Concorde and the Space Shuttle were the last products of the 20th Century's delusion that governmental fiat could produce economically viable transportation systems. Despite substantial cooking of the books, both programs failed to deliver on their promises. Market realities have finally killed the Concorde. The fate of the Shuttle, even more insulated from financial accountability, remains open.

Both programs had their genesis in national-prestige posturing. The Shuttle, or "National Space Transportation System," was designed to give NASA's human spaceflight division a continuing mission after the termination of the Apollo program. Concorde began as a showpiece of British-French political collaboration, in an effort to one-up both Soviet and American aviation efforts - although neither competitor ever fielded a supersonic jetliner.

The resultant airplane, while one of the most beautiful craft ever designed, was destructive of the ozone layer, so noisy that no nation would allow it to fly over populated areas, and so expensive that there were no commercial takers for the craft. Promised markets failed to develop, and the governments were forced to unload the airplanes onto their state-owned airlines. Even so, those airlines only took them at a price of 1 pound each - somewhat below the production cost to taxpayers of $34 billion in current dollars.

In an amusing aside, Richard Branson, the clown prince of capitalism, offered to buy the 12 remaining Concordes from their owners - at their original purchase price. His offer of 12 pounds cash was not accepted. Instead, British Airways will face a $132 million write-off, and Air France a loss of $65 million - just in the costs of retiring the fleet.

The demise of Concorde was due in part to a sense that the aging aircraft were becoming unsafe. A July 2000 crash on takeoff killed 113 people and grounded the fleet for 15 months. Safety concerns continued to plague operations, with a series of engine, rudder and nose cone problems reported through this past February, and pieces of the rudders falling off in flight at least six times.

The fleet of 13 Concordes entered commercial service in 1976, five years before the Shuttle began operations. Both seem to be technological wrong turns which have outlived their safe utility.

Making explicit the link between aviation's wrong turn and our lost spacefaring future, the editors of the New York Times concluded that "[a]lmost half a century after it was conceived - at a time when people assumed there would be passenger flights to the moon in the early 21st Century - the Concorde will remain the plane of tomorrow, even in retirement." The reason? "[T]he economics have never caught up with the technology."

The other major factor in the decision to terminate Concorde operations was the decline in the luxury travel market. Since September 11, long-distance air travel from the United States has dropped substantially. With the general global economic decline of the past few years, few companies were willing to pay up to $13,500 to fly an executive from London to New York, and fewer private individuals considered the adventure of supersonic flight worth the price. The aircraft have been flying at an average of 20% capacity.

Reading those statistics, it is hard to remain sanguine about the business plans of the entrepreneurial rocket companies. In many cases, they envision dependency on just that luxury adventure travel market claimed by the Concorde, a market which was never sufficient for profitability and now too small even to sustain subsidized operations.

If experienced companies like British Airways can't run a luxury aerospace operation - with free aircraft! - what hope is there for a suborbital-jaunt or quick-and-dirty orbital tourism operation in the hands of a startup company?

The lesson of Concorde seems to be "build it, and when the boom times end, they'll stay home." That notion shouldn't be rocket science. Anyone marketing an expensive, technologically risky luxury-tourism service in an era of war and recession had better be a rocket scientist - because they're clearly no kind of businessperson.

Aside from unadulterated wishful thinking, the "build it and they will come" mentality comes from a misunderstanding of the difference between utility and demand. Utility answers the question, does this thing have a purpose? Demand answers the market's question, do enough people actually want this thing at a price that will enable the producer to supply it? The first is objective, while the second has an important component of pure subjectivity - the sum of individuals' desires.

Space advocates have asserted for a generation that we need commercial suborbital and orbital craft, to enable a myriad useful services, from same-day package delivery between Tokyo and Los Angeles to quick disaster relief to the experience of weightlessness and the adventure of space flight.

All true, all irrelevant. Those things may well have great utility. The demand, the market for them, arguably does not exist.

Similarly, Boeing cancelled its plans for a luxury high-speed jetliner, the "Sonic Cruiser," when its customers passed on the glitzy offering. What they demanded was a fuel-efficient midsize aircraft. In response, Boeing will field the 7E7, offering lower operating costs to airlines and a cheaper ride to the public.

Cheap access, rather than luxury experience, seems to be the key to demand right now. To the extent that the entrepreneurial rocket companies succeed in driving launch costs down substantially, they may find themselves with a viable market. However, the price point is only one element of the equation. Equally critical is the element of desire.

Throughout history, many technologies have been developed only to languish for decades or centuries until there was sufficient public desire to sustain a market. The creative output of Leonardo da Vinci provides one example. In another, a substantial market for high-bandwidth internet services is just now emerging, three years after a telecom bust brought about by investors confusing utility - all the cool things broadband can do - and desire - does the average household care?.

Desire can be created and shaped. There was no pre-existing demand for desktop computing when Apple took the market by storm. Too savvy to rely solely on technology and utility, they used brilliant and engaging marketing to shape new desires. They created a new meme - "computers are cool" - and enabled it to propagate everywhere. Computers became something we wanted, rather than mere tools or sci-fi bogeymen.

Nobody's really succeeded in shaping the public desire for space, in crafting and spreading that killer meme, that Superbowl commercial that gets everybody thinking they just gotta have space. Without that one term of the market equation, even assuming technology, utility and price, without desire, we won't fly.

For a viable market for space services, each term of the equation is critical. The technology must be robust enough to handle the job. Concorde and Shuttle have operated right on the margins of sufficiency - a real market awaits the next generation's hardware. There must be utility for the service. Three-hour Atlantic crossings do have utility. In the Shuttle's case, finding unique utility for a craft tasked with doing so many different things is more challenging. And finally, there must be a desire for the service at a price that will sustain operations. Both Concorde and Shuttle failed this final test.

Concorde failed, and its operators have retired it. The Shuttle has failed as well, but a Congress and space agency isolated from fiscal responsibility will likely do the disservice of continuing its operations until the next disaster.

Designers of a next generation of aerospace services face a great challenge - to succeed where their predecessors failed. To design more robust technology, to provide greater utility, to offer their services at a fair price to buyer and seller - and above all, to inspire and satisfy our desire for space.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column � 2002 by John Carter McKnight, an Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation (http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Spacefaring) Views expressed herein are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy. Contact the author at [email protected]

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