Gregg Maryniak, executive director of a foundation promoting the privatization and expansion of space travel, impressed upon a small group of interested students and Madison residents the plausibility of homemade space flight Monday in the Humanities building.

The X-Prize Foundation, an organization founded by a close friend of Maryniak, is offering a prize totaling $10,000,000 to any person or group that can successfully send a small, reusable vessel into space.

Maryniak predicted a winner of the competition in upcoming months and said the privatized space-flight market will be able to expand from “space tourism” in the near future to around-the-world hypersonic space flights and beyond in upcoming centuries.

Maryniak said a major holdup of private space-travel development is the amount needed to produce “space stuff” and attributed a major cause of high space-age prices to the public’s expectations.

“If people expect space stuff will be ridiculously expensive, it will be,” Maryniak said. “Space flight is not a technical problem; it is about money.”

Spacecrafts are more expensive to build than deep-sea submersibles, which are exposed to similar high-pressure situations. The price of spacecrafts reaches several thousand times that of deep-water explorers, Maryniak said, though their development costs should be similar.

After a famous competition landed Charles Lindbergh in Paris after a transatlantic flight in 1927, public interest in the relatively new method of transportation soared and ticket sales on commercial flights increased by nearly 30 times.

Maryniak said the same sea change is possible with space flight and compared air travel to space travel. Maryniak said both were considered impossible at the time of their conception, were initially developed by governments during wartime and remained a pastime of risk-takers and daredevils shortly thereafter.

According to Maryniak, prizes and competitions fueled the development of air travel in the early 1900s and brought the public closer to a seemingly dangerous method of transportation.

Maryniak also said the number of commercial spaceflights yearly is staggeringly low; this year’s statistic has not yet passed 20. In order to encourage companies to invest in space travel, he said, the market must be increased little by little to include normal consumers.

“What is the magic payload of the future? You are,” Maryniak said. “Regular folks like you and I will have a way into space as soon as next year.”

One of the most promising X-Prize competitors, being developed by Scaled Composites LLC, is a reusable spacecraft propelled by a small rocket engine made of readily available components. The spacecraft has a larger tow vehicle that brings it to a high altitude, at which point the craft takes flight and blasts away from the planet.

Along with the other X-Prize candidates, the Scaled Composites proposition fulfills the competition’s guidelines by providing a reusable hull, the capacity for three adults and the thrust to reach more than 60 miles in altitude.

Maryniak also said the U.S. government does not attempt to suppress efforts to privatize; instead, it has formed a small office in the Federal Aviation Administration to handle commercial launches. He said the government gives U.S. citizens the rights they should be allowed.

“Humans should be allowed to take these risks,” he said. “[The government] is surprisingly friendly to this stuff … It lets us do it, it lets us have it, it lets us play.”