Elon Musk is aiming for Mars. Jeff Bezos is building “a road to space.” Richard Branson is selling gravity-defying joyrides. Among the New Space entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of talk about the future. But what about the past?
We think we know about the history of space. (Heck, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably lived through a lot of it!) Popularizations like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 have made the space race story common knowledge. It goes like this: The Soviets kick things off by blasting Sputnik, and then Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. The Americans respond by dropping Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and then 10 others, on the moon, where they play golf and rip around in a buggy. The Soviets up the stakes with a space station. The Americans meet the challenge with a space truck. And so on.
But those astronauts and cosmonauts alike were civil servants. Their doings were the antics of the great powers, the achievements of impossibly vast military-industrial complexes in a new Great Game. At its peak, NASA gobbled up nearly 5 percent of the United States’ annual budget. The strain of the Cold War on the Soviet balance sheet was a key reason that the state itself failed. Game over.
In the 21st century, NASA is moribund and the USSR is no more. There’s a new space race, different from the old clash of the nations. Space rivalry is now a competition between the world’s billionaires—who very much intend to reap a return on their capital investments. Mars, when and if Musk terraforms the planet, will be the greatest real estate play since Columbus planted a Spanish flag in the New World. Bezos’s road skyward will start here on Earth, next to the Amazon tollbooth. Branson has already sold several hundred tickets to the show and promises to begin giving tours later this year—and a once-in-a-lifetime space jaunt has got to be on at least a billion bucket lists. We’re living through the New Space story right now, and the next chapter is going to be a page-turner.
It should come as no surprise that New Space has a history too. Musk, Bezos, and Branson are not the first space entrepreneurs—they’re just the first successful ones. New Space has its own Apollo 13 story, its own near-miss spectacle. In the 1970s and early ’80s, there were three Americans, private citizens, who nearly made it past the Kármán line and into space proper. All three had the right stuff. Not only did these ancient astronauts build themselves a fully functional spaceship—the Volksrocket—but they had the means and the moxie to light it up.
You even know some of these would-have-beens by name, albeit not as astronauts. The first aspiring astronaut was Evel Knievel, already a celebrated daredevil before he turned to space. The second was Jeana Yeager, who. Each of them, except for a quirk of history, would have, should have, or could have been the first private astronaut to reach space. Knievel, who wrote the first check to finance the , washed out of Truax’s astronaut program after a flash of murderous anger. Yeager dropped out when she fell in love and decided to take another path. As for Truax himself, he was in his 70s when his rocket was finally ready, and he flunked out too: a last-minute failure of nerve.
