Selfies in Space Alexandra Witze Examines a Book on the Techheads Behind Commercial High-Altitude Travel

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TECHNOLOGY Selfies in space Alexandra Witze examines a book on the techheads behind commercial high-altitude travel.

n 4 October 2004, US test pilot Brian stomach-wrenching microgravity and harsh X Prize (see Nature 482, 469; 2012), and Binnie flew a winged wonder to radiation of space, humans have been push- Guthrie tracks Diamandis’s attempts to find space and back. The rocket-powered ing to go there since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri someone to fund it. OSpaceShipOne won a US$10-million prize for Gagarin became the first person to reach In 1996, he got an early boost from back- becoming the first commercial spaceplane — orbit in 1961. ers in St Louis, Missouri — the city whose a breakthrough meant to herald the birth of First among the motley racers is Peter investors had helped Charles Lindbergh to the space-tourism industry. A decade later, Diamandis, a serial dreamer who had fly from New York to Paris on the first solo its successor SpaceShipTwo broke apart dur- helped to found a student space-exploration transatlantic flight some 70 years before.

ing a test flight. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury group and an international space univer- Diamandis went on to cobble together for MARK GREENBERG/VIRGIN GALACTIC had made a control error, and was killed as a sity by the time he was 28. He is the kind of the $10-million lure. Enter the next group of result. The nascent business of take-a-selfie- technofanatic who tracks how many days he dreamers — those looking to win the money. in-space seemed as far from reality as ever. has been alive and is entranced by the fact Of these, the most technically adept was Burt Now, in How to Make a Spaceship, jour- that the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- Rutan, the contrarian aviation designer who nalist Julian Guthrie tackles the story of ogy numbers its buildings instead of naming recorded many firsts, including building the private spaceflight. Readers who want to them. Much of the book revolves around his broad-winged Voyager plane that circled the know about its early days will revel in her efforts to jump-start a private space indus- world in 1986 without stopping or refuel- charismatic sketches of the space geeks, try. Frustrated by can- ling. Rutan runs an eclectic company in entrepreneurs and aviation buffs who made celled space missions California’s Mojave desert, where engineers SpaceShipOne. Those looking for in-depth and hoping to open and test pilots push the boundaries of flight. analysis of how that history relates to today’s the final frontier to Backed by the deep pockets of Microsoft’s commercial spaceflight should look else- more than a select Paul Allen, Rutan decided to make a bid where. Space tourism remains a bucket-list cadre of astronauts, for the X Prize. He dreamt up the innova- thrill for billionaires, and NASA has adopted Diamandis and a few tive design in which SpaceShipOne dropped private spaceflight only to ferry science like-minded tech- from a carrier plane, ignited its engines and equipment, drinking water and extra bin heads gathered in a coasted to the arbitrarily designated point bags up to the International Space Station. Colorado mountain where space begins, 100 kilometres up. Guthrie’s earlier The Billionaire and the cabin in winter 1994. How to Make a Guthrie’s anecdotes illuminate Rutan’s Mechanic (Grove Press, 2013) dealt with There they hatched Spaceship: A Band environment more than the enigmatic man businessman Larry Ellison’s obsessive quest the concept of a lucra- of Renegades, and himself. We glimpse the angst of the spouse Epic Race, and the to win the America’s Cup yachting race. In tive award to spur the Birth of Private left behind as a test pilot soars into the sky How to Make a Spaceship, she deploys her development of com- Spaceflight in an experimental machine. We hear of skill to observe rich, driven enthusiasts rac- mercial spaceflight. It JULIAN GUTHRIE the engineer who in February 2003 lis- ing to get to the edge of space. Despite the became known as the Penguin: 2016. tened aghast to the news of the space shuttle

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Putative spaceplane Columbia coming SpaceShipTwo, held apart, underscoring under carrier plane that lives were at risk. Books in brief WhiteKnightTwo. Other colourful characters enter the Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade narrative. They include John Carmack, the Robert Cialdini Simon and Schuster (2016) video-game designer who founded Arma- Fittingly, Influence (William Morrow, 1984) became one of the most dillo Aerospace in Mesquite, Texas, to shoot influential studies in behavioural science, a triumph of field research for the prize; Steve Bennett, who sent his on persuasion and how to resist it by social psychologist Robert Starchaser rocket soaring above north- Cialdini. Here Cialdini turns the tables, analysing how to harness west England; and the Romanian Dumitru persuasion by “frontloading” attention and pinpointing patterns Popescu, who as an engineering student of association conducive to change. His trove of findings and case recruited his wife to help build rockets in studies covers how our focal points determine who we see as his father-in-law’s backyard. More famous influential, how babies can be “pre-suaded” to be helpful, and how names also emerge. Erik Lindbergh re- language can become a fulcrum in fraught negotiations. created his grandfather’s flight in a modern plane to cope with the emotional pressure of his family’s intense legacy and raise money Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow for the prize. Entrepreneurs Anousheh and Yuval Noah Harari Harvill Secker (2016) Amir Ansari used their personal fortune to Historian Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens (Harvill Secker, sponsor the X Prize (and, eventually, to buy 2014; see Nature 512, 369; 2014) was a trenchant treatise on Anousheh a ride to the International Space what he sees as our species’ resistible rise to global dominion. Station in 2006). British billionaire Richard In this equally acerbic forecast, Harari argues that the biological Branson ensured that an enormous Virgin paradigm that casts organisms as biochemical algorithms shaped logo was painted on the side of SpaceShipOne by natural selection could open the way to domination by networked so that the television cameras would catch it computer algorithms. He opines that, as search engines and social in the morning light. media absorb our life histories and artificial intelligence advances, Guthrie sketches the interplay between “dataism” may even make humanity obsolete. these personalities as they jostle towards the X Prize deadline of December 2004. In the end, no competitor came close to the scrappy The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Rutan, who won the purse with two flights Natural Disasters five days apart. Robert Muir-Wood Oneworld (2016) What remains unanswered is whether From the August earthquake in central Italy to the Fukushima all this geekiness more than a decade ago crisis of 2011, multitudes of ‘natural’ disasters are exacerbated by has truly transformed commercial space- shoddy construction, non-existent preparedness and political inertia. flight. In lieu of contributing to the X Prize, Disaster expert Robert Muir-Wood’s study is science in the round, entrepreneur Elon Musk founded SpaceX in spanning centuries of catastrophes, key figures such as seismologist Hawthorne, California, which is now ferry- Charles Richter, forecasting, the intricacies of insurance (multistorey ing cargo to the space station (and will soon concrete buildings are revealed as “weapons of mass destruction” in do the same with astronauts, along with a quake) — and a detailed, workable recipe for resilience. aerospace company Boeing). Its competitor Blue Origin, set up by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was barely known in 2004 but has Revenger since pioneered reusable suborbital rockets Alastair Reynolds Gollancz (2016) that could save costs. There may or may This latest science-fiction gem by astrophysicist Alastair Reynolds not be a long-term business case for private is a pacy space opera set in a far-future universe, where a broken spaceflight, but at the moment space tourism civilization hangs on in a phalanx of artificial worlds. Rebellious does not seem to be it. teenagers Fura and Adrana join the crew of a solar-sailed vessel, Ultimately, How To Make A Spaceship is riding the photon winds in search of lost technologies in the galactic about the entrepreneurial work needed to deeps. Reynolds makes the human story compelling in a narrative launch such a project; short shrift is given that, spiced with bizarre characters aplenty and propelled by to technical details and subsequent history. vengeance, smacks intriguingly of everything from Robert Louis The fatal SpaceShipTwo accident is relegated Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Mad Max. to an epilogue, and an engine-test explosion that killed three of Rutan’s employees in 2007 is not even mentioned. Yet Branson’s Sun Moon Earth Virgin Galactic continues to sell seats on Tyler Nordgren Basic (2016) future space flights for a quarter of a million On 21 August 2017, the United States will experience its first total dollars each. It expects to send a re-build of solar eclipse in 40 years. Astronomer Tyler Nordgren’s primer maps SpaceShipTwo into the skies on its first test essentials for that event, contextualized by a fascinating history flights later this year. ■ that sweeps us from Anaxagoras’ explanation of eclipses in the fifth century bc to Arthur Eddington’s test of Einstein’s theory of Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for general relativity during the May 1919 total eclipse. Nordgren is a Nature based in Boulder, Colorado. wonderful guide to both the science and the sensory thrills, such as e-mail: [email protected] the shimmer of Baily’s beads or the eerie twilight of totality. Barbara Kiser