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微软之父富翁保罗-艾伦的航空梦
http://www.sina.com.cn 2005/06/16 19:25  国际在线

  Paul G. Allen's first foray into rocketry, as he recalls it, was inauspicious.

  "My cousin and I tried to build a rocket out of an aluminum armchair leg," he said. At just 12 years old, the future billionaire raided his chemistry set for zinc and sulfur, and packed the fuel mixture into the tube. He got the formula right, but had not looked up the melting point of aluminum.

  "It made a great noise," he said, "and then melted into place."

  His rockets have gotten better since then, and a lot bigger, too. Mr. Allen, who became a co-founder of Microsoft, is responsible for SpaceShipOne, the pint-size manned rocket that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition last year as the first privately financed craft to fly to the cusp of space - nearly 70 miles up.

  Mr. Allen is not the designer; that is Burt Rutan, the legendary aeronautical engineer with the sideburns that look like sweeping air scoops. He is not one of the test pilots who made the competition-winning flights; they are Michael Melvill and Brian Binnie. Mr. Allen is, instead, the one who gets little glory but without whom nothing is possible - he is the guy who signs the checks. And he did what the rich do: he hired good people.

  The SpaceShipOne flight made him the best-known member of a growing club of high-tech thrillionaires, including the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who find themselves with money enough to fulfill their childhood fascination with space. Rick N. Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, a group that promotes public access to space, said the effort had become a geeky status symbol. "It's not good enough to have a Gulfstream V," he said. "Now you've got to have a rocket."

  Many self-professed "space geeks" say the possibility that entrepreneurs like Richard Branson of the Virgin Group may help regular people see the black sky - well, regular rich people, at least - has drawn away much of the excitement that government-financed human space efforts long enjoyed.

  "It's completely shifted," said Charles Lurio, a space consultant with an interest in private efforts that goes way beyond ardent. "This is where the action is, not at NASA."

  The new generation of deep-pockets space entrepreneurs includes Mr. Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, in Washington State, and quietly announced this year that he had bought 165,000 acres of land in West Texas as a base for his eventual launching operations.

  Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, created the rocket company SpaceX, and John Carmack, the creator of computer games like Doom and Quake, has been testing rocket designs through his company, Armadillo Aerospace near Dallas.

  The engine for Mr. Allen's craft was developed by SpaceDev, a company formed as a second act by another computer entrepreneur turned space man, Jim Benson. And Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, recently joined the board of the X Prize Foundation.

  The rise of the space money men is a unique moment in history, said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, a co-founder of the X Prize. "There is sufficient wealth controlled by individuals to start serious space efforts," he said.

  What's more, they are frustrated, he went on, adding: "The dreams and expectations that Apollo launched for all these entrepreneurs have failed to materialize. And in fact, those who look into it realize that the cost of going into space has gone up and the reliability has, effectively, gone down."

  For Mr. Allen, 52, SpaceShipOne was no set-it-and-forget-it bauble of a project. It was an expression of a lifelong passion, he said, a "love of science and technology, and what can be done with engineering."

  He recalled the widespread excitement in the 1960's about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, when "I really got enthralled, and probably more than most kids."

  Science became his fascination, and with a librarian as a father, he soon learned that there was a book to answer each of his innumerable questions. Like many children, he would go down to the five-and-dime and buy plastic rockets that could be filled with water and pumped up with air, whose compression built up launching pressure. But he took it further, checking out books to find out "how the heck a turbopump worked" at the age of 11.

  He devoured novels like "Rocketship Galileo," by Robert A. Heinlein, in which enterprising teenagers join forces with a scientist to build and fly a rocket to the Moon, and nonfiction books like "Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel," by Willy Ley. He recalled riding his bicycle to the local hobby shop and reaching for the top shelf, where there was a model of a space station along with Redstone and Atlas rockets.

  As the Moon shots of the Apollo program came to an end, however, Mr. Allen saw his voracious interest in the sciences expanding to other fields: chemistry, and - by the age of 15, when he met a teenager named Bill Gates - to computing.

  Even after starting Microsoft as a tiny software company in Albuquerque, he kept his interest in space alive. "At the back of my mind, there was always this desire, this inkling of desire, that someday I would try to do something with aerospace or rocketry," Mr. Allen said.

  He recalled flying to Florida with Charles Simonyi, a space-obsessed co-worker, to see the first shuttle launching in 1981. "I'm not sure that Bill Gates was happy that we even took off a weekend to do that," he said, since the company was preparing software for the IBM PC at the time.

  But the launching was worth any tension on the job. "The air basically vibrates," he recalled.

  "There are hundreds of thousands of people yelling, 'Go! Go! Go!' "

  In 1982, he learned he had Hodgkin's disease, and he withdrew from day-to-day work with Microsoft the next year. (The cancer has been in remission since 1985.) Microsoft made him a billionaire 20 times over, with the ability to invest wisely, unwisely - even, on occasion, frivolously. It gave him the luxury of being able to take gambles and make mistakes. Some of his huge early investments in what he called the "wired world" of media, interactive technologies and cable were duds.

  More recent investments in biotechnology, energy and real estate could prove more promising. He also owns two major-league sports teams, the Portland Trail Blazers in basketball and the Seattle Seahawks in football.

  And he has begun to put some of his wealth into sharing his enthusiasms with the world: he has given away hundreds of millions of dollars through philanthropy, has founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science and has created museums in Seattle devoted to rock 'n' roll and to science fiction.

  It is all of a piece, he said. Projects like the museums "try to plant those seeds of imagination" like the ones that carried him so far.

  In the past, amateur rocketry had been essentially a weekend pursuit that brought guys together for fun and fire. Cheap and powerful computing has brought down the cost and the amount of trouble it takes to design rockets, said John Wickman, an aerospace engineer who has written a popular guide to rocket making; amateur groups commonly send rockets to 30,000 or 40,000 feet, he said, at a cost of several thousand dollars.

  "You can get a couple of guys together, and if your wife won't kill you for spending money like that, you could probably pull it off," he said. But amateurs could take things only so far, and could not have hoped to create human-rated craft that could blast past the 328,000-foot line that the Ansari X Prize defined as the edge of space.

  Mr. Tumlinson says the tech entrepreneurs are accustomed to putting powerful technologies into the hands of individuals against enormous odds - a good foundation for the space business. "The current American space program is a passive activity that has no connection with those watching it or their children," he said. The new space race is different: "It's about 'you can do it.' "

  NASA officials past and present say it is not that easy. While they praise the achievements of the Rutan-Allen team, they point out that there is a vast difference between reaching the cusp of space, which NASA did in the 1960's, and building something that can withstand the punishing conditions of orbital space and re-entry.

  Sean O'Keefe, a former administrator of the agency, called SpaceShipOne's success "a great achievement," but also "a modest first step."

  The just-do-it adventurism of the SpaceShipOne project could never fly at NASA, he said, adding,

  "If I had authorized somebody to jump into a plastic airplane fueled by laughing gas in just a flight suit, there would have been a Congressional investigation the next day - whether it was successful or not."

  Mr. Allen understands the challenges better than most. He speaks knowledgeably about the amount of energy that must be dissipated when a vehicle returns from orbit and the various methods of dealing with the risks.

  "It's much harder to do orbital flight - much," he admitted. But his immediate goal is less grand: to lay the groundwork for businesses that will carry adventurers, briefly, into space. That is a realistic goal, he said. There are plenty of people who would pay for the experience, and "you could actually get a return on your investment dollar."

  He is licensing the innovations developed by Mr. Rutan, he went on, adding, "I am optimistic that I will have a good chance to get my money back."

  He says he spent about $20 million on the project, which is about what he earns in interest while flossing.

  In the meantime, he said, he has had a blast, having had a hand in "some of the aspirational part of what it means to be human." Standing in the control room for SpaceShipOne during the launchings, he said, his heart was in his throat and he felt deeply the risk that the pilots were taking.

  But he is in no rush to touch the rim of space himself. "After it's proven to be incredibly safe, I might consider it," he said. "I have a lot of things I want to see to fruition."

微软之父富翁保罗-艾伦的航空梦

  美国微软公司创始人之一、亿万富翁保罗-艾伦自幼酷爱航空,尽管少年时代的火箭升空计划均以失败告终,但这个航空迷在软件事业成功之后,却一直没有忘记自己儿时的梦想。

  据《纽约时报》6月14日报道,去年,他旗下的SpaceShipOne小型人造火箭创造了全世界首个私人飞行装置攀上70英里高空的纪录,并且赢得国际民间太空飞行器设计比赛X大奖的高达1000万美元的奖金。火箭的设计者并不是艾伦本人,而是传奇航空工程师波特-鲁坦。大赛中飞行工作小组的成员则是专业飞行员米歇尔-梅尔维尔和布赖恩-比尼尔。实际上艾伦得到的荣誉是最少的,然而他才是火箭计划中真正必不可少的人,正如同大多数富人所作的那样,他提出自己的计划并提供财力支持和选择合适的人选。

  SpaceShipOne的成功让艾伦在逐渐扩大的亿万富翁高科技圈子里声名鹊起。这个圈子中的成员全部是声名显赫的人物,如在线拍卖网站亚玛逊的创建人杰夫-贝佐斯,和艾伦一样,他如今对于航天的喜好也完全是延续儿时的梦想。专家们认为,普通企业家进入航空领域,将使得老百姓了解更多的业内信息,而一直由政府赞助的人类航空计划所带来的惊喜也会逐渐转移目标。“航空的重心发生了完全的改变”,太空咨询家查理斯-鲁日奥先生说,“是普通富翁创造了这些奇迹,而不再是美国国家航空局”。

  对于现年52岁的艾伦来说,SpaceShipOne已经超越了传统意义上的商务计划,它是生命热情的宣泄。“我深爱科学和技术,航空计划给了我这些”。在回忆上世纪60年代的往事时,艾伦说,当时的美国水星、双子星及阿波罗计划给他造成了极大的震撼。因为有一位身为图书管理员的父亲,年幼的艾伦有机会接触大量的书籍。就在同龄的孩子还在玩水枪时,艾伦已经开始研究水枪的水压原理了,当时他只有11岁。

  艾伦最喜欢的科幻小说是罗伯特-海莱茵所著的《伽利略火箭》,书中的主人公是一位科学家,亲自参与了登月火箭的制造和航空计划。另外一本名为《火箭、导弹以及空间旅行》的书也给艾伦的童年带来了极大的影响。直到现在,艾伦还能清楚地记得童年的事,他骑着自行车兴冲冲地赶往当地的商店,只不过因为那里货架的顶层有一个火箭和空间站的模型玩具。

  当阿波罗计划结束之后,艾伦发现自己深深迷恋上了航空以外的另一门科学——化学,对于化学的热情一直延续到与比尔-盖茨相识并创建了微软公司。即使在微软公司成立的初期,艾伦仍未放弃走向宇宙的梦想,“在我的脑海中,始终存在对于太空的渴望,有朝一日我会实现梦想”。

  1981年,艾伦和查理斯-西蒙尼,一位同样痴迷于航空的同事,坐飞机赶往佛罗里达去参观历史上第1艘航天飞机的发射。而当时艾伦和同事并不是在假期,他们正在为IBM PC的软件忙得焦头烂额,“不知道盖茨会不会对我们的这一决定感到生气,在那种紧要关头我们为了航天放弃了一整个周末”,艾伦回忆道,“不过到了现场,我们发现为这种场面放弃任何工作都是值得的,发射的前夕空气都在振动,成千上万的参观者异口同声地喊‘冲!冲!冲!’的口号”。

  1982年,艾伦被查出身患何杰金氏病,第2年就离开了微软的日常工作。在微软工作的20年中,艾伦成了真正的亿万富翁,他拥有足够的资金去进行自由投资,当然这些投资中有一些并不十分明智。艾伦将自己早期的投资计划誉为“有线世界”,如有线传媒、互动技术等,然而这些投资最终被证明并不恰当。最近,艾伦的投资集中在生物技术、能源及不动产领域,投资回报有了明显好转。艾伦还拥有两家大型运动俱乐部,分别是棒球联盟的波特兰开拓者和美式足球联盟的西雅图海鹰。

  这位IT领域的传奇人物乐意于将自己的巨额财富与全世界共享,到目前为止,艾伦已为慈善事业捐赠了多达数百万美元,并且建立了艾伦脑部科学研究所,甚至出资在西雅图建立了一座摇滚纪念馆和科幻纪念馆。

  美国宇航局(NASA)前官员西恩曾说,虽然艾伦的航空计划勇气可嘉,不过他所达到的结果实际上宇航局早在上世纪60年代就已经达成,艾伦那种到达宇宙的计划和真正的轨道航空设计间存在明显的差距。因此,他称艾伦的SpaceShipOne计划为“伟大的成就,但只是有限的进步”。(文/李远)


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