The low-cost space race is on as private companies see big money in launching
satellites and tourists into orbit. JOHN HUXLEY talked to some of the people turning
dreams into machines.
EVEN as a schoolboy, growing up in the far-off Sydney of the 1940s, Phil Chapman
had a simple if ambitious career plan: to go from Parramatta High to sky-high
by the fastest possible route.
He studied the stars. He devoured the fantasies of the science-fiction writer Arthur C.
Clarke and dreamt of turning them into fact. He wrote to the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies,
warning him that the proposed Woomera rocket site in South Australia was pointed in the
wrong direction for satellite launches.
"Oh, yes, Menzies wrote back," Chapman recalls. "He thanked me for my interest, but
reassured me - wrongly, as it happened, of course - that as satellites would not be
required in the future, I was not to worry."
Undeterred, Chapman had decided by age 14 that he wanted to be an astronaut. Since then,
he has come tantalisingly close.
After a distinguished academic career in Australia and the United States, he joined NASA
as a scientist-astronaut. From Houston, he watched man walk on the moon. He was mission
scientist for Apollo 14. He was shortlisted to go into space on Skylab II. ...
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