SpaceShipOne is the favourite to win the Ansari X Prize. Credit: © X Prize

If all goes according to plan, by early October SpaceShipOne will have become the first privately funded spacecraft to have carried a pilot and the weight of two people to 100 kilometres above Earth's surface, returned safely, and then repeated the journey within two weeks.

Those are the criteria that must be fulfilled for SpaceShipOne to claim the US$10-million Ansari X prize, donated by private benefactors "to jumpstart the space tourism industry".

There is a respectable tradition of scientific innovations being stimulated by cash prizes. French industry offered the rewards that prompted Jean-Baptiste Guimet to synthesize artificial ultramarine in 1828 and Louis Pasteur to find a way of making racemic acid in 1853. More recently, the $1-million prizes offered in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States for solving seven key maths problems have been a tempting stimulus to new discoveries.

The X prize has a political philosophy, which is supported by a little rewriting of history.

But the Ansari X prize is driven neither by the needs of industry nor by the enthusiasms of philanthropists. It has a political philosophy, which is supported by a little rewriting of history.

"We believe", the X prize creed states, "that spaceflight should be open to all - not just an elite cadre of government employees or the ultra-rich." Aviation was once just the way rich people travelled it argues; commercial forces have now brought it within reach of everyone.

Let's leave aside the fact that "everyone" here means everyone in a developed nation. It's the "elite cadre" that bothers me. This is the language of the libertarian right, which maintains that governments are always trying to obstruct our fundamental freedoms. Indeed, the X prize mission states: "Space provides freedom".

"Just as America became a symbol of hope for millions around the world," say the X prizers, "space offers the promise of freedom and opportunity to the billions living in the twenty-first century." Living in a dictatorship? Get on board and head for the stars!

Public against private

The image promoted by the X prize Foundation is that of selfish governments who developed space technology only to keep it for themselves, depriving the ordinary citizen of the chance to leave the planet.

Private industry, in contrast, will supposedly bring power to the people. What the foundation calls the New Race to Space® (you can never start commercialization too soon) "is more exciting than the US-Soviet space race of the 60's, because this time we'll get to go".

But depicting the original space race as some kind of competition between public and private enterprise that the US government quickly monopolized is completely false, not to say bizarre. It was, of course, all about demonstrating technological (and by implication, military and ideological) supremacy. As with the nuclear weapons programme, the immense sums of money involved were only liberated because of the military interests.

This is the language of the libertarian right, which maintains that governments are always trying to obstruct our fundamental freedoms.

Surprisingly, and encouragingly, the resulting Apollo programme was nonetheless something of a humanistic triumph, which is still rightly celebrated today. Yet this was at the same time just the friendlier face of the technology that began with V2s raining on London and went on to give us the intercontinental ballistic missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

As the X prize website implies, few sights are more inspiring to budding young scientists than a home-made rocket soaring skywards. Yet as the site's link to Rocketry Online soon makes clear, the amateur rocket-maker now has to struggle uncomfortably to find a balance between the freedom to build a projectile and the worry that someone might decide to pack the nose with explosive and fire it at the White House.

Space wars

To win the X prize the spacecraft must carry the pilot and the weight of two people to 100 kilometres above Earth's surface, return safely, and then repeat the journey within two weeks. Credit: © X Prize

Small wonder, perhaps, that the X prize elects instead to draw inspiration from the history of aviation, claiming that "an aviation prize in 1927 became the basis for today's $250 billion aviation industry."

That reward was the $25,000 Orteig prize, offered for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. By piloting the Spirit of St Louis on its famous voyage in 1927, Charles Lindbergh showed that "the principal barrier to commercial air travel was not a technological wall as much as a psychological one".

But wait, don't we cross the Atlantic today by jet aircraft? Where did they come from? The first jet plane, the German Heinkel He 178, powered by Hans von Ohain's engine, made its maiden flight in 1939, ten days before the beginning of the Second World War. By then, the British government had reconsidered its initial doubts about Frank Whittle's own design for jet propulsion, and the Pioneer prototype jet made its debut in 1941, funded by the British Air Ministry.

Once again, military necessity, not commercial entrepreneurship, was the force that made technological innovation viable.

There is no point in being coy about the role of military incentives in the advancement of science and technology. After all, it has a history far older than that of aviation and space science. But this does not suit the narrative the X prize needs, and so the foundation has transformed the story into one of private (yet populist) enterprise battling public (yet elitist) prevarication.

As an example of where this reasoning leads, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg suggests in The New Atlantis that the commercial space age would be further accelerated if the United States were to withdraw from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, because it "bans declarations of national sovereignty off-planet, and makes the defense of private property rights in space problematic".

How otherwise can McDonalds colonize the Moon (or should that be the Moon®)? Simberg neglects to mention that the treaty also outlaws the militarization of space. But no one would do a thing like that, would they?