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 Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle on a flight as part of the Lunar Lander Challenge in September 2009. On Monday NASA announced that it has made $475,000 in awards to Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems for experimental flights of suborbital reusable vehicles. These are the first contracts for test flights under the agency’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, which is designed to support flight opportunities on commercial suborbital vehicles for a variety of research purposes. The flights will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico (for Armadillo) and Mojave Air and Space Port in California (for Masten) this fall and winter, reaching altitudes of between 5 and 40 kilometers.
The announcement coincided with a “Flight Opportunities” panel at the AIAA Space 2010 conference Monday afternoon in Anaheim, California. As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a panel session: most of the scheduled panelists were unavailable for one reason or another, but officials from the CRuSR program and the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (CRuSR’s parent organization) were present and offered some additional details beyond what was in the NASA release. For example, the $475,000 awarded was split roughly evenly between the two companies, with one getting approximately $250,000 and the other approximately $225,000. (I was later told that Masten got the slightly larger award.)
The NASA press release mentioned that the vehicle will be carrying antennas to support the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) navigation system for the FAA, but that will not be the only payload they will carry. Dougal Maclise said at the panel session that the vehicles will also carry a “flight monitor” from NASA Ames to measure the flight environment of the vehicles, including acceleration and vibration. A third payload is a “particle agglomeration” experiment from the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California Berkeley tat has previously flown on the ISS. The key requirements for all the experiments, he said, is that they be “self-sufficient, autonomous, and expendable”.
The flights will begin as soon as October, with Armadillo flying out of Spaceport America; the Masten flights will begin late this year. Those two companies were pretty much the only ones who could meet CRuSR’s requirements to perform test flights, even at relatively low altitudes, within six months of contract award (a requirement in the solicitation). Virgin Galactic has not yet started glide tests of SpaceShipTwo, let alone powered flights, while XCOR Aerospace will not be ready to begin vehicle tests in the next six months. (Blue Origin’s status is more secretive, as usual for them, but there’s no evidence they are in an active flight test program.)
County commissioners in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, approved earlier this week a plan to pave a road to Spaceport America. The paving will be paid by the spaceport project, although the county is contributing the equivalent of $200,000 in engineering and surveying services for the project, which will pave an existing road to cut the travel time to the spaceport for people coming from the south. Spaceport developers are also dealing with a drop in the water table in the region that has affected a number of nearby residents, whose wells have gone dry as a result of heavy use of water during the spaceport’s construction, particularly when paving its 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) runway. The water table is “showing all the right signs of recharge”, said Spaceport America director Rick Homans, but residents are still concerned about any long-term affects.
On the other side of the country, Maryland governor Martin O’Malley visited Wallops Flight Facility, home to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), earlier this week. Wallops is in Virginia, but close to the Maryland border; many people who work there live in Maryland. The statement by O’Malley’s office about the visit said little about the commercial potential of the spaceport, instead playing up the impact of NASA and other government space-related spending on state’s economy. By contrast, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has played up the commercial potential of Wallops, including plans by Orbital Sciences Corporation to launch ISS cargo missions from MARS using its new Taurus 2 rocket.
Virgin Galactic has responded to yesterday’s report that the company is only accepting US citizens for its flights by, in effect, saying the article is completely off base. The Irish Independent article claimed that an Irishman living in England, Cyril Bennis, had been told by the company that it was currently only accepting US citizens. A Virgin official said Monday that Bennis had inquired about flying non-US citizens on its flights and was told that they were accepting deposits from Americans and others alike “because we fully intend to be able to fly these pioneering people”. (That would include, of course, Sir Richard Branson, who has previously said he and his family would go on the first SpaceShipTwo commercial flight.) The company will do so “in a way which fully complies with all applicable laws and regulations including those which relate to US export controls”; as noted yesterday, there’s already precedent for allowing spaceflight participants to be trained for such flights without going through ITAR-related paperwork. “Unfortunately we were not contacted by the Independent before the piece was published and so had no chance to correct an entirely inaccurate report,” the Virgin official said.
Is Virgin Galactic only accepting US citizens now? That’s the claim of an article Sunday in the Irish Independent, which reports that an Irishman living in England “received a legal notice from Virgin Galactic stating that at present only US citizens can be considered for inclusion.” The company has signed up and accepted deposits from a number of people outside the US, so it’s not clear what would cause this change in direction, if in fact correct. The obvious concern would be something having to do with US export control regulations, but Bigelow Aerospace won a ruling last year that ITAR-related agreements were not needed for prospective spaceflight participants.
Even without that issue, Bruce Dickinson isn’t interested in flying on Virgin Galactic. The 52-year-old British lead singer of Iron Maiden, who is a licensed commercial pilot and Star Trek fan, would seem to be in the ideal demographic for space tourism, but he tells QMI Media he’s not interested right now because of price and safety issues. “I think I’d want to take a long hard look at those little suborbital things before I got on one,” he said. “And for the amount of money it costs, well, I could think of a lot of things you could do that would be a lot more fun, and last a lot longer.”
Those who do want to, and are able to, fly on Virgin Galactic may be able to enjoy a little bit of a shortcut to Spaceport America. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority approved Friday a proposal to pave a road on the southern approach to the spaceport. The road, from the Upham exit on I-25, will shorten the travel time for people coming to the spaceport from Las Cruces from one hour and 40 minutes down to one hour as they will no longer have to take the current northern approach through Truth and Consequences. The money for paving the road comes from “unexpected savings” on other aspects of the project because of a “good bid climate”, freeing up the $11.5 million needed for the paving.
That decision, as well as the FAA’s award of a commercial space transportation “center of excellence” to New Mexico State University, get the seal of approval of the Las Cruces Sun-News in an editorial Sunday. With a greater emphasis on commercial spaceflight emerging in national space policy, “NMSU and Spaceport America are poised to lead the way in a burgeoning new industry with limitless potential.”
 WhiteKnightTwo in flight over Las Cruces airport in June 2009. The landing gear is partially extended during this overflight. The AP reported late today that part of the landing gear for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft collapsed upon landing at the end of a test flight today at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. An FAA spokesman told the AP that the left main landing gear, the one that collapsed, was damaged, but he did not know if there was any other damage to the aircraft. SpaceShipTwo was not attached to the aircraft during Thursday’s flight.
Scaled Composites issued a brief statement about the incident, offering few details about what happened in the “minor” incident:
A minor incident occurred on the runway at Mojave airport this morning, which involved a mechanical problem with the left hand-side landing gear of WhiteKnightTwo. No injuries were sustained and the incident did not involve the Spaceship which was not attached to WhiteKnightTwo. WhiteKnightTwo was on its 37th test flight, and has been flying since December 2008. Further information will be posted in due course.
 Enrico Palermo of Virgin Galactic discusses the company's development of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo at the NewSpace 2010 conference on Saturday. At the end of Saturday’s sessions at the NewSpace 2010 conference in Silicon Valley, Enrico Palermo, project engineering manager for Virgin Galactic, gave a brief update on the company’s activities. There weren’t any new announcements about the company’s efforts, nor (consistent with their past practices) predictions about future flights. Palermo did show video of their most recent captive carry flight, the first time a crew flew in SpaceShipTwo, as well as some new photos of work on SpaceShipTwo in Scaled’s facilities, showing the spaceplane’s wings rotated up in the feathering position that provides for the “carefree” reentry of the vehicle, in much the same way as SpaceShipOne.
Palermo did provide a few updated statistics about the company and the vehicle testing program. WhiteKnightTwo now has over 100 hours of flight time on 33 flights since the test flight program began in late 2008. SpaceShipTwo, meanwhile, has now flown three captive cary flights. On the business side, the company now has over 350 customers who have paid deposits ranging from $20,000 to the full $200,000, with a total of now over $50 million. Those deposits, he added, are held in escrow for now, and won’t be converted to company revenue until the tickets are formally issued.
Palermo also briefly discussed The Spaceship Company (TSC), the joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites that will manufacture the WK2 aircraft and SS2 spaceplanes. “This is a company you’re going to be hearing a lot more about over the next year or so,” he said. “We’re currently assembling a team of individuals to run TSC in Mojave; we’re recruiting like mad.” (There is a list of job openings on the TSC web site.) TSC is currently located in an existing building at Mojave Air and Space Port, but Palermo said there are plans to build a new final assembly hangar there.
 Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures, updates NewSpace 2010 attendees on his company's suborbital and orbital spaceflight plans. Two months ago, at the International Space Development Conference in Chicago, Space Adventures announced a partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to develop vehicles for suborbital space tourism. At the end Friday of the first day of the NewSpace 2010 conference in Sunnyvale, California, Tom Shelley, the new president of Space Adventures, provided a brief review on the company’s suborbital plans. (Shelley took over as president about a month ago, he said; Eric Anderson is still there as chairman, but Shelley said he’s involved in more of the day-to-day activities of the company now.)
Shelley didn’t make any major announcements about the company’s suborbital efforts yesterday, instead primarily summarizing the plans to have Armadillo develop a vehicle that can serve what Shelley said could be a huge market: he noted that there are about 10 million people with investible assets of $1 million or more, and who could thus afford a $100,000 suborbital flight if they’re so inclined. Shelley went on to suggest that the fraction of those people who would be interested could be huge: he cited a survey of several hundred jet owners, 69% of whom said they’d be interested in flying into space. “There was no context to that,” he admitted, saying that survey didn’t describe what sort of spaceflight experience would be offered. “Even if it’s ridiculously wrong,” he said, offering something closer to 20% that had been noted in previous surveys, “that’s still a pretty good number.”
“There is a market, and we have barely scratched the surface,” Shelley said. One challenge the company has faced, he said, is describing what the spaceflight experience will be like for suborbital flyers, something that can be difficult to do since there are no vehicles flying yet. “What we’re missing is the actual flight, the actual moment where a real person, a real paying passenger, gets on the vehicle and we take them up into suborbital space,” he said. “At that point the market for sure is going to explode.”
Shelley also briefly discussed Space Adventures’ orbital plans, hinting that there are new developments coming soon. Asked why, given that Space Adventures has been able to readily fill seats on Soyuz taxi flights to the ISS when offered, it hasn’t yet flown a dedicated mission, Shelley said it came down to cost. “Selling expensive spaceflights is not easy,” he said. “When your price goes from $20 million to $35 million to more over the course of very short period of time, it’s a challenge to find customers who are prepared to put up that money.” However, he added, “The customers are there, and there’s going to be some fun announcements coming out of us in the next few months about future missions and future contracts that we have signed.”
Rocketplane Global has been barely hanging on the last couple of years since its orbital counterpart, Rocketplane Global, lost its NASA COTS award and the financial crisis dried up the investment market. The company, in particular vice president Chuck Lauer, has been out there trying to drum up support for a variety of opportunities, from flights in Hawaii to, at the Space Access ’10 conference three months ago, a venture to use Florida’s Cecil Field for suborbital flights as part of a broader tourist attraction. However, time has run out for the company.
The Oklahoma Gazette reported today that Rocketplane, including its Rocketplane Global and Kistler subsidiaries, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection last month in Wisconsin, where the company was operating from after giving up its Oklahoma facilities. Unlike Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where the company can reorganize, Chapter 7 involves the liquidation of assets. Whatever is left of Rocketplane will be sold off to cover those debts.
According to the bankruptcy filings, linked to at the end of the Gazette article, Rocketplane Kistler has $108,250 in assets, primarily tooling and some components for the K-1 vehicle, and over $7.36 million in liabilities. (The filing notes a number of “aerospace patents” dating back to the original Kistler Aerospace, but puts no value on them.) Rocketplane Kistler claims $275,000 in assets, in the form of four used GE F-85 jet engines, as well as unvalued patents versus over $2.56 million in liabilities. The parent company, Rocketplane, declared no assets in its filing but nearly $3.7 million in liabilities. (Also included in the documents is a bankruptcy filing by Rocketplane owner George French, although he is also listed as a creditor in some of the company filings.)
“We did what we said we could do. Unfortunately, we did not complete the program as originally conceived,” French told the Gazette, in something of an understatement. The long saga of Rocketplane, which stretches back to the mid-1990s with the founding of Pioneer Rocketplane by Lauer, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, and Robert Zubrin, has come to an end.
Earlier this week I got to see the film Space Tourists during a screening as part of the AFI Silverdocs film festival in Silver Spring, Maryland. This film has been out for some time but has been limited to the film festival circuit; it first appeared in the US at Sundance earlier this year and Ryan Kobrick wrote a good review of the film for The Space Review.
My own impressions of the film are mixed. Part of the film is about the spaceflight experience, in particular the flight of Anousheh Ansari, but as much or more is about life in Kazkhastan, with imagery of abandoned apartment blocks and crumbling infrastructure. The film follows a group of scavengers who travel out to where the first stages of the Soyuz rocket that launched Ansari fall back to Earth; they cut up the metal and sell it for scrap. At times the film juxtaposes the two: we see the metal collectors immediately pull out of the rocket stage a small tank that looks like a cooking pot so they can use it exactly for that—a pot to cook their meals in over an open fire. We then see Ansari and her crewmates on the ISS prepare their own prepackaged meals on the station.
Another portion of the film steps away from the ISS and Kazakhstan to look at the effort by one Romanian group, ARCA, led by Dumitru Popescu, to develop their own vehicles. ARCA competed in the Ansari X PRIZE and is a team in the Google Lunar X PRIZE; the film shows their efforts to loft a subscale rocket on a solar-heated balloon. It’s an odd choice for a film supposedly about space tourism: this particular ARCA effort isn’t directly about space tourism, while a number of other ventures are focused on space tourism and arguably making faster progress than ARCA.
The film is neither blatantly pro- or anti-tourism. In a brief Q&A session after the screening, director Christian Frei said he was drawn to the topic after reading a short newspaper article about Daisuke Enomoto, who had planned to fly to the ISS on a Soyuz flight. Enomoto was rejected for health reasons and Ansari, who had been training as his backup, took his place. Ansari provided him with the footage she shot while on the station for his documentary without any conditions, he said. That was a relief to hm, he said, since dealing with “billionaires”, as he put it, “was a challenge”. (Ansari is not quite a billionaire.)
One comment by Frei struck me late in the Q&A session. Asked about the inclusion of ARCA in the film, he said that he wanted to feature someone in the film who wants to go to space “with his own tools” instead of simply buying a ticket. “I love this guy and his dream of going and flying to the Moon as a Romanian,” he said. “This is the most expensive thing that you can imagine. And of course he won’t get there, but, you know, theoretically it would work.” In some sense he’s right: it is unlikely that the small, undercapitalized ARCA team will be able to land a spacecraft on the Moon as required for the GLXP; after all, the team was never able to develop a suborbital rocket for the original X PRIZE competition. But, unlike Frei, I’d be cautious about completely writing off ARCA or anyone else striving to turn a dream into reality.
 Armadillo's Mod vehicle descends under a drogue chute for several seconds before relighting its engine, in this screen capture from an Armadillo Aerospace video of Saturday's flight. First it was Masten Space Systems, who last month demonstrated an in-flight engine relight on their Xombie vehicle, and now it’s Armadillo Aerospace’s turn. On Saturday Armadillo flew a Mod vehicle on a boosted hop to an altitude of about 2,000 feet (600 meters), similar to flights they’ve done in the past. This time, though, they turned off the engine on the descent for about five to seven seconds before relighting, as can be seen in this video. One difference between the Armadillo and Masten flights is that the Mod deployed a drogue during the time the engine was off, apparently to keep the vehicle from tumbling; it worked, although the vehicle did appear to swing around quite a bit. Once the engine was reignited and the drogue released, the vehicle made a normal descent and landing under rocket power.
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