Space cowboys: The maverick pioneers of galactic travel | Space

The 1987 order from the German government was clear: Shut down your operations in Libya. For Lutz Kayser, this marked the heartbreaking finale to his private rocketry enterprise, OTRAG, and to his dream of “making access to space affordable for everyone”.

Founded in Germany and based, in a series of bizarre turns, first in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then deep in the Libyan desert, OTRAG had developed an IKEA-like concept for rocket design, using mass-produced modular components that could be assembled into spacecraft of various shapes and sizes.

The two African countries both offered potentially ideal conditions for rocket launching: vast, unregulated spaces far from prying eyes. But when United States and Israeli intelligence came to suspect that Libya was coopting the programme for its own military ends, it meant the end of the line for OTRAG, given that Kayser and his colleagues could face criminal charges in their home country had they persisted. In a final, devastating twist, all of OTRAG’s equipment was seized by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, but its modular approach to rocketry would go on to influence later generations of aerospace players.

While government agencies sent Sputnik into orbit and put men on the moon, Kayser represented one of a succession of individual pioneers – incidentally all white and all male – who have endeavoured to conquer the skies despite being regularly dismissed by their contemporaries as absurd or deluded.

And although the second explosion this year of a SpaceX rocket presents another setback for CEO Elon Musk in his ultimate mission to colonise Mars, it is likely only a hiccup in the ongoing privatisation of aerospace, the roots of which go right back to the late 19th century.

The Russian grandfather of the space age

Born in 1857, the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is credited for laying the mathematical and theoretical foundations for rocketry. As the reclusive home-schooled child of a minor government official living in a log cabin about 200km (125 miles) southeast of Moscow, Tsiolkovsky developed an interest in mathematics and physics and then, reading the science fiction of Jules Verne, became enthralled by the possibility of space travel.

Although never formally educated, Tsiolkovsky went to Moscow and carried out his own research there under the influence of Nikolai Fyodorov, a proponent of “cosmism”, a philosophical movement at the time that integrated science, religion and metaphysics with a belief in the potential immortality of mankind and the harnessing of science for space exploration.

In contrast to the present archetype of “capitalist turned space crusader”, Tsiolkovsky went on to earn his living as a teacher in another remote part of southwest Russia. Beset by personal tragedies – including the suicide of his son, the loss of many of his research notes and manuscripts in a flood and the arrest of his daughter for revolutionary activities – Tsiolkovsky defied misfortune to publish almost 100 works on space travel and related subjects, including designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.

And in 1895, inspired by the newly constructed Eiffel Tower, Tsiolkovsky conceived the “space elevator”, a cable theoretically attached to the Earth somewhere along the equator and reaching well beyond the atmosphere, using centrifugal power from Earth’s rotation to counter downward gravity, keeping the cable upright and taut. The immensely long cable, according to Tsiolkovsky, would enable vehicles attached to the cable to carry people and cargo all the way up to a stationary space station and back again.

While that and many of his other ideas might seem far fetched even today, Tsiolkovsky is regarded as a theoretical grandfather of spaceflight. “Tsiolkovsky was the prophet of the Space Age,” Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Sputnik-era Soviet space programme, wrote in his 1934 book Rocket Flight in the Stratosphere. “His ideas and calculations formed the foundation of modern astronautics.”

Inspiration at the top of a cherry tree

Tsiolkovsky died in 1935, and although he never obtained the means to put his ideas into practice, other space pioneers of that era were developing similar theories and trying to execute them. One such figure was Robert H Goddard, the American engineer who built and launched the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket.

Goddard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882, also had a deep fascination with science and mechanics from an early age. Like Tsiolkovsky, he too was galvanised by science fiction, writing in his diary as a teenager about the HG Wells novel The War of the Worlds sparking the idea of space travel in his imagination.

Goddard grew up in a comfortable home as the son of a businessman and conducted experiments with kites, balloons and homemade fireworks. While climbing a cherry tree in his back yard, aged 17, he had a kind of epiphany, imagining a rocket capable of reaching Mars. This vision stayed with Goddard throughout his career and was the motivation behind his scientific curiosity and his concept of space travel. He later wrote in an unpublished autobiography, “I was a different boy when I descended the tree, for existence at last seemed very purposive.”

While working on his doctorate in physics at Clark University in Massachusetts, Goddard began experimenting with solid and liquid fuel propulsion, believing that rockets could be used for high-altitude research, atmospheric studies and eventually exploration of space.

He obtained patents in 1914 for a multistage rocket and a liquid-fuelled rocket engine and five years later published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, a groundbreaking book that outlined his theories on spaceflight, for example, that a rocket could function in the vacuum of space.

Goddard faced considerable scepticism from both his peers and the media. “He does not know the relation of action to reaction,” a 1920 New York Times editorial mocked, “and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Unfazed by the criticism, Goddard countered to a reporter: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it. Once realised, it becomes commonplace.”

On March 16, 1926, Goddard succeeded in launching the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts. Nicknamed “Nell”, the rocket flew for about 2.5 seconds, reaching a height of 12.5 metres (41ft) – seemingly unremarkable now but identified as a seminal moment in the evolution of rocketry.

Goddard went on to work with the US military on rocket-assisted takeoff systems for aircraft.

He died in 1945, not living long enough to learn that German scientists captured during World War II had revealed that the Nazi V-2 rocket programme was heavily influenced by Goddard’s work. Upon their release, a number of those scientists were invited to join NASA, meaning that Goddard’s theories were ultimately applied in the US mission to put a man on the moon.

And Goddard would no doubt have been amused to read the retraction by The New York Times of its derisory 1920 editorial, published just prior to the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.

“It is now definitely established,” the Times editors wrote, “that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.”

“The Times regrets the error.”

One of Goddard’s students of rocketry had been a man by the name of Edwin Aldrin, whose son Buzz Aldrin was an astronaut and the second person to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong.

Today, Goddard is recognised as a visionary of the space age, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is named in his honour.

Democratising space travel

As Goddard’s life was drawing to a close, another seminal character in private space exploration was still in his infancy. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1939, Lutz Theodor Kayser was spellbound by rocketry from his early childhood. He idolised Wernher von Braun, leader of Germany’s V-2 guided missile programme during World War II, who later became famous for his role in NASA. Witnessing Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, Kayser became captivated by the emerging Cold War space race between the US and the USSR.

At the University of Stuttgart studying rocket propulsion, Kayser came to the conclusion that existing space programmes were overreliant on highly complex and expensive systems and that there existed a possibility of far simpler, cost-efficient modular rocket design – a flat-pack-like approach to rocketry that could potentially democratise space travel and bring it within the grasp of people around the world.

Kayser joined the Working Group for Rocket Technology and Spaceflight, a student-led organisation that designed small-scale rockets and conducted test launches. He also connected with leading German aerospace figures such as Kurt Debus, a former Nazi scientist who later became an important figure in NASA.

Kayser’s vision was to develop a low-cost space transportation system independent of government control, challenging the assumption that space exploration could only be managed by state-run agencies, such as NASA and the Soviet space programme.

In 1975, backed by private investors, Kayser founded OTRAG (Orbital Transport und Raketen AG – Orbital Transport and Rocketry Ltd) with a unique concept: Instead of building a single large, expensive spacecraft, the idea was to manufacture modular rocket segments that could be mass-assembled in different configurations, enabling space expeditions to be cheaper and more frequent.

However, OTRAG faced a challenge in that launching rockets required access to vast and unrestricted land tracts – not readily available in Germany or indeed anywhere in Western Europe – leading Kayser to embark upon a rather outlandish and controversial strategy. Introduced to President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire by a fellow German businessman, Kayser negotiated the leasing of a 100,000sq-km (38,600sq-mile) launch site in a remote and underpopulated region of that country, enabling OTRAG to conduct its tests free from any regulations and far from any unwanted scrutiny. That apparent solution turned out to be its downfall.

Initial OTRAG test launches were apparently successful, but both Western and Soviet intelligence agencies began to speculate that the operation was secretly developing military missiles – German arms development being an especially sensitive issue after World War II. Mobutu was pressured by both NATO and the Eastern Bloc to shut down the entire programme, and in 1979, OTRAG had no option but to leave Zaire.

Undeterred, Kayser searched for an alternative location and found a warm welcome in Libya, whose fiercely independent President Gaddafi was only too willing to defy Western powers and host such a grandiose aerospace project. The Libyan desert provided another optimal test site, again without much regulatory control.

OTRAG conducted several test launches from the Sebha region of the Sahara, using multiple small engines, potentially enabling a “scalable” rocket system for various commercial or military applications.

But geopolitics interfered once again. The US and its NATO allies soon concluded that OTRAG’s technology could be applied to long-range ballistic missiles, and the CIA and Israel’s Mossad spy agencies both accused Libya of co-opting OTRAG for its own missile capabilities, potentially in league with North Korea and Pakistan.

By the mid-1980s, the resulting diplomatic and military pressure made it impossible for OTRAG to continue operating in Libya – hence the 1987 German government directive to cease all operations. The company shut down its base there in 1987, only for its assets to be seized by the Gaddafi regime, apparently, as suspected, to further its own missile development – an unsuccessful bid in the absence of Kayser’s blueprints and personal expertise.

This ended Kayser’s vision of accessible space travel, but surprisingly, he remained in Libya for another decade, teaching rocket science at a university in Tripoli. It is unclear why he chose to stay, but given the financial clout of Libya at that time, it could have simply been the temptation of a large, tax-free salary after his business losses.

Kayser withdrew from the public spotlight and died in 2017, aged 78, on a trip to India, but his work remains a notable chapter in the history of private rocketry. OTRAG is now recognised as a foundation stone of contemporary space travel, its impact seen for example in the “modularity” of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which uses nine identical engines in its first stage, and in the now common aerospace strategy of using relatively cheap, over-the-counter equipment instead of more expensive proprietary components.

The commercial space industry is born

Commercialisation of the aerospace industry was kick-started in earnest by an American man called Elbert Leander “Burt” Rutan. Born in 1943 in Estacada, Oregon, the young Rutan inherited his dentist father’s passion for aviation, sketching futuristic aircraft designs, testing model gliders and experimenting with wind tunnels.

With a degree in aerospace engineering from California Polytechnic State University, Rutan went on to work as a flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he gained experience with experimental aircraft and aerodynamics. He left the US air force in 1972 to found the Rutan Aircraft Factory in Mojave, California, aiming to produce easy-to-build, high-performance aircraft. Having succeeded with two planes – the light and fuel-efficient VariEze, and the ultra-lightweight Voyager – Rutan set his sights on space travel.

With funding from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – this connection between tech money and space travel being the shape of things to come – Rutan embarked upon Space Ship One, a “suborbital” spacecraft designed to go beyond the atmosphere but not make a full orbit of the Earth.

On June 21, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private spacecraft to reach outer space – that is, to get beyond Earth’s atmosphere – returning safely with a “feathering” re-entry system, allowing it to descend safely without complex heat shields.

This achievement, followed by the equally successful Space Ship Two – which was subsequently used and developed by the British entrepreneur Richard Branson in his Virgin Galactic space tourism enterprise – heralded the present “corporatisation” of space travel, underwritten by the financial masters of the universe.

“Welcome to the dawn of a new space age,” declared Branson upon the successful touchdown of his touristic spacecraft Galactic 01 on June 29, 2023 – provided, of course, that you have $600,000 for the suborbital ride. The 72-minute voyage takes passengers about 85km (53 miles) high, where they can experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth.

The corporate space race is now in full thrust, and it is perhaps only a matter of time before Musk and his archrival, Jeff Bezos, fulfil their respective ambitions to dispatch millions of human workers to the moon and onwards, begging the question: Is an interplanetary commute any more desirable than the kind we put up with here on Earth?

And just as modern aviation owes a debt to the dashing innovators who risked life and limb in the earliest attempts to fly, so too are today’s aerospace corporations beholden to the cosmic pioneers who showed that science fiction can become reality, that boyhood dreams can lead to breakthrough innovations and that the ideas of eccentric outliers can one day be universally accepted as genuine scientific advances.