Who first championed the idea of privately-funded space travel

[VDD1991]

Does anybody know who first came up with the idea of privately funded spaceflight? One thing to remember is that even though SpaceShipOne proved that privately funded passenger spaceflight and space tourism might be feasible, before 2004, very few people believed that privately funded space travel was possible given the budgetary and financial constraints of the time. Would it be reasonable to assume that a small army of futurists championed the idea of private spaceflight long before the beginning of the space age? Is anybody aware of patents by private aerospace companies for privately funded spacecraft that pre-date the 1930s?

[QuantumG]

Good question, I know that prior to Yuri Gagarin's flight most everyone assumed human spaceflight would be privately funded, but how far back does that go?

In "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne, the Baltimore Gun Club is a private club but they raise the money from governments. So if you're after the origin of public-private partnerships, there ya go

If you're just after when "space tourism" came into being, I presume that would be "The Menace from Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein in 1957.

[Danderman]

If you are asking about science fiction stories about private space travel, there are no lack of very old tales about it.

If you are asking about news stories and the like, there have been  wannabe space lines for some 50 years.

The true pioneers however, are those people who worked to make it happen. Peter Diamandis, for example, championed the X-Prize back in the 1990s before any of this was fashionable.

[Elmar Moelzer]

Dont forget Gary C. Hudson, who frequents here...

[mheney]

Jules Verne's First men in the Moon was the story of a private expedition, and Robert Heinlein's charater D.D. Harriman was a space-obsessed tycoon.  So nobody "invented" the idea commercial space - it's an idea whose time may (finally) have come ...

[HMXHMX]

Depends on if you are looking for fiction or fact champions.  (Either are valid in my view, but since everyone knows about D.D. Harriman, etc., I'll concentrate on the fact guys.)

Donald Douglas, Jr. (Douglas Missile Company) addressed the commercial space transport business in the early 1960s, giving a paper that found its way into Arthur C. Clarke's  "The Coming of the Space Age" (1967).  His essay was originally written in 1961 and was titled "Space Commerce." 

There was an AAS (I believe) conference in Dallas about 1967 which was devoted to the topic of commercial space.  It is where Barron Hilton made his famous speech about space hotels.  About the same time Len Cormier created TransSpace, Inc. to promote the idea of a commercial space shuttle.  (He later sold the name to another company in the 1980s which intended to market the Delta II commercially and renamed his operation Third Millennium, Inc.)  And about 1968 or 1969 Phil Bono and Ken Gatland wrote Frontiers of Space which touched on commercial spaceflight.  It's the book that got me started on the path towards SSTO and VTOL vehicles.

I entered the game in 1969.

[spectre9]

My first thought was Verne too 

I guess it takes a great imagination to get things started.

Did Goddard get government funds to launch rockets?

If it only counts when you launch a man without government assistance then true privately funded space travel might be decades or even centuries away.

[bioelectromechanic]

Good question, I know that prior to Yuri Gagarin's flight most everyone assumed human spaceflight would be privately funded, but how far back does that go?

In "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne, the Baltimore Gun Club is a private club but they raise the money from governments. So if you're after the origin of public-private partnerships, there ya go

If you're just after when "space tourism" came into being, I presume that would be "The Menace from Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein in 1957.

If we're talking about Heinlein specifically, "The man who sold the moon" was written in 1951 and specifically talks about an entrepreneur (D.D.Harriman) who opens up the space frontier to allow hundreds of thousands of colonists to settle on the moon.

[HMXHMX]

If you are asking about science fiction stories about private space travel, there are no lack of very old tales about it.

If you are asking about news stories and the like, there have been  wannabe space lines for some 50 years.

The true pioneers however, are those people who worked to make it happen. Peter Diamandis, for example, championed the X-Prize back in the 1990s before any of this was fashionable.

Yes, Peter, Bevin McKinney (founder of AMROC), Dan DeLong (a founder of XCOR), I, and a few others met in Montrose CO for a weekend retreat. (I think in 1991, maybe 1992; I can't recall the date with certainty except that there was a nasty blizzard in progress when we flew in.) This was the meeting that led Peter to the X-Prize approach; we called it "the John Galt" project. 

But prizes for commercial progress in U.S. space efforts were first suggested by Jerry Pournelle's Citizen Advisory Council on National Space Policy in 1980, and annually thereafter until the Council disbanded in 1988-89.  Of course, prizes for innovation are an old idea dating back at least to the invention of accurate timekeeping devices for ships, i.e., "The Longitude Prize" of Parliament.

[Moe Grills]

    The late Robert Traux, who worked with the late Dr. Goddard, and then went on to help the US Navy design and build rockets like the Vanguard, was ACTUALLY attempting to design, build and fly a private suborbital rocket to carry a nonprofessional citizen to the Karman Line, out of his own funds, and in his "garage" in the 1970's, after he retired.
  He didn't live long enough to see it through completion.

   His failure to find sufficient funds to complete his work, and brutal government red-tape all brought his plan to a heartbreaking end.
Sound familiar for many private space projects over the past 40 years?

[Proponent]

Re the OP, wasn't everybody who worked on spaceflight privately funded until von Braun was hired by the German Army in the early 1930s?

In fact, von Braun's career might be summed up as "follow the money":  in the 1920s, his efforts were funded by amateurs.  In the thirties and early forties, it was the German army.  Then the US army.  Reportedly, von Braun was initially opposed to his team's transfer to NASA, because he thought a civilian agency would never get a real budget.  Then he got lots of money from NASA -- for a few years.  When the US government lost interest in innovation in space, he went to the private sector again, perhaps prematurely, through his participation in OTRAG.

If I recall correctly, the British Interplanetary Society's lunar-landing study of the late 1930s naively suggested that a moon landing "might cost as much as a million pounds."  Though a million quid was a great deal more money then than now, it was still an amount that might have been raised privately.  Read Arthur Clarke's stories circa 1950, and he imagines spaceflight being managed by a nebulously-funded non-governmental entity known as "the Interplanetary."

[Archibald]

If you are asking about science fiction stories about private space travel, there are no lack of very old tales about it.

If you are asking about news stories and the like, there have been  wannabe space lines for some 50 years.

The true pioneers however, are those people who worked to make it happen. Peter Diamandis, for example, championed the X-Prize back in the 1990s before any of this was fashionable.

Yes, Peter, Bevin McKinney (founder of AMROC), Dan DeLong (a founder of XCOR), I, and a few others met in Montrose CO for a weekend retreat. (I think in 1991, maybe 1992; I can't recall the date with certainty except that there was a nasty blizzard in progress when we flew in.) This was the meeting that led Peter to the X-Prize approach; we called it "the John Galt" project. 

But prizes for commercial progress in U.S. space efforts were first suggested by Jerry Pournelle's Citizen Advisory Council on National Space Policy in 1980, and annually thereafter until the Council disbanded in 1988-89.  Of course, prizes for innovation are an old idea dating back at least to the invention of accurate timekeeping devices for ships, i.e., "The Longitude Prize" of Parliament.

I do hope that, someday, you will write your autobiography. You have so much stories to tell, and was involved in so much pioneering moments since (as you said) 1969.
Please write a book !!

[Danderman]

There are really 3 classes of answers here:

The science fiction writers.

Those who proposed human spaceflight projects back in the day.

and

Those who are currently selling tickets and building spaceships to carry passengers.

You can pick from those groups.