure pattern, launch liability insurance is highest for the maiden
voyages. Compared with the situation just ten years ago, however, rockets have become more reliable, and the growing database of launches has allowed underwriters to more accurately assess the risks of a given vehicle. But most relevant for the issue of personal spaceflight, says Duffy, is that the underwriters have not yet written any policies for passengers.

Shooting people into space is inherently risky, and while there is no track record in the personal spaceflight industry, it is simply a matter of time before a catastrophic failure. Nobody knows whether the risk of death is 1 in 10, 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000 but in the end, it doesn’t seem to matter to the passengers. Anderson is typical in this sense. She has placed her faith in George French and company. French says that he is risk averse, and this is precisely the attribute you would like for someone who has your life in his hands. Although it may seem crass, the CEOs and presidents of the companies that are competing to put people into space have a great deal more to lose than the passengers signing up for the ride. A catastrophic failure would rain down a series of investigations and lawsuits that not only would tank the offending company but could send officers to prison. And yet, these iconoclasts press on with their vision. Cognizant of the risk, but not paralyzed by fear of failure, they have begun to work together to define what will become the standards for safety in this industry. As in any business, there will be financial pressures to come up with the most cost-effective solution. Will safety be compromised? It’s too soon to say, but a growing cast of characters that includes people like Ray Duffy will keep an eye on it. And the companies that succeed will be the ones that don’t try to go it alone.

Rick Homans: The G-man with Social Intelligence

Spaceflight is not going to be like climbing Mount Everest. There is no federally mandated organization to certify a mountain climber’s ability and training to take novices to the top of the world. Safety will come because there are profits to be made for being safe. Foremost, there will
be government oversight—not just because that is the role of government (to ensure public welfare), but because it is in the best interests of the private ventures to have government oversight.

Shoot a rocket to any reasonable altitude—let alone a rocket with a person inside—and a flurry of federal agencies will rain down a world of hurt on you. Airspace, especially in the United States, is crowded. Up to about 40,000 feet, the air is filled with aircraft, and launching a rocket into this soup could have disastrous consequences. The FAA and the Department of Transportation (DOT) control the airspace, while NASA monitors outer space. The departments of Defense and Homeland Security monitor the airspace for missiles and hostile aircraft, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is tasked with controlling explosives, which are the same substances used to propel rockets. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) makes sure that the operation of rocket vehicles complies with rules to protect the public from potentially hazardous substances. The rocketeers, by and large, bemoan the alphabet soup of regulations with which they must comply, but they grudgingly acknowledge that government oversight is necessary to instill public confidence. It is also a lesson in how to sell a strange idea to the public through familiarity and reputation building.

Although a paying passenger on a rocket might assume a reasonable level of risk for dying, the same cannot be said of people on the ground. When the space shuttle
Columbia
disintegrated on reentry, debris was scattered from eastern Texas to Louisiana and covered an area of 28,000 square miles. Although nobody on the ground was injured, the risks of spaceflight were not limited to astronauts. Clearly, it is not possible to launch even a suborbital vehicle near a populated area, which rules out the coastal regions. All the companies with plans to send people into space will do so in the sparsely populated areas of the Southwest. And ground zero for these launch sites is where rocketry began in the United States: in the deserts of southeastern New Mexico. Nestled between the Old West town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the border
mayhem of El Paso, Texas, lies White Sands Missile Range. Named for its bleached white sand dunes, White Sands has witnessed the key developments in rocketry history. Over 100 miles long and 40 miles wide, White Sands is the only fully protected airspace over ground in the United States, which means that commercial aircraft never fly over this area. The first atomic bomb was detonated here on July 16, 1945. Werner von Braun came here after WWII to continue development of the V2 rockets he had created for Nazi Germany, and his work eventually led to the rockets that would carry men into space and to the moon.

White Sands, however, is a military facility and has not been available for public use. At least until the commercialization of spaceflight began to look like a reality. The Organ Mountains, which look like a series of bloated organ pipes thrusting up from the desert floor, run in a north-south line. White Sands lies mostly to the east of the ridge, and to the west there are only a few small towns. Hatch (pop. 1,673) is best known, relatively speaking, for its annual chili festival. A little farther north on I-25 is Truth or Consequences (pop. 7,289), which was originally called Hot Springs but changed its name in 1950 when the host of the popular radio show announced he would broadcast his program from the first town to rename itself after the show. Las Cruces (pop. 74,267) is the closest city of moderate size, and that is 75 miles to the south. But along the corridor between Hatch and Truth or Consequences, the future of private spaceflight will rise from the desert sands. It is a lesson in social networking.

The ever-popular governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, struck a remarkable deal with Richard Branson in 2005. Branson agreed to locate the base of operations for Virgin Galactic in this corner of New Mexico if the state would build a spaceport. Because of its proximity to White Sands and the abundance of sunny, dry weather, the Hatch region was selected as the ideal site. And although Branson and Richardson made a great public fanfare out of the deal, the real credit goes to a person who excels at bringing together iconoclasts in a tour de force of networking.

Rick Homans, whose official title is cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, is not your typical government bureaucrat. Homans has become the biggest booster in New Mexico government for the placement of Spaceport America in his state. His job was to bring new industries and jobs to New Mexico. No stranger to business, Homans had founded Starlight Media Group, a publisher of visitor’s guides, which he eventually grew to include the
New Mexico Business Weekly
in 1994. With political aspirations, Homans sold the newspaper in 2000 and began a run for mayor of Albuquerque the next year. Although he lost the mayoral bid, Homans’s campaign was notable for his lawsuit against Albuquerque’s campaign spending limit. At the time, the city limited campaign spending to double the mayor’s annual salary. Homans argued that such limits violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The district court agreed, and Homans went on to spend a record amount during the election. Although he received only 10 percent of the vote in a seven-way race, Homans’s gutsiness caught the attention of Bill Richardson, who hired him as deputy campaign director for his 2002 gubernatorial bid. Although Richardson didn’t realize it at the time, Homans was about to become the “connector” to space.