Paul Allen's dreams fuel new space race

By Andrew Garber
Seattle Times staff reporter

HARLEY SOLTES / THE SEATTLE TIMES At the Scaled Composites hangar at the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center in California, SpaceShipOne is mounted under "White Knight." The launch of the aircraft is set for 6:30 a.m. tomorrow.

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Rooms in the town's inns, from the Twenty Mule Motel to the Econo Lodge, are booked solid and RV parking spots are selling fast. Local officials expect a flood of cars on the highways leading into this desert community. Yet publicity doesn't seem to be the media-shy billionaire's goal. Nor does making money. The craft cost Allen more than $20 million to build and is in contention for a $10 million prize.

Here's Greg Bear's guess: "This is a science-fiction dream made real," says Bear, a popular sci-fi author who lives in Lynnwood and is involved with one of Allen's projects.

He notes that Allen, 51, the co-founder of Microsoft, got hooked on science fiction as a child after reading a book by Robert Heinlein, "Rocket Ship Galileo," which was about some high-school graduates who built a rocket ship in the desert. Now, years later, Allen has his own rocket in the desert.

While the whole thing has a surreal feel to it — with talk of civilian spaceports and the potential for a booming space-tourism industry — the people who built SpaceShipOne seem dead serious. It's not a game to them. This is about kicking manned spaceflight out of a decadeslong hiatus.

Allen, who rarely talks about what motivates him, acknowledges science fiction has played a role. "Science fiction definitely stimulated a large part of my thinking about some of these things," he said in an interview last week. "You always have to look at what's happening."

In addition to building SpaceShipOne, Allen has spent millions on the search for extraterrestrial life, started a project to build a computerized tutor smart enough to pass college-level tests in subjects such as chemistry and biology, and built his own Science Fiction Museum, which opened Friday at Seattle Center.

The key players Paul Allen, 51 Education: Attended Seattle's Lakeside School with Bill Gates; attended Washington State University. Background: Co-founded Microsoft with Gates in 1976 and remained the company's chief technologist until he left Microsoft in 1983. Allen acknowledges science fiction helped inspire some of his business and charitable ventures. Major business ventures and investments: Vulcan development company, Charter Communications, Portland Trail Blazers, Seattle Seahawks, DreamWorks SKG, Oxygen Media. Source: Who's Who, Vulcan Burt Rutan, 61 Education: California Polytechnic University, 1961-1965, B.S., aeronautical engineering. Third in graduating class. Numerous honorary degrees. Background: Became famous for building a privately funded airplane that in 1986 made the first flight around the world without refueling. Job: Founded Scaled Composites in 1982 to design research aircraft. Led the team that built SpaceShipOne. Source: Scaled Composites

"He sees that he has an opportunity with his wealth to try to take things that have been described as science fiction and see if they can actually play out," says Laura Rich, who wrote a 2002 unauthorized biography of Allen,

"You can see that kind of an approach across a lot of what he does," Rich says. "With technology, he has ideas, that he wants to see if he can make them happen. That's driven him always."

Capt. Kirk's chair

Allen's fascination with science fiction is perhaps most evident at his museum, located in a wing of the Experience Music Project. About half of the roughly 1,000 artifacts in the museum come from his personal collection.

There's a giant egg from the movie "Cocoon," a blaster gun from the TV show "Lost in Space," a spacesuit worn by Spock, a spaceship from the classic movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and, of course, Capt. Kirk's command chair from the USS Enterprise.

All of those items, and more, came from Allen, who spent $20 million on the 13,000 square-foot museum. Allen says he's never sat in Capt. Kirk's chair and doesn't handle the merchandise. "All of these pieces of memorabilia, when you curate something for a museum, you really want to preserve the way it appears and the character," he says. "I have held Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that's the extent of it."

Donna Shirley, who heads the science-fiction museum, says the collection shows "science fiction is an important factor in Paul's life. He just wanted to share it with the world."

Shirley, who once headed NASA's Mars exploration program, says Allen has a unique perspective on the world. "Science fiction and science interplay with each other constantly," she says. "I think Paul Allen is a real visionary. He sees these things as being connected."

Searching the heavens

The launch of SpaceShipOne When: 6:30 a.m. tomorrow Where: Mojave Desert What's at stake: If the flight is successful, it will be the first time a private, manned spacecraft has left Earth's atmosphere.

One part of the museum, for example, is devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Allen has invested $27 million in the effort, much of it helping to pay for the Allen Telescope Array, which will be capable of scanning up to a million stars for any signs of civilization.

The array, operated by the SETI Institute (the group's initials stand for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), is being built on top of a remote lava bed in Northern California. It will be made up 20-foot radio dishes, 350 in all, hooked together electronically to form the equivalent of a giant telescope. Three dishes are already built.

"There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue and it was a very interesting scientific question," Allen says.

"Is there a possible influence there, an underlying desire to have the question answered that was caused by reading innumerable science-fiction books? Probably that's somewhere in the background."

Likewise, Allen said a book by Gordon Dickson, "The Final Encyclopedia," helped inspire a project he's funding called Project Halo.

That effort is researching whether a computer, loaded with scientific knowledge, can be created to answer questions in plain English, like a teacher.

"A lot of these things are background," Allen said. Science fiction "planted a seed that has always stuck in my mind, about, well, why can't you put all of human knowledge into a computer."

The types of computer intelligence seen in science fiction won't be developed anytime soon, though, he says. "We're decades away, if not a century away, from getting anything that comes close to duplicating a large part of what the human brain does."

Final checks

Paul Allen's other science ventures The Allen Telescope Array is a cluster of 350 radio dishes under construction in Northern California that will scan the heavens for signs of civilization. Project Halo is an effort to research whether a computer loaded with scientific knowledge can answer questions in plain English. Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame opened Friday at Seattle Center.

That's not the case with SpaceShipOne.

Its mission to space this week must be a welcome relief for Allen, says Michael Malone, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, who has written extensively about the Silicon Valley and software industry.

Several wealthy people in the high-tech industry, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, are trying to build spaceships, he says.

"You can see guys, who have spent their entire lives with computer code, wanting to have something you can bang your fist against the side, and it makes a big roar and throws out lots of flames," he says. "This is a real honest-to-God, you build it and light the candle and blow it up. It must be nice to finally see what you're doing."

Workers used the final days before launch to attach the spaceship to its carrier jet and make final checks. On Friday, the antiseptic-looking hangar was busy with workers. Hoses and pumps chugged away. The nose cone over the cockpit was open as a crew worked. The rocket engine was in place, the giant nozzle sticking out the rear. Small letters on the fuselage read "A Paul G. Allen project."

	AP Paul Allen, left, and aviation engineer Burt Rutan

Burt Rutan, who led the team that built the spaceship for Allen, was running full tilt and seemed a bit stunned at the torrent of media request pouring in. His staff had to find a hangar to fit in an overflow crowd showing up for interviews today.

If everything goes as expected, at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow the three-seat rocket ship and its pilot will be carried by a twin-turbojet aircraft to an altitude of about 50,000 feet where it will be dropped from the carrier jet.

"The ship will take off right in front of (spectators)," Rutan said. "They will watch overhead as the rocket plume goes to space."

The rocket motor is expected to fire for about 80 seconds, pushing the craft to Mach 3 in a vertical climb. The spaceship is expected to reach an altitude of 62 miles before returning to Earth.

The craft's twin tails will be folded up for a shuttlecock effect as it re-enters the atmosphere. The pilot, not yet publicly identified, will reconfigure the ship back to a normal glider and land it like an airplane on the same runway from which it took off.

'Big risks'

The craft took years to design and build, with Allen providing the funding, in secret for most of that time.

The rocket ship is made almost entirely from graphite composite materials and contains little metal. It uses a hybrid rocket engine that burns a combination of liquid nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and rubber. Unlike the rockets that put satellites into orbit, its engine can be throttled.

Stuart Witt, who overseas the Mojave airport (officially named a civilian spaceport last week by the federal government), said the flight tomorrow is risky. "What is going to occur is a very dangerous feat. If it were easy, I don't think Burt would be interested," he says. "But it's not."

Rutan acknowledges there's some danger involved. "I don't want to water this down," he says. "We are taking big risks by going Mach 3 for the first time. We will be pulling five and a half G's on re-entry where we've only done three before. No question there are new risks there. But they aren't ones that are bigger than we've taken before."

If tomorrow's flight is successful, it will be the first time a private, manned spacecraft has left the Earth's atmosphere. SpaceShipOne is later expected to contend for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a competition to launch three people into suborbital space, bring them back safely and do it again within two weeks using the same vehicle.

Considering Allen's reported net worth of around $20 billion, the financial risk is peanuts. For the typical family in Washington state, it would be about the same as buying a model rocket kit.

But Allen's investment is helping manned space flight break out of a decadeslong holding pattern, Rutan says. "Everybody's been sitting, waiting for some new technology or for NASA to invent something," he says.

If SpaceShipOne succeeds, Allen may very well be looked on years from now as the person who kicked off private space travel, Rutan says. "This wouldn't have happened without him."

Andrew Garber: 360-943-9882 or agarber@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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