Today it costs over a billion dollars for a space shuttle flight. The cost… is fundamentally what's holding us back from becoming a space traveling civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species.

Today it costs over a billion dollars for a space shuttle flight. The cost… is fundamentally what's holding us back from becoming a space traveling civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species.

It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.

[What Space X ultimately contributes to space travel might please the government in other ways.] One of the significant innovations of Falcon V is that because it's got five engines on the main stage, it can actually lose an engine and reach orbit safely, ... If the space shuttle were to lose one of its solid rocket boosters the people on the shuttle would be doomed.

the Internet; changing the energy cycle from petroleum-based to solar-electric; and moving into space.

[He'd better be, because the new space race already is under way and competition is shaping up as fierce. Rutan's chief rival may ultimately be Elon Musk. A former Internet mogul who in 2002 sold his online payment company, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, Musk now runs SpaceX in El Segundo, Calif., which is developing an orbital space vehicle. Musk notes that making it into orbit requires going eight times faster and producing 65 times more rocket energy than a suborbital vehicle like SpaceShipOne. Musk has already put more than $50 million into SpaceX and says he is prepared to invest $50 million more. He expects it to take at least five years to get passengers into orbit. In the meantime, SpaceX is generating revenue by booking orders to launch satellites; its first such launch is scheduled for January.] Our earned revenue will be $35 million after a little more than two years of operation, ... By comparison, the X-Prize was a one-off of $10 million, and it took Burt something like five years to do it.