Last month, we recounted how the Wright Brothers created the rudimentary aircraft that ultimately led to the modern aviation industry. The story of their remarkable success has since passed into legend, but very few know of the colossal failure of the Wright Brothers’ government-funded competitor, Dr. Samuel Langley.
Langley was the director of the Smithsonian Institution at the turn of the 20th century, and he had received a staggering $70,000 federal grant to produce a working heavier-than-air flying machine, a sum of money 35 times larger than what the Wrights spent on their own glider. Langley’s efforts produced a contraption that was launched via catapult from a houseboat on the Potomac River. Two months prior to the triumph at Kitty Hawk, Langley’s prototype was flung into the air, only to plunge seconds later into the chilly river waters.
This episode, largely forgotten by history, has practical application in the 21st century as we consider the potential for privately funded space travel.
Granted, governmental support of space travel has been far more efficacious than the $70,000 wasted on Langley’s catapult. Publically funded projects got us into orbit and, ultimately, to the moon and back. Indeed, the conventional wisdom has always presumed that space travel presents such a massive challenge that only a government’s resources are adequate to confront it. Yet the entrepreneurial spirit that inspired Orville and Wilbur Wright is alive and well among many who are seeking privately funded means to explore the final frontier.
Consider famed inventor Elon Musk, whose company, SpaceX, created the Falcon 9 rocket, which last month successfully launched, then returned safely to earth and can be reused for multiple space flights. He has called Falcon 9 “the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space,” and he may well be right. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, is developing a similar rocket. British billionaire Richard Branson has already booked 700 people for rides on his “spaceline” that he calls Virgin Galactic, a near-orbital taxi service that will transport passengers 50 miles above the earth and allow them to become “space tourists.” Musk and SpaceX are not content to linger in earth orbit and are actively exploring ways to mine the moon and eventually go to Mars.
And why not? It may seem implausible, or even outrageous, to imagine that eccentric billionaires will get to the Red Planet before NASA does. But Samuel Langley stands as a testament to the fact that government backing is no guarantee of success. Scrappy entrepreneurs shocked the world with heavier-than-air flight at the beginning of the 20th century, and we ought not be surprised if the same is true of space travel in the second decade of the 21st.