What would space travel look like if the Russian Mir space station had been bought by rogue entrepreneurs and kept in orbit for private enterprises to use? No doubt it would have accelerated today's feverish race to develop space tourism and been a catalyst for other commercial enterprises. It would have also affected the Soviet-American relationship, most likely for the worse. Director Michael Potter's debut documentary,
Orphans of Apollo, suggests all of the above was a real prospect not long ago, when in 1999 a group of space enthusiasts and businessmen tried to buy the Mir.
The film features interviews with the main protagonists of the project – a group of entrepreneurs, some of whom refer to themselves as 'anarcho-capitalists' – as well as
NASA and former Mir administration, other space experts and enthusiasts. It traces the events leading up to and after the failed attempt to take part ownership of the Mir space station to prevent its impending decommission. The group, made up of members from an alternative organisation
The Space Frontier Foundation was driven by disenchantment at America's post-Apollo efforts to re-launch man into space and build on the moon. When the Nixon administration pulled the funds from the space programme, an underworld of self-initiated and privately-funded space organisations rallied around and set out to continue space exploration, inspired by the initial promise of 1969’s successful moon landing. 'As Apollo's children, we were now Apollo's orphans, we'd been left out in the cold,' says
Rick Tumlinson, space activist and entrepreneur.
The members of the Space Frontier Foundation enlisted wealthy telecommunications businessman Walt Anderson, who believed that space should be the domain of the private sector. Without needing much persuasion Anderson put $7m behind the plan to part-privatise Mir. At the time, the USA was putting pressure on the economically crippled Russia to honour its agreement to help build the
International Space Station. That entailed Russia destroying Mir, despite the fact that the newest parts of its modular structure (core parts had been put in space in 1986) were only a few years old.
The team approached Russian agency
RSC Inergia, which had been responsible for running Mir, as well as for launching Sputnik, the world's first satellite, in 1957 and making Yuri Gagarin the first man in space, in 1961 (the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, followed in 1963). It set forth a business plan to its director Yuri Semenov that tapped into one of Russia's proudest successes – the country’s frequent superiority over the Americans in the Space Race. 'The Mir represented all achievements of our country's modern science and technology as well as international ones,' says Semenov. The provocative nature of the Mir rescue proposal is a measure of ‘wild west’ American culture at that time.
The film allows little room to misinterpret its implicit anti-American and anti-establishment overtones. To take space out of the hands of a government agency 'and give it to real people for a real profit', as author and Rotary Rocket investor
Tom Clancy says, smacks of a revolution in the way space is seen. The film expounds the notion that America, in its role as the premier capitalist on Earth, is playing at being the socialists of space. Meanwhile, the former Soviets of communist Russia have embraced capitalism in all its forms when it comes to space.
The lack of a narrative voice in the film – to give a contextual setting to what’s going on – is problematic and the result is that interesting questions are raised but left unanswered. For example, why is the American government so concerned that everything put into space is a potential weapon? The film's heavy focus on Anderson as a character – despite his absence from the interviews – serves to further affect a conspiratorial tone when we discover right at the end that he is appealing charges of fraud from his American prison cell.
Space exploration is exciting because it attracts Utopian ideals and rewards pioneering spirit – albeit in the long run. Had the orphans of the Apollo space programme been successful, it would have signalled the beginning of a democratic space age. A decade later, it’s a new generation that has taken up the gauntlet. Robert Bigelow's efforts to use inflatable structures as a space station (see page 22) and others' ongoing work to develop a space elevator are ideas that stem from a movement lead by dreamers whose ventures were apparent failures. Indeed the film's appeal is the ambition of its main characters. As Dr Peter Diamandis,
X-Prize founder says, 'the day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea'.
