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Casino betting on Canada's entry in $10M space race

Andy Ogle
The Edmonton Journal


Monday, September 20, 2004





EDMONTON -- If all goes according to plan, a 45-year-old self-taught engineer from Toronto with about 25 hours of flying experience in light planes will become Canada's first private astronaut early next month.

Brian Feeney will achieve that heady goal by launching himself into space from a small airport in Kindersley, Sask., in an eight-metre-long cigar tube-shaped rocket carried to the edge of space by the world's largest reusable helium-filled balloon.

If it sounds like a bit of a gamble, then it's perhaps no coincidence that Feeney's lead backer is an Internet casino. And it's not just any casino, but the Golden Palace Casino, whose name was emblazoned on the chest of the infamous Canadian who crashed the Olympic diving event in Athens last month.

Feeney, team leader of the da Vinci Project, plans to give the Golden Palace even better exposure, making it the first casino in space by playing a laptop game of blackjack on its website during his three minutes or so of space flight. rock: Then after the balloon, the rocket, the crew capsule, laptop, Feeney and all come floating back to Earth, he'll try to do the whole thing again within two weeks.

Welcome to the wild and wacky world of the Ansari X Prize competition.

The X Prize is a $10-million US purse that will go to the first team to put a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying three people 100 kilometres into suborbital space twice within two weeks.

Aimed at kick-starting a private space tourism industry, the X Prize was created eight years ago by American businessman and space buff Peter Diamendis and has attracted 26 official entries. The $10-million prize is guaranteed only to the end of this year.

Of all the teams, only Feeney's da Vinci Project, and one other, have announced launch dates.

Unfortunately for Feeney, the other team is the American Scaled Composites team financed by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and led by legendary plane designer Burt Rutan. They've already hit that 100-kilometre goal once, using a rocket-glider called SpaceShipOne powered by laughing gas and burning rubber. But because it carried just the pilot and not the equivalent weight of two passengers, it wasn't considered an official X Prize flight.

Like Feeney's Wild Fire Mark VI, SpaceShipOne is carried aloft for launch, but not by a balloon. It's taken to about 50,000 feet under the belly of a mother ship called White Knight, a futuristic-looking twin turbojet with outstretched wings. Both White Knight and SpaceShipOne were invented by Rutan, best known for designing the Voyager, the first plane to go around the world without refuelling.

SpaceShipOne will make its first official flight for the X Prize three days before Feeney, on Sept. 29, from its base in the Mojave Desert 150 kilometres northeast of Los Angeles.

If both first flights are successful, that's when things could get really interesting.

Rutan has already said his team will attempt its second flight on Oct. 4. They have three rocket engines ready so they can make a third attempt if necessary within the two-week time frame.

Feeney doesn't want to speculate on how fast his turnaround time might be.

"We'll just have to see how things go on the first flight and what condition we're in to conduct a second flight," he said in a phone interview from the team's headquarters in Toronto.

"We know what the system requires. However, we do not know and will not know the condition of the spacecraft and the balloon etc., beyond the theory, till it comes down."

Feeney was at the Mojave Airport in June to watch SpaceShipOne's maiden space flight and is only too well aware that he's the underdog.

While he says the da Vinci project is the largest volunteer technology project in Canada and has several corporate backers, most have lent "in-kind" support.

The cash the project needed to really get off the ground didn't come through until the Golden Palace signed on.

When that happened, Feeney was finally able to give the X Prize foundation its required 60-day advance notice of a launch date, making Oct. 2 his earliest possible launch.

"We're very mindful of both his earlier flight date and his extremely competitive capabilities, having been backed by the third richest or so guy in the world when he needed funding," Feeney says of Rutan.

"On the other hand, I will yield no inch. We're standing up solid and we're going to go for it."

He's going for it from an unlikely spaceport -- the western Saskatchewan farm town of Kindersley, chosen partly because it's kilometres from anywhere in a relatively sparsely populated part of the world.

For their part, the townfolk of Kindersley, population 5,000, have wholeheartedly jumped on the da Vinci bandwagon, even if just two weeks before the launch they're still not entirely sure what to expect.

They've dubbed their town Cape Kindersley and are gearing up for an influx of media and visitors.

But nobody has any idea how many will come. Tim Crump, editor of the Kindersley Clarion, one of five area weeklies his family owns, has heard figures from 5,000 to 100,000. If it's the latter, the town will be hard-pressed to accommodate everybody, says Crump.

"We worked it out," Crump said. "If you have that many people, it would take every restaurant within 50 miles of Kindersley five hours just to feed them breakfast."

Whether the town can successfully pull off its role as host of a space first is one thing.

Whether Feeney can pull off the launch is another.

"At the very least," said Crump, "if he's successful, we'll be the answer to a trivia question -- the first place in Canada to put a man in space. You can never take that away from us."

People are beginning to get excited, says Kindersley Mayor Mike Hankewitch. Asked if he thinks it has already put Kindersley on the map, he said with a chuckle: "Well, Andy, you're talking to me and otherwise you'd have absolutely no reason to call small-town Saskatchewan.

"Especially if he's successful and does do the two launches, it will be just great for our community," he added.

"And then people will know, 'Oh, you're from Kindersley, the rocket launch.' And you know, home of the junior Clippers too, who were second best in the Royal Bank Cup last year."

Not surprisingly, Feeney and his team have their share of skeptics.

Ted Llewellyn, a University of Saskatchewan physicist and space expert, warns that with any kind of wind, and western Saskatchewan can be windy, the team could have trouble just launching its massive 60-metre tall balloon.

"I have some experience with balloon launches and lifting 8,000 pounds so that it does not pendulum, nor pull the support truck over is not a simple matter," he said in an e-mail.

Beyond that, he questioned how realistically the team can expect to control the rocket's flight and plot its trajectory. Even NASA, he notes, has an ascent trajectory that takes them over ocean to limit potential damage.

"While Saskatchewan has a low population density, it is not zero within the probable range boundary that is defined by a careful analysis of possible projectories.

"I certainly want him to succeed but I have no desire for everyone to be swept up in euphoria and then be considered country bumpkins as the magnitude of the problems becomes apparent," he said.

aogle@thejournal.canwest.com

VEHICLE AT-A-GLANCE

Name: Wild Fire MKVI

Dimensions: 8 metres long, 2 metres in diameter

Gross Takeoff Weight: 3,860 kilograms

Dry Weight: 1,660 kg

Crew Capsule: two-metre diameter sphere

Crew Environment: Pressurized to 1 atmosphere with pressure suits

Payload Capacity: 410 kg

Propulsion System: Single, pressure-fed, hybrid engine

Propellants: Nitrous Oxide and proprietary solid fuel

Total Thrust: 80,000 newtons

Reaction Control System: Cold gas nitrogen integrated with GPS and INS for flight guidance

Miscellaneous: Two drogue parachutes and two main parachutes on the capsule deploy, and it repeats again separately for the propulsion section during descent.

© The Edmonton Journal 2004

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