June 19 (Bloomberg) -- James Hansen reckons the 2,000 aerospace executives assembled at Le Bourget Airport this week for the 100th Paris Air Show need to develop an interstellar platform that takes men -- and women -- where they’ve really never gone before.

“Sex in space, now there’s an experiment scientists certainly want to conduct,” the Auburn University history teacher and official biographer of lunar astronaut Neil Armstrong says. “Great outer-space food and wine would be fine, too,” he adds over lunch in the Jules Verne restaurant, a few hundred feet beneath the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Hansen is no lunatic. He’s the 57-year-old director of Auburn Honors College, author of eight books on the U.S. space program and, for the past 28 years, an official historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At the air show to present a series of lectures to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon flight, the professor from rural Alabama says it’s high time for the folks in charge of funding space exploration to make the adventure sexy.

As Hansen tells it, a little hanky panky and a few flutes of Champagne followed by a luxury meal from Jules Verne’s Michelin three-star chef Alain Ducasse would civilize outer space and arouse generations weaned on “Star Trek” fiction to persuade global leaders into spending the money required to make galactic travel a reality.

“That’s what Jules Verne did in ‘From Earth to the Moon,’” Hansen says. “Verne’s science-fiction stories were the original inspiration for the people who launched NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.”

Orbital Cuisine

Savoring a cup of Ducasse’s whipped baby peas in cream and crab claws, Hansen says the dish would taste terrific in orbit. “Astronaut Mike Collins had his own Michelin-grading system for space food, but he did spend his youth in France,” Hansen says. “I’m certain Mike would have given this five helmets.”

That sort of celestial praise makes Ducasse beam. Back in 2006, the French chef developed an orbiting menu for the European Space Agency, gourmet chow for the International Space Station that included roast quail, grilled tuna and a duck confit slathered in capers. The puree of celery came with a hint of nutmeg. Ducasse says that German astronaut Thomas Reiter told him the only thing missing was a glass of wine.

“It’s time to take space food to the next step,” Ducasse says, helping to prepare a breakfast of scrambled eggs and asparagus in his earthbound kitchen. “We put the project on hold because there was no new sponsorship. We have the knowledge to begin overcoming the main problem: preserving flavor and shelf life for long-range space travel.”

Outer-Space Bubbly

As for the wine, Odran Achard says it must be Pommery Champagne, which is produced by Epernay, France-based Vranken Pommery Monopole SA and is an official sponsor of the air show.

“Sponsoring the show gets us halfway to becoming the first Champagne in space,” says Achard, Pommery’s business- development manager. “The strategy must include a new Champagne packaging and delivery system. It’s a technology worth pursuing.”

Hansen suggests that one necessary breakthrough might be found in the science of fluid mechanics. Ducasse says he’s conferring with physicists and nutritionists on a solution.

“The taste, putting pleasure on the outer-space table, is my responsibility,” Ducasse explains. “Then we must run it all through a series of tests that can take two years to complete.”

Champagne Pressure

According to NASA’s Space Station Food Systems division, the thighs and calves of weightless astronauts grow thinner from fluid redistribution and their faces grow puffy. Alcohol won’t help matters, so gravity plates a la starship Enterprise need to be invented. Then there’s the explosive issue of the pressure inside a Champagne bottle, around 90 pounds per square inch, three times the pressure on an automobile tire.

Those tiny bubbles are bound to trigger a carbon-dioxide crisis in an environment where oxygen is precious. A three-year, $7 million research program conducted by the Champagne house Moet & Chandon, owned by Paris-based LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, and Dutch brewer Heineken NV sought to “understand the influence of chemical and physical parameters on the formation of bubbles and the stability of the mousse.” The study concluded that a bottle of Champagne on average contained 250 million carbon-dioxide bubbles.

The gaseous snags and gravitational glitches are temporary and Verne’s stories can help technicians find solutions, says Hansen. “Verne’s connection with NASA is truly remarkable,” he explains. “All those first-generation astronauts were huge Verne fans.”

Luxury Spacecraft

To be sure, the French novelist’s tales of extraordinary voyages accurately anticipated much of the U.S. space program. Verne’s 19th-century astronauts in “From the Earth to the Moon” and its sequel “Around the Moon,” for instance, were launched into space from a fictional Florida town 130 miles from Cape Canaveral aboard a luxury lunar ship named Columbiad and were recovered through a splash landing in the ocean.

Verne’s imagination of the possibilities 19th-century technology offered allowed him to correctly predict the future and motivate dreamers to pursue what many of that era’s scientific experts called hallucinations, according to Hansen. He says the money the U.S. poured into the Cold War space race after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, underwrote the cost of turning Verne’s illusion into a reality.

Mars Mission

“Today, America spends more on potato chips than it does on the space program,” Hansen says. “Apollo cost $20 billion, about $180 billion in 2009 dollars. We need a manned mission to Mars to make space sexy again, and that would cost $1 trillion. So the U.S. can bail out another failed bank or head to Mars. That’s the choice.”

Hansen says that today’s astronauts are not packaged as paladins. “Alan Shepard went to the moon with a six-iron and hit golf balls,” Hansen marvels. “How cool is that? We once idolized astronauts, now we don’t even know their names. NASA made shuttle flights to be regular events, nothing out of the ordinary. It still takes a cowboy to fly into space.”

Nick Lappos says making space travel sexy is no whimsy. He’s a senior vice president at the Bell Helicopter unit of Providence, Rhode Island-based Textron Inc., though the 60-year- old engineer’s business card offers a woefully homogenized description of his job. Lappos runs XworX, Bell’s secretive skunk team, an 80-member group of scientists, engineers and dreamers on a mission to tap Verne’s vision to empower technologies to carry humankind into the cosmos.

Encounters With Spielberg

How far out does Lappos think? He says that he taught Steven Spielberg how to operate a Bell Helicopter simulator and that he brainstorms with the director of science-fiction blockbusters such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for ideas XworX can play around with inside the unit’s Fort Worth, Texas, laboratory.

“Technology has entered the realm of magic,” Lappos says. “Our vision is beyond our technical understanding, so what we do is write the flight manual before we build the aircraft. That’s precisely what Verne did, but to make space sexy again we must first remind people just how hard it is to get there.”

Lappos’s boss, Bell President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Millman, 68, says in an interview that the biggest obstacle is learning how not to be afraid of failure.

“Remember Buck Rogers’s ray gun, Captain Kirk’s phaser? We have them right now,” Millman says.

Millman describes the final frontier as the ability for humankind to “slalom through the solar system.” Perhaps even further.

Ducasse in Space

“Back in 1947, the world’s greatest minds said there was absolutely no way man could get into space,” Millman says. “Then the transistor was invented and we had the computer power to handle issues like re-entry physics. I’m sure it will be less than a century before we get into outer space, maybe even in 10 years.”

Back in the kitchen, Ducasse, 52, is preparing the menu. “I intend to open the first restaurant on Mars sometime within the next 50 years and I already have a vegetarian menu based on what we can grow there,” Ducasse says. “There will be no competition. Just me. The competition on Earth is terrible.”

To contact the writer on the story: A. Craig Copetas in Paris at ccopetas@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 18, 2009 19:00 EDT