



If you build it, they will come. That may be something of a cliche these days, but it retains an essential nugget of business sense: you need the infrastructure before you can find the big revenue models.

Nowhere is that more true than in the fledgling private space industry. Entrepreneurs have plenty of promising ideas for what we can do in Earth orbit and beyond, but no consensus on how we're going to get there.

Tuesday's announcement from Microsoft co-founder (and somewhat reclusive billionaire) Paul Allen could change all of that.

Allen is starting a $200 million company, Stratolaunch Systems, that will marry the designs of two of the space industry's most important inventors: Burt Rutan and Elon Musk.

Behold, the hybrid rocket plane — due this decade, larger than any aerial vehicle yet built, it can put anything and anyone in orbit.

Rutan is the creator of SpaceShipOne, the world's first commercial spacecraft, which was launched from the top of a light aircraft called White Knight. The plane took care of those crucial first 30,000 feet of a launch, where Earth's hold on us is hardest to break. This is how Virgin Galactic will be sending its first tourists to space in 2013.

Musk, the former PayPal billionaire, owns a company called SpaceX, which is building a new breed of rocket called the Falcon in order to deliver commercial payloads like satellites.

So why not have a Falcon rocket launching off the back of a White Knight plane? That, essentially, is Paul Allen's plan. There's a little more to it than that; Rutan is creating a giant and far more expensive version of the White Knight, using six engines from Boeing 747s. The wingspan will be 385 feet, wider than that of the previous record holder, Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose.

What Allen has done, wisely, is to take two already proven systems and fuse them together. To build even more confidence, he has hired NASA veterans such as the agency's former administrator, Mike Griffin, to sit on the Stratolaunch board.

So what will this setup actually launch into space? In a word: everything. Commercial payloads, tourists, satellites, space hotels, International Space Station guests, maybe even unmanned missions to other planets.

Given that the only entity that can currently launch all of that for you is the Russian Space Agency — which charges more than $60 million per passenger — Allen thinks the industry is wide open to competition. At Tuesday's press conference, he spoke of bringing "airport-like operations to the launch of commercial and government payloads.” The company's motto is "any orbit, any time."

Sure, it'll be a while before you can hop onto an affordable orbital flight; Stratolaunch has tentatively pointed to 2016 as its first year of operation, and the first clients are likely to be deep-pocketed telecoms companies and governments.

But the system seems powerful, light and easily scaled — a magical recipe for entrepreneurship. It also doesn't hurt to have the resources of one of the world's wealthiest men. Slowly but surely, it's companies like this that will move the needle on the cost of getting ordinary people, everyday things, and all-important infrastructure to space.

"I have long dreamed about taking the next big step in private space flight after the success of SpaceShipOne – to offer a flexible, orbital space delivery system," Allen said in a statement. "We are at the dawn of radical change in the space launch industry."

As Wordsworth might say: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young made it very likely you could eventually get a cheap ticket to the heavens.