The engineering and technology required to send humans into space are still so complex and seemingly improbable that they're hard to grasp, which may be why some dismiss the whole endeavor as arrogant, wasteful, and even dull. Or maybe the problem is that up to this point, space travel has mostly been a government program, which means that every accidental explosion or fruitless fact-finding mission gets weighed against the food, shelter, medicine, and education not provided to the needy. That dilemma was the impetus for "The X Prize," a $10 million bounty bestowed on the first private aircraft to ascend to 100 kilometers, return safely, then repeat the feat within two weeks. For all the talk about NASA's tangential benefits to mankind, "X Prize" founder Peter Diamandis realized that until private companies start making money off space travel, most Americans would have a hard time thinking of it as anything more than an expensive hobby.
Michael Belfiore's Rocketeers: How A Visionary Band Of Business Leaders, Engineers, And Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space documents the race for the prize, and in particular, the efforts made by the team behind SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million on October 4, 2004. But the real story is what's happened since. NASA has attempted to farm out more of its projects to private contractors, while some congressmen have been pushing for the FAA to ban private space flights, and billionaires worldwide have been making deposits for their own future trip beyond Earth's gravity. At stake, as always: Who can claim ownership of something as ethereal as the sky?
Belfiore is a science-fiction author turned journalist, and he approaches this story more as a fan than a skeptic. He frequently writes in the first person, and sometimes describes weather conditions and flight patterns in pulpy prose. He's also less interested in the potential legal ramifications of letting the plutocrats run riot in the stratosphere than he is in praising their moxie. Still, Rocketeers makes for a fascinating postscript to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, explaining how the drive for adventure and impossible challenges migrated to the private sector. And given the recentness of the developments described in the book, Rocketeers may be a prologue rather than a postscript.