Space cowboys: The maverick pioneers of galactic travel

The 1987 order from the German government was clear: Shut down your operations in Libya. For Lutz Kayser, this marked the heartbreaking finale to his private rocketry enterprise, OTRAG, and to his dream of “making access to space affordable for everyone”.

Founded in Germany and based, in a series of bizarre turns, first in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then deep in the Libyan desert, OTRAG had developed an IKEA-like concept for rocket design, using mass-produced modular components that could be assembled into spacecraft of various shapes and sizes.

The two African countries both offered potentially ideal conditions for rocket launching: vast, unregulated spaces far from prying eyes. But when United States and Israeli intelligence came to suspect that Libya was coopting the programme for its own military ends, it meant the end of the line for OTRAG, given that Kayser and his colleagues could face criminal charges in their home country had they persisted. In a final, devastating twist, all of OTRAG’s equipment was seized by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, but its modular approach to rocketry would go on to influence later generations of aerospace players.

While government agencies sent Sputnik into orbit and put men on the moon, Kayser represented one of a succession of individual pioneers – incidentally all white and all male – who have endeavoured to conquer the skies despite being regularly dismissed by their contemporaries as absurd or deluded.

And although the second explosion this year of a SpaceX rocket presents another setback for CEO Elon Musk in his ultimate mission to colonise Mars, it is likely only a hiccup in the ongoing privatisation of aerospace, the roots of which go right back to the late 19th century.

Born in 1857, the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is credited for laying the mathematical and theoretical foundations for rocketry. As the reclusive home-schooled child of a minor government official living in a log cabin about 200km (125 miles) southeast of Moscow, Tsiolkovsky developed an interest in mathematics and physics and then, reading the science fiction of Jules Verne, became enthralled by the possibility of space travel.

Although never formally educated, Tsiolkovsky went to Moscow and carried out his own research there under the influence of Nikolai Fyodorov, a proponent of “cosmism”, a philosophical movement at the time that integrated science, religion and metaphysics with a belief in the potential immortality of mankind and the harnessing of science for space exploration.

In contrast to the present archetype of “capitalist turned space crusader”, Tsiolkovsky went on to earn his living as a teacher in another remote part of southwest Russia. Beset by personal tragedies – including the suicide of his son, the loss of many of his research notes and manuscripts in a flood and the arrest of his daughter for revolutionary activities – Tsiolkovsky defied misfortune to publish almost 100 works on space travel and related subjects, including designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.

And in 1895, inspired by the newly constructed Eiffel Tower, Tsiolkovsky conceived the “space elevator”, a cable theoretically attached to the Earth somewhere along the equator and reaching well beyond the atmosphere, using centrifugal power from Earth’s rotation to counter downward gravity, keeping the cable upright and taut. The immensely long cable, according to Tsiolkovsky, would enable vehicles attached to the cable to carry people and cargo all the way up to a stationary space station and back again.