PARIS — Europe's
biggest aerospace company, EADS, has concluded that carrying wealthy tourists
to 100 kilometers in altitude for several minutes of weightlessness could be a
multibillion-dollar industry in 20 years and is seeking co-investors to build a
rocket plane it already has designed.
EADS's
Astrium division, prime contractor for Ariane 5 rockets and for Europe's
contribution to the international space
station, said a group of its engineers has spent two years quietly
designing a vehicle
that looks like a business jet with exceptionally long wings and a rocket
engine powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The company unveiled the
project here June 13.
Taking off
from an as-yet undetermined spaceport using two conventional jet engines, the
plane would climb to 12 kilometers in altitude before its rocket engine
ignites, powering the vehicle through the atmosphere and into a coast phase
whose 100-kilometer apogee would provide passengers with one and one-half
minutes of near-zero-gravity experience.
The round
trip would last about 90 minutes. The plane would carry four passengers and a
pilot, with the passengers each paying about 200,000 euros ($267,000) for the
experience.
Astrium
President Francois Auque said one side benefit of the project is to shatter the
cliche that established aerospace giants like EADS have lost their imagination
and sense of daring.
Auque said
Astrium and EADS have investigated the business model in recent months and
concluded that their project has sufficient advantages compared to similar efforts under way by
start-up companies in the United States to attract as many as 4,500 paying
customers per year by 2020.
At $267,000
per ticket, that customer volume would generate gross revenues of some $1.2
billion per year.
Auque said
the company has determined that designing and flight-qualifying its proposed
space plane would require 1 billion euros in investment. He said Astrium has
begun hunting for co-investors and would give itself until the end of this year
to round up the needed commitments before abandoning the project.
Astrium
Chief Technical Officer Robert Laine, who leads the Astrium team working on the
idea, declined to say how much of its own resources the company would be
willing to invest alongside its co-investors. "We will make our business plan
available to co-investors only," Laine said.
Laine said
project officials envision building five initial vehicles, with the planes
capable of being refurbished quickly enough to fly once per week.
He said
Astrium has surveyed other space-tourism
projects, mainly in the United States, and found most of them lacking in
engineering or business-model seriousness. "There are those who think you can
design a rocket plane in a garage," Laine said. "Suffice it to say that that is
not our niche."
Auque said
Astrium and its parent company have enough experience in designing Airbus
aircraft and rockets to be confident in their ability to design a craft that
meets the stringent safety and operating-cost constraints of a space-tourism business. "The big
part for us will be finding private finance partners. If we succeed, we will
open the door to private financing of space."
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