A report prepared by Bigelow Aerospace for NASA concludes that the commercial approach that the space agency used [...]]]>

Cutaway illustration of a BA 330-DS module included in the Bigelow Aerospace report to NASA. The company proposes to use this module to support commercial activities in cislunar space in partnership with NASA. (credit: Bigelow Aerospace)

A report prepared by Bigelow Aerospace for NASA concludes that the commercial approach that the space agency used successfully for developing commercial cargo transportation to the International Space Station should also be applied to developing transportation beyond Earth orbit, including in the vicinity of, and to the surface of, the Moon.

The report, prepared under a Space Act Agreement between NASA and Bigelow Aerospace announced earlier this year, is being formally released today at a press conference in Washington. It recommends that NASA pursue a partnership with industry to develop beyond-LEO transportation systems, given NASA’s constrained budgets and the record of success by NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to supply the ISS.

“America is facing a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions making the likelihood of increased funds for human space exploration highly unlikely,” states an advance copy of the report provided by the company. “Therefore, the only viable option for the U.S. to reach cislunar space is to leverage the efficiencies, innovations, and investments of commercial enterprises.”

The report specifically advocates an approach modeled on the COTS program, where NASA used funded Space Act Agreements (SAAs) to support the development of cargo transportation systems by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. That led to service contracts with those two companies to transport cargo to and from the station. NASA is following a similar approach with its commercial crew program, using funded SAAs to support development of crewed systems, which it plans to follow up with contracts to complete development and certification of those systems and initial purchases of flights.

That approach, the Bigelow report argues, can allow NASA and the private sector to work together on exploration and commercialization of cislunar space, including the establishment of a lunar base, something NASA is not currently planning to develop for the foreseeable future. “Over the next ten years, it is very possible that if NASA can soon adopt some of the suggestions within this report in combination with current steps underway by NASA and the private commercial sector, a permanent, semi-commercial lunar base is achievable and for substantially less money than people would imagine.”

Much of the report is devoted to demonstrating that the capabilities to enable those plans will exist within the next few years, if not already today. The report examines some of the launch vehicles and spacecraft that could support cislunar development, ranging from NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft to vehicles under development in the private sector and by other nations. “By 2017–2018, all of the destinations within our immediate neighborhood including low lunar orbit will again be accessible to humans,” the report concludes. “The physical craft that have been under development (some for more than a decade) will be ready to execute any of these missions.”

That suite of spacecraft includes Bigelow’s own vehicles. The report states that the company’s first two BA 330 expandable habitats, modules with an internal volume of 330 cubic meters once deployed in orbit, will be ready for launch by the end of 2016. Bigelow Aerospace is also working on a version called the BA 330-DS for missions beyond Earth orbit; this will be very similar to the basic BA 330 but with improved rad-hardened avionics and additional shielding, as well as a larger inventory of spare parts for deep space missions. A modified BA 330-DS would be capable of landing on a planetary body, like the surface of the Moon. The report also outlines additional hardware, including tugs and power modules, that could be used in conjunction with the BA 330-DS modules to support missions beyond LEO.

The report also makes the case for innovations beyond technology and contracting mechanisms. The Bigelow report argues that, for private companies to be involved in any joint venture with NASA in cislunar development, they must have property rights on the Moon or other bodies that are not available today under existing space law structures, a controversial subject in space policy. Companies “must known they will be able to (1) enjoy the fruits of their labor relative to activities conducted on the Moon or other celestial bodies, and (2) own the property that they have surveyed, developed, and are realistically able to utilize,” the report states. And, in a point emphasized in the report in bold, italic, and underlined type: “Without property rights, any plan to engage the private sector in long-term beyond LEO activities will ultimately fail.”

With a property rights system in place on the Moon, both NASA and industry would benefit, the report concludes. “By leveraging a property rights regime private sector facilities could be developed on the Moon which NASA could subsequently take advantage of for a wide variety of astronautics and scientific activities. What the Agency could never afford to do alone could become financially possible due to the husbanding of private and public sector investments and resources.”

Mars One, the private venture with the audacious goal of sending humans to Mars—permanently—as early as 2023 made a splash earlier this week when [...]]]>

Mars One is planning a permanent human settlement on Mars within ten years, and plans to use a unique astronaut selection process open to the public. (credit: Mars One/Bryan Versteeg)

Mars One, the private venture with the audacious goal of sending humans to Mars—permanently—as early as 2023 made a splash earlier this week when it announced that more than 78,000 people had applied for its “astronaut selection program” just two weeks after starting to accept applications. The application process, revealed by the company on April 22, includes paying a registration fee that varies by nation ($38 in the US) as well as providing, as Mars One explained, “personal information about the applicant, a motivational letter, answers to a fixed questionnaire, a resume and an one minute video in which the applicant explains why he or she should be among the first humans on Mars.”

Given the requirement to provide that much information, as well as pay a fee, many were extremely impressed that Mars One had attracted that many applications so quickly. The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, noted that Mars One could have raised several million dollars based on application fees alone, and they’re not the only ones doing that fiscal math. However, those estimates, and that overall application number, require something of an asterisk.

The same day that Mars One made the announcement, I spoke with Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder and CEO of Mars One, at the Humans 2 Mars Summit, a conference in Washington organized by the space advocacy group Explore Mars. I asked him about the 78,000 figure and whether that means that all of these people have completed the application process, including paying the application fee. “I don’t know exactly what the distribution is,” he said. “People register, they pay, they start filling out their information, they have the movie to make, the movie to upload,” he said, which is then reviewed and made public if the applicant chooses to do so. “I think we have something like 700 movies online or so.” (A check of the Mars One application web site appeared to show, as of Thursday evening, about 570 videos available, based on the pagination of the videos on the site: 57 pages of 10 per page.)

So what does the 78,000 figure in the announcement represent? “It’s people who have at least done the first step,” he said. That appears to be to go to this page, which asks for only a few pieces of information: an email address, password, birth date, and country of residence. After completing the form, you’re prompted to check your email for a confirmation message; clicking on the link in that message takes you to a page asking you to pay the registration fee before proceeding with the rest of the application.

It wouldn’t be surprising, then, that there’s a sharp dropoff between those who simply complete the initial registration form and those who actually do pay (anywhere from $5 to $73, depending on the per capita GDP of the applicant’s nation). The fee serves a useful purpose by screening out those who aren’t that serious about applying, as well as providing revenue to cover the costs of the application review process. But if, as Lansdorp said, the 78,000 covers only those who completed that initial (and free) registration step, it’s a little misleading to say that 78,000 have applied, since that implies that they have all completed the registration process. Lansdorp said on Tuesday he didn’t know the breakdown of the numbers in the steps between the 78,000 who registered and the several hundred who had uploaded videos.

Lansdorp is, though, very pleased with the public response to the campagn, the first step in a long process to select the first four-person crew that Mars One plans to launch in 2022. “We were expecting half a million at the end,” he said, referring to the August 31 deadline for submitting an application. “To have already now a very good portion of that is actually quite surprising to me.”

The Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed nonprofit organization led by American space traveler and entrepreneur Dennis Tito, [...]]]> On Wednesday, publicists for a new organization called Inspiration Mars Foundation sent out a media advisory for a press conference planned for next Wednesday, February 27. This new organization apparently has some audacious plans in store:

The Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed nonprofit organization led by American space traveler and entrepreneur Dennis Tito, invites you to attend a press conference detailing its plans to take advantage of a unique window of opportunity to launch an historic journey to Mars and back in 501 days, starting in January 2018. This “Mission for America” will generate new knowledge, experience and momentum for the next great era of space exploration. It is intended to encourage all Americans to believe again, in doing the hard things that make our nation great, while inspiring youth through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and motivation.

Besides Tito, the press conference will feature Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter, the CEO/CTO and president/chairwoman, respectively, of Paragon Space Development Corporation (the two also were part of the original Biosphere 2 crew). Also at the press conference will be Jonathan Clark, an expert in space medicine.

That lineup of speakers, and the language in the media advisory, have led some to speculate that Inspiration Mars is planning a human mission to Mars, although the advisory makes no explicit mention of that. “Dennis Tito To Announce Private Human Mars Mission” is the headline at NASA Watch, while Wired News reports “Space Tourist to Announce Daring Manned Mars Voyage for 2018″. The “unique window of opportunity” the advisory refers to may be a reference to the 2018 Mars launch window, which is particularly favorable (NASA had planned to use it for a Mars lander and rover mission in cooperation with ESA before terminating those plans a year ago in favor of what became a 2020 Mars rover based on Curiosity.) Paragon, meanwhile, is known for its expertise in life support systems, while Clark has worked with private ventures, including the Red Bull Stratos high-altitude jump last year.

However, at first blush there would be a lot of obstacles to a human Mars mission like what Inspiration Mars appears to be proposing. There’s obviously the cost, which would run in the billions of dollars (10? 20? 50?). Tito, the first self-funded private space traveler, is a wealthy man, but not that wealthy: his estimated net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He certainly has a network of contacts that could bring in additional money, but enough to mount a human mission?

There’s also the technical issues of putting together a spacecraft that can handle a 500-day mission to Mars and back without the steady stream of resupply lights bringing up propellant and spare parts, as is the case today with the International Space Station. A 500-day mission would also set human spaceflight endurance records and raise medical issues (something Dr. Clark would be very knowledgable about). And getting it done by 2018? Keep in mind NASA slipped a Mars rover that is, to first order, a copy of Curiosity to 2020 because it didn’t have the time and budget to get it ready for the more favorable 2018 opportunity.

What if, though, Inspiration Mars is planning not a crewed mission to Mars, but instead an inhabited one? That is to say, instead of sending people to Mars, they’re instead planning to send plants and/or animals on a mission there? Such a mission could be a critical pathfinder for a later human mission, by governments or private organizations, and could, as the advisory stated, offer “new knowledge, experience and momentum for the next great era of space exploration.” It’s also something that would be far more affordable and easier to complete in time for a 2018 launch without having to solve a lot of technical and medical issues associated with crewed mission.

What could that non-human biological payload be? One possibility is that it may be some kind of Martian greenhouse, a project that has been proposed in the past. And, four years ago, Paragon announced plans to develop a lunar greenhouse that would be flown to the Moon on a lander developed by Odyssey Moon, a Google Lunar X PRIZE competitor that has since merged with another team, SpaceIL, last November. This might be something similar, and the favorable 2018 launch window would make it easier to send either a lander or an orbiter with the ability to return to the Earth. The press conference attendees given no hint at any technical details, like who would build the spacecraft and who will launch it. However, SpaceX has been working on a “Red Dragon” Mars mission concept using its Dragon spacecraft that might work here. And, interesting enough, Elon Musk started SpaceX when he encountered problems finding an affordable launch of a pet project of his: a small Martian greenhouse.

Of course, perhaps Tito and his team are indeed planning a human Mars mission, and have found the right combination of funding and technology to make it possible in five years. But simply sending life to Mars would be fascinating enough.

This morning I posted some things to look for in today’s unveiling of Golden Spike, the company planning commercial human lunar missions as early as 2020. With the company’s Washington press conference now complete, let’s quickly revisit those topics:

Technology: As expected, the company [...]]]>

Illustration of a Golden Spike lunar lander. (Credit: Golden Spike)

This morning I posted some things to look for in today’s unveiling of Golden Spike, the company planning commercial human lunar missions as early as 2020. With the company’s Washington press conference now complete, let’s quickly revisit those topics:

Technology: As expected, the company is leveraging existing capabilities in terms of launch vehicles, spacecraft, and the like, focusing on developing only those components that don’t exist today. “Take a look at what you’ve already got in terms of existing assets, use existing launch vehicles, adapt crew capsules that are already in development,” said Alan Stern, president and CEO of Golden Spike. “Only develop new systems, like an expedition lander and surface suits, where no system exists today.” He calls this a “head start” architecture that “offers enormous and convincing cost, schedule, and reliability advantages” over an entirely clean-sheet approach.

Financing: Even with this “head start” approach, the company will still need significant amount of money to develop this system: Stern said they estimate the cost to be $7–8 billion, which is still far less than any other human lunar mission approach. Stern said that while they’ll raise the money though a variety of means, including advance sales of expedition and an “enterprising financing plan,” they’ll still need to raise “hundreds of millions of dollars” from outside investors.

The company declined to go into details about their investment plans, including how much they’ve raised and from whom. “We don’t have any billion-dollar backers,” Stern said. Gerry Griffin, the chairman of the company’s board of directors, addressed “some pretty wild speculation” in the media about who might be funding the company. “For example, I read that Warren Buffett is involved. Let me just say that we’re in an earlier stage of this company than some people may think,” he said. “On the other hand, if any of you know Warren, I’d be grateful if you’d point him my way.”

Business Case: Who would be the customers of the company’s lunar expeditions? Their biggest target is what some in the industry call “sovereign clients”, or national space agencies that don’t have their own human spaceflight programs. “We expect significant demand from foreign space agencies,” Stern said, citing an internal market study that identified 15 to 20 “or more” nations out there that could afford such a mission, which the company prices at $1.5 billion a flight. “We’ve already had conversations with some national space agencies, and they’ve expressed their interest.”

Other markets include individual tourists or companies interested in commercial exploitation of the Moon. Stern said he’s talked with one unnamed individual who is “very seriously” interested in such a trip.

But are those markets big enough to warrant the hundreds of millions of dollars of outside investment, when other ventures, like Google Lunar X PRIZE teams and Space Adventures’ circumlunar flights, have struggled to find customers and line up significantly smaller tranches of funding? Stern and Griffin said that landing people on the Moon is big and exciting enough to attract interest that other ventures haven’t found. “It’s apples and oranges,” said Griffin, calling human spaceflight “a different domain” than robotic landers. “You can’t compare this to the Google Lunar X PRIZE. It’s not the same animal.”

Human missions, said Stern, “will attract a lot more interest, and, unlike a figure-eight flyby around the Moon”—a reference to the Space Adventures proposed mission—“these are serious scientific expeditions, so you don’t have to justify it as a stunt” but instead as science.

Indeed, human missions to the surface of the Moon are far different than anything else proposed to date. Whether they are exciting and compelling enough to open up investors’ pocketbooks and space agencies’ coffers to the tune of several billion dollars is a question whose answer will unfold over the next few years.

Science-fiction authors and space commercialization advocate alike have dreamed for decades of mining asteroids. So when Seattle-based Planetary Resources, Inc. announced last week it will unveil on Tuesday “a new space venture with a mission to [...]]]>

Illustration of Planetary Resources Inc.'s initial spacecraft, the Arkyd-101 space telescope in Earth orbit. (credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)

Science-fiction authors and space commercialization advocate alike have dreamed for decades of mining asteroids. So when Seattle-based Planetary Resources, Inc. announced last week it will unveil on Tuesday “a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity” that has the backing of an all-star list of investors—Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, James Cameron, and Ross Perot, Jr., among others—the Internet exploded with visions of 21st century ’49ers heading out to the asteroid belt to make trillions of dollars mining gold and platinum.

That vision, as it turns out, is partially correct. Planetary Resources does plan to mine asteroids, eventually, but is taking an incremental approach with a series of robotic missions in Earth orbit and beyond to get there. And once they’re ready to start mining, the first resources they’re interested in are not precious metals but instead volatile compounds like water that can be used for propellant depots, enabling a wide range of commercial and government missions. In short, they’re initially more oil drillers than ore miners.

“Over the next five to ten years, considerable capability will be added in terms of launch vehicles and spacecraft,” company co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson said in a telephone interview last week, citing developments in commercial and government crewed and other vehicles. “The ability to use space resources to help explore space is a missing piece.”

Propellant depots have been an area of interest in recent years as a way to lower launch costs by allowing spacecraft to launch “dry”—that is, with empty tanks—and then gas up in space; or, to refuel their tanks to extend their missions. For propellant depots to work, though, the cost of bringing the propellant up separately and operating the depots would have to be less that simply launching fully-fueled spacecraft on larger rockets. Depot advocates in the past have suggested that supplying depots with relatively inexpensive propellants could be an ideal market for new, untried low-cost launch vehicles, particularly reusable launch vehicles.

In Anderson’s vision, obtaining water from near Earth asteroids and hauling it to propellant depots in Earth orbit or in cislunar space (such as one of the Lagrange points) would provide propellant in the form of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for spacecraft at a tenth of the cost of hauling that water from the Earth. “I think there’s a market that, once the capability is there, will be easy to demonstrate,” Anderson said.

“I think we’ll have propellant depots in operation within the decade, before 2020,” Anderson said. He added that the company is open to either operating the depots itself or selling fuel to other depot operators, who would, in turn, sell propellant to spacecraft that needed it.

The company isn’t forgetting about the potential to mine asteroids for precious metals that are becoming harder and more expensive to mine on Earth, Anderson said. “I’m certainly not shying away from emphasizing that, but it’s a less urgent example,” he said. He said that “certainly within 20 years” there will be a strong, positive case for extracting such metals from asteroids. “I think the near-term driver for the space resources market is volatiles from near Earth objects” for refueling spacecraft and supporting robotic and human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, he said.

Getting to the point of extracting those volatiles and other resources will be a multi-step process. The company plans to launch its first spacecraft within 18 to 24 months that will go into low Earth orbit and carry telescopes and instruments to observe near Earth objects, characterizing them to determine which ones would be most promising to visit by future missions.

The “Arkyd-101″ spacecraft will be small and simple, said company president Chris Lewicki in a separate interview. Each spacecraft will fit into a box 40 centimeters on a side and weigh about 20 kilograms. Planetary Resources will look for secondary launch opportunities—hitching a ride on a larger spacecraft’s launch—to launch these spacecraft, of which several will be flown.

Within a few years of launching those Earth orbiting missions, the company then plans to launch “swarms” of small spacecraft on missions to candidate asteroids to study them in situ. Lewicki said that phase would include missions to rendezvous with near Earth objects as well as “intercept” missions to asteroids passing close to the Earth “in the spirit of the Ranger missions done to the Moon in the 1960s,” although not necessarily impacting the asteroid.

Lewicki said there were several keys to the company’s technical approach, including technology, small teams, simplicity of design, and overall mindset. For example, on the technology side, the company has been doing work on optical, or laser, communications that would enable high-bandwidth communications among the spacecraft and with Earth while requiring only limited power. Arkyd Astronautics, also run by Lewicki, received a $125,000 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award from NASA in 2011 for work on “Multi-functional Optical Subsystem Enabling Laser Communication on Small Satellites”.

The company has attracted a number of experienced people from JPL to help develop its spacecraft. Lewicki himself worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander. “We have many people on my team that I brought from JPL who were as excited about the opportunity as I was that they jumped ship from Mars Science Laboratory and other exciting projects to really redefine the way robotic space exploration can be done,” he said.

Lewicki likened the company’s efforts to perform low-cost planetary exploration—and eventually exploitation—to how Scaled Composites was able to develop a crewed suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne, in the early 2000s, an effort that four decades earlier required the resources of a nation. “In a lot of ways, what we’re focused on at Planetary Resources is doing the same for robotic exploration,” he said. “We’re putting forth missions like the Mariners and Rangers and Surveyors of the ’60s.” Now, though, he added, the technologies make such missions possible for a commercial company.

What financial resources that Planetary Resources can bring to bear is uncertain. Anderson did not respond to questions about the level of funding that the company has raised from its billionaire investors. He did indicate that, in the nearer term, the company could generate revenue by selling versions of its Arkyd-101 and other spacecraft to various customers, including for Earth observing applications. Anderson also would only say that they have “a number of thoughts” on how to accomplish the resource extraction missions to near Earth asteroids.

Lewicki was clearly eager to work on this, while understanding it will be a long term effort to extract asteroid resources. “For me, it’s just really exciting,” he said. “It’s just the promise and the hope that we’re actually gotten to a time and place where private resources and technology, and the foundation that NASA has laid,” can enable such an effort. “We are taking what is that first, necessary step.”

A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human spaceflight. [...]]]>

Illustration of a Soyuz spacecraft and habitation module en route to the Moon for a circumlunar flight Space Adventures has proposed.

A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human spaceflight. In a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson said his company projects approximately 140 people to fly in space commercially in the coming decade. By comparison, during the last ten years seven people flew to space commercially on eight flights (one, Charles Simonyi, flew twice.)

Anderson said Space Adventures was asked by NASA and by Boeing (who Space Adventures has partnered with on development of a commercial crew vehicle, the CST-100) to provide an estimate on the demand for commercial human orbital spaceflight. That figure, he said, includes direct sales to individuals (the traditional “space tourist”) as well as lotteries and other competitions, corporate research, and educational missions. Anderson said the total specifically excludes what are often called “sovereign clients”, representatives of national space agencies flying for their governments. Those 140 people, he said, would fly to the ISS as well as Bigelow Aerospace facilities and one proposed by a Russian company, Orbital Technologies. “Realistically, having 140 individuals fly by the time 2020 rolls around is a pretty darn big accomplishment,” he said.

That estimate uses some relatively conservative assumptions on factors such as price and training time, Anderson said later. “For the majority of the next ten years, we would see prices roughly where they are now,” between $20 million and $50 million, he said. Price, he said, is probably the most important factor in demand, and there would not be dramatic changes in prices unless there was the development of a fully-reusable vehicle. Training time, he said would likely be no less than two months even for missions not going to the ISS. “I just don’t see a way to get that training time down any less than, say, six weeks,” he said. “There’s just too much stuff people need to know, they need to learn, in order to be prepared for the weightless environment.”

The other major aspect of the Space Adventures call Thursday was to provide an update on their circumlunar plans. Earlier this year Anderson announced that the company had signed up one customer for its proposed mission at a cost of $150 million. Anderson confirmed that on Thursday, and added that the company had started negotiations for the second seat available on the flight. “We are hopeful that the contract for the second client, and therefore the total locked-in mission, will be signed and announceable by the end of the year,” he said. Once the mission is “locked-in”, Anderson said they believe they will be able to fly it in about four years, or as soon as the end of 2015.

Anderson didn’t disclose the identities of either the signed customer or the potential customer they’re currently in negotiations with. However, Anderson did note, intriguingly, that the signed customer is planning some kind of research during the flight. The mission of that customer, he said, “is actually really, really meaningful. It is something that is going to address an issue and a concept that is of great importance to the world.” That work, which Anderson did not elaborate upon, will be “an amplifier to the attention” that circumlunar mission would receive and would “captivate a lot of people”.

Space Adventures also released some new images of the lunar mission concept, which features a habitation module launched separately on a Proton that would dock with the Soyuz spacecraft after the Soyuz completes a mission at the ISS. The hab module, along with the Soyuz modules, would provide 18 cubic meters of habitable volume for the three-person crew and would allow for “an extraordinarily comfortable trip to the Moon and back,” in the words of Richard Garriott, Space Adventures vice-chairman who flew to space as a customer of the company in 2008.

“We’re at an extraordinarily unusual moment in history,” Garriott said. “I good argument can be made that there’s every real possibility that the first human return to the Moon since the original Apollo flights may not be sponsored by any government of the Earth, but will be sponsored by private citizens.”