STONE: Why did you fund this project?
ALLEN: I was looking for possible space-related endeavors that I could participate in. Burt is a very talented guy, and any projects you’d want to do, Burt is the person to talk to. He has such an innovative mind and a great team of people familiar with how you could [build] unusual vehicles. He and his team are experts at using carbon composites to build very light but very strong vehicles. And then the X Prize [a $10 million prize for the first private spacecraft to reach suborbital space] got announced. Through friends I met with Burt, and we hit it off right away. He started sketching ideas.
Why did you keep your investment a secret for so long?
Since the X Prize is a competition, I wanted to keep it under wraps. We have a modest budget, but maybe it is higher than some other teams. Keeping it secret helped give us the lead.
What were your thoughts about the risks of this project after the space-shuttle Columbia tragedy?
Anything like that heightens your awareness of the risks involved. But it’s not like Burt or I or any of his team weren’t aware of them. We didn’t stop work.
Are we on the verge of a commercial space-tourism industry?
We have shown that you can construct a vehicle like this with a modest budget. The big question is, how many people will sign up, and will they pay $50,000 to $200,000 to go on one of those flights. It’s not something I would contemplate unless I had partners willing to share the risk. I’m not personally really looking much beyond Monday, and then winning the X Prize.
The government doesn’t know how to regulate suborbital craft. Is it important to quickly set some standards?
It’s something you have to have in place for space tourism to become reality. Right now we are doing all these things as experimental flights. We have permission from the FAA to go Mach 2.5 straight up. There aren’t many vehicles that do that. I think it will be good for the government to encourage something like space tourism. Having a space-tourism experience, whether suborbital or orbital, within the reach of people would be an exciting prospect.
Have you ever considered paying $20 million to go to the International Space Station–the trip Dennis Tito took?
In SpaceShipOne you are taken to 57,000 feet and then dropped [from the carrier plane White Knight] and shot up into space. Then you are back on the ground within the hour. What Tito experienced is much more ambitious. He had to train to be an astronaut. I believe the catastrophic risks are higher. It is not something I thought about.
You have your Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, your investment in SETI [a nonprofit research center that looks for extraterrestrial life] and now SpaceShip-One. Are you trying to nudge humanity’s ambitions forward, or just investing in your own personal interests?
There’s nothing wrong with a good nudge now and then. I met with Carl Sagan years ago. He convinced me it was a worthy thing to keep funding SETI. And there is no other science-fiction museum. Sci-fi gets people thinking about the future of the planet and where technology is taking us. It’s a combination of my interests and trying to do something worthy and interesting, and, frankly, something like rocketry is very, very cool to be involved in. If you are a technologist by background, it doesn’t get much better than this.
What do you make of the president’s call for an expedition to Mars?
It’s what any president tries to do: lay out ambitious goals. But anything like going to Mars is a long-term project that is going to take many administrations. You have to look at the costs and benefits and study the best way to do it. Should it be a multinational, collaborative effort? I don’t know.
