Who'll be first with star ship Private Enterprise?

We’ve put people on the moon and hundreds more into orbit. Yet more than 40 years after Yuri Gagarin’s momentous first circuit of the globe, space travel remains the prerogative of government agencies - Russian, American and, shortly, Chinese - which no longer rate manned space missions high on their priorities. Contrary to the interplanetary pioneering spirit and back-room boffinry which informed much early science fiction, private enterprise, so far, has failed to put a man into space.

Granted, there have been two "space tourists", Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, who flew in Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station for a cool £12 million or so each, but commercial space travel has failed to materialise.

This is about to change. As NASA chews over the report into the Columbia disaster, the prospect of suborbital excursion flights, zero-gravity orbital hotels, and even lunar resorts should loom a little closer within the next year, possibly even within the next few months, when the first private manned space flight blasts off in a bid to win the $10 million X Prize.

In an attempt to "jump-start the space tourism industry" through encouraging international competition, the prize will go to the first team privately to finance, build and launch a vehicle to carry three people to 100km (62.5 miles) above the Earth and return safely. The suborbital flight must be repeated, using the same vehicle, within two weeks.

With 24 teams from five countries registered, three of them from Britain, the deadline for the prize is 1 January, 2005 (when the competition’s insurance guarantee terminates), but some teams may make their attempts within a matter of months, although it seems unlikely any will do so around the resonant date of 17 December, the centenary of the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kittyhawk.

It is the pioneer days of flight which are part of the inspiration of the X Prize, founded by aerospace engineer and space activist Peter Diamandis and compared to the Orteig prize which prompted Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in 1927. "The year before Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, something in the order of 6,000 people flew in aeroplanes," said Mr Diamandis, who is now the president of the St Louis-based X Prize Foundation.

"The year after he made his historic flight, over 180,000 people took aeroplane rides. The market and the need for suborbital vehicles will grow significantly after the X Prize is won."

Announced in 1996, the prize has attracted a celebrity entourage that includes Mr Tito, the best-selling novelist Tom Clancy (who put up part of the prize money), former NASA administrator Dan Goldin, former pioneer astronauts John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, and the science fiction seer Arthur C Clarke, as well as two of Lindbergh’s grandchildren.

Among the front-runners are a California-based aerospace company, Scaled Composites, whose billionaire owner, Burt Rutan, was the designer of Voyager, the first aircraft to fly round the world non-stop, and whose X Prize attempt involves a distinctive-looking turbojet-powered "mother" aircraft, White Knight, which will provide a high-altitude launch platform for the small, suborbital SpaceShipOne.

There has been talk of Mr Rutan making an attempt on the prize as soon as December, although a spokeswoman for Scaled Composites said this week that this was unlikely.

Another of the entries, Interorbital Systems of Mojave, California, announced last month that its pilot would be a 16-year-old, Justin Houchin. He could be the first teenager into space - if he manages to raise the sponsorship towards his $50,000 ticket.

Building and launching a spaceship do not come cheap. Mr Rutan has his own fully developed aerospace company, while an anonymous backer recently contributed $25 million towards his attempt.

For Steve Bennett, the British self-made rocketeer currently rated as a contender, such back-up must seem enviable indeed. With his company, Starchaser Industries, based at Hyde, Cheshire, Mr Bennett has progressed from amateur rocketry to recently drop-testing a one-man capsule over the Red Lake test area in Arizona (he sky-dived down alongside it), and is about to test-fire the Churchill 3 rocket engine for his X Prize vehicle, Thunderbird.

Mr Bennett plans to pilot the eventual three-man capsule himself, and reckons his bid to become the world’s first astronaut aboard a privately built spaceship could happen within 18 months. For him, as for many other challengers, the big problem is cash. Starchaser has raised some £2 million - about half of the overall cost - through sponsorship, investors and an energetic publicity programme, including a competition to win one of the seats on the two required flights. Two of the other seats have been bought, for £250,000 each, by enthusiasts willing to risk the ride, while the third is still up for grabs at £500,000.

Mr Bennett appears undismayed by the multi-million funding of his competitor: "OK, this is a guy with a successful track record, and somebody’s put $25 million into his project so he can win a $10 million prize," he says of Mr Rutan. "But we’re not fazed by that. We have some pretty good scientists on our team, and we know where he is going to have problems.

"We’re still in with a very good chance," he added, "and we’re going to put Britain back into space."

If he wins, says Mr Bennett, some of the $10 million will be "re-invested in terms of making bigger and better rockets happen". Going by various recent analyses, he reckons that within ten years of someone winning the prize, the space tourism industry will be worth about $10 billion.

"A straight-up-straight-down, suborbital flight could initially cost about $100,000, or £65,000, and with market forces could come down to as little as £10,000."

In Canada, the X Prize has offered Scots-born Geoff Sheerin, 40, an industrial designer, the chance to fulfil dreams of space flight he has nursed since childhood. Based in London, Ontario, he and his team have gone back to basics and modelled their Canadian Arrow rocket on the V2 missile developed by the Germans during the Second World War.

"We needed a high-thrust engine, and the only one I knew of with plans in the public domain was the V2," he said. The resulting engine is "as low-tech as you can get". Mr Sheerin’s team, including a NASA-trained astronaut currently working for the Ukrainian space agency, who will pilot the vehicle, is ready to commence engine tests. He said: "We had hoped to do a flight before the end of this year, but now it looks like early next year."

Despite the lack of anything getting off the ground so far, the leisure business has long displayed a tentative interest in space travel. Pan Am started accepting reservations for commercial moon flights 35 years ago, prompted by the Pan Am spaceship featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, while around the same time a certain famous hotel chain proposed Lunar and Orbiter Hiltons.

More recently, Virginia-based Space Adventures, which organised the flights by Mr Tito and Mr Shuttleworth, has been negotiating a custom-built Soyuz spacecraft for its customers: the fare - return of course - will stand at around $20 million.

Apart from the tourism aspect, there are many who think that it is the private sector, rather than government agencies, which will ultimately carry the torch of manned space exploration. Among them is Britain’s Astronomer Royal and leading cosmologist, Sir Martin Rees, who points to the commercial sponsorship role in Britain’s Beagle 2 robot spacecraft currently on its way to Mars and who has urged the private sector to develop in that direction.

It sounds a far cry from one of Sir Martin’s predecessors as Astronomer Royal who, a few days before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, declared authoritatively that the idea of space travel was "utter bilge".

So don’t mock. You may regard the likes of Mr Bennett and Mr Sheerin as space cadets, but the Wright brothers, remember, were bicycle mechanics.

• For further details visit www.xprize.org

Aww man! Enough of the fundraiser posts!!!

Only YOU can make fundraiser posts go away. Please contribute!