Nasa v Tito - a 2001 space controversy

ROGER FRANKLIN traces billionaire space tourist Dennis Tito's long countdown to lift off.

NEW YORK - It really wasn't so long ago, certainly not in the grand cosmic scheme of things, that Nasa would have been over the moon about a fellow like billionaire investor Dennis Tito, the first space tourist.

Remember what it was like back then? If you are old enough to have stood awestruck in the backyard, searching the night sky for the bead of light that was John Glenn looping over the Southern Hemisphere in his Mercury capsule, the gee-whiz promise of those early years remains impossible to forget.

There were to be orbiting Hiltons, and an Orient Express for the busy businessman who simply had to get to Tokyo and back in, quite literally, the space of an afternoon.

Pan Am was taking reservations for its inaugural Moon Clipper, which it confidently predicted would be blasting off, well, sometime about now.

The vision was so clear, so detailed in its promise of things to come, true believers could almost take it for granted that the rocketliners' stewardesses would be wearing little silver dresses and Space Age go-go boots.

That was the way 2001 was supposed to be, so perhaps Tito's real offence - the one that has made his name a four-letter word around Nasa - is that he actually believed the space agency's talk of the coming commercialisation of space.

As a young mathematician plotting interplanetary trajectories at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Sixties, Tito dreamed of someday floating into orbit.

Trouble was, once he had traded science for stocks and made billions of dollars on Wall Street, Nasa's original vision was every bit as bankrupt as Pan Am, the airline it had designated as its official civilian space carrier.

Yet there was Tito, brandishing $US20 million ($47.5 million) of his own money to pay for a tourist-class seat on a space shuttle, and Nasa didn't want to know him.

When he persisted, the agency grew even nastier, so much so that he found himself flanked by armed guards whenever he made one of his regular trips to Nasa's Houston HQ to plead his case.

As a friend of the investment tycoon explained, "First, they treat him like a nut. Then he's a criminal. No wonder Dennis got pissed off."

So Tito turned to the cash-strapped Russians, whose need for hard currency made them only too happy to oblige. The 60-year-old billionaire was put through nine months of astronaut training at Star City in Siberia, pronounced fit to fly and slotted to blast off on board the Soyuz capsule that this week docked with the newly opened International Space Station.

Nasa went ballistic and has grown even more agitated about Tito's backdoor coup, especially now that he is actually getting the ride he paid for. First, the agency tried to ground Tito by claiming it could veto any crewmember it didn't like - a gambit that backfired when the Russians briefly boycotted joint training sessions with US astronauts in protest.

And right up until last week, when Tito's Energia rocket was sitting on the launch pad, Nasa was still trying to keep him on the ground. There was no room for the Soyuz capsule to dock with the space station, Nasa insisted, because the shuttle was occupying the only parking spot.

Rubbish, responded the Russians, who again called the Americans' bluff by going ahead with the launch exactly as planned.

Since then, in what can only be seen as a litany of petty spites, Nasa chief James Goldin has told a congressional committee that he will be billing the Russians for the extra expense he claims Tito's presence has cost America's taxpayers. Live TV broadcasts from the space station have been curtailed, and Nasa's PR unit has been cranking out press releases about the "incredible stress" Tito is placing on ground controllers and support staff.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. It was Nasa, after all, that returned Glenn to space on a mission that served no purpose other than winning a few brownie points with the septagenarian spaceman's colleagues in the US Senate, the men and women who control its budget.

Before that, it had taken two other congressmen on shuttle joy flights, and it had ignored its own technicians' warnings to abort the takeoff of the doomed shuttle Challenger.

As a committee of inquiry later found, one of the reasons for the forced launch was that teacher Christa MacAuliffe would have been forced to reschedule the televised lesson she was set to deliver from space. In other words, six people lost their lives for the sake of a publicity stunt.

All of which makes Nasa's attuitude toward Tito so much harder to comprehend. By the agency's own estimates, it costs around $US10,000 per pound to put a payload in orbit - so Tito's $US20 million ticket works out at a premium price of almost $US100,000 per every pound of bodyweight. Similarly, over the course of the past 10 years, Nasa has spurned a succession of aspiring rocket builders that claimed they could produce launch vehicles far more cheaply than the gold-plated models the agency currently buys from its select group of authorised suppliers. One group, underwritten in part by novelist Tom Clancy, spent more than $US300 million on a promising prototype before Nasa's indifference put it out of business last year.

"The lesson of Nasa's fight with Tito is clear," Cato Institute analyst Edward Hudgins said. "Top Nasa officials are determined to run their space station like the old Soviet apparatchiks ran their factories."

Ironically, rather than follow the lead of its ex-Communist adversary-turned-partner, Nasa's actions leave no doubt that its prime goal is to simply to remain in charge of a bureaucratic feifdom for which there is no economic rational. Yet a market appears to be there. One of the two companies that helped arrange Tito's contract with the Russians says it has more than 140 applicants prepared to pay similar amounts for the pleasure of an orbital jaunt.

The producers of the TV show Survivor are talking with Moscow about sending the winning contestant of a future series into space, and Titanic director James Cameron has said that he would pay $US20 million to blast off.

"There is no economic or scientific justification for the space station," begins Hudgins, "So the official to reaction to Tito - a man who makes no pretense that he is going into space for any reason other than personal pleasure - proves that Nasa is also aware of the fact. As a matter of policy, however, the agency just doesn't want anyone else to notice."