“Space tourism doesn’t have to be rocket science,” reads the subheading of a New Scientist article about a proposed high-altitude passenger balloon concept that would take people to the edge [...]]]>

While the "bloon" from zero2infinity will take people to altitudes of up to 36 kilometers, it shouldn't be confused with space tourism. (credit: zero2infinity)

“Space tourism doesn’t have to be rocket science,” reads the subheading of a New Scientist article about a proposed high-altitude passenger balloon concept that would take people to the edge of space. The “bloon” concept, by Spanish company zero2infinity, features a six-person pressurized capsule carried to an altitude of 36 kilometers (118,000 feet) by a giant balloon. Four passengers, paying €110,000 (US$142,000) each, will spend two hours at that altitude, gazing down on the Earth, before gently descending to a landing.

It sounds like an interesting experience: an opportunity to gaze down on the Earth at altitudes three times higher than a commercial jetliner in what appears to be a luxurious setting (according to a brochure describing the overall experience). It may turn out to be a profitable niche for zero2infinity. However, contrary to New Scientist, it is certainly not space tourism.

And why isn’t it? For obvious reasons, the balloon is not going into space: while doesn’t have a sharp boundary like a national border, 36 kilometers is well below the altitudes commonly considered space, including the widely-accepted 100-kilometer the Kármán line. While there is some dispute about what altitude constitutes space (the US government, for example, awards astronaut wings at an altitude of 80 kilometers), the bloon flights still appear to fall far below those alternatives. Even zero2infinity markets its flights as “near-space”, using the term that emerged in the last decade for aerospace activities above altitudes commonly used by planes but below the Kármán line and other space boundary definitions.

Moreover, the bloon flights provide only part of the experience of space. While they will offer a high-altitude view of the Earth—albeit well below what suborbital and orbital space tourists would get—the bloon flights do not provide another essential aspect of spaceflight: extended weightlessness. (The company’s brochures do suggest that the bloon flights would allow “up to 25 seconds of zero, lunar and martian gravity”, comparable to a single parabola on a ZERO G or similar aircraft flight.) The New Scientist article is dismissive of the weightlessness experience: “But is the point of space travel to get funfair thrills that you could experience far more cheaply by taking a plane ride on a weightlessness-producing ‘vomit comet’?”

Well, perhaps: the “funfair thrills” of weightlessness (of much greater duration than possible on an aircraft) is widely cited as one of the primary reasons people are interested in space flight. There’s also the intangible benefits of the full experience: the view from space plus the sensation of weightlessness plus the other attributes of the flight. Suggesting one could save money by separating out the experiences (a balloon flight plus a zero-g flight, for example) is somewhat like arguing that one can save money on a trip to Hawaii or the Caribbean by staying home and going to an indoor pool and then a tanning salon. It’s not really the same.

There’s also the environmental angle: the article argues that while zero2infinity claims that its flight can be (eventually) zero-emission, suborbital vehicles flown at high flight rates could have polluting effects comparable to all of commercial aviation. However, the 2010 study cited in the article as evidence of suborbital spaceflight’s polluting effects has been questioned by some in industry, who take issue with some of the assumptions that went into that model, including the amount of propellant used on those flights and the amount of soot produced. (For what it’s worth, the New Scientist article was written by the magazine’s biology and environment features editor, and not one of its space reporters.)

There’s another important difference between suborbital spaceflight and high-altitude ballooning. The former is arguably a means to a greater end: more frequent, less expensive, and safer spaceflight for a wide range of other applications. By leveraging the large potential customer base of thousands of spaceflight participants per year versus the roughly 100 satellites launched annually, it’s possible to support development of suborbital and eventually orbital vehicles that can open up new markets and applications that would otherwise be inaccessible with current vehicles. High-altitude ballooning, on the other hand, seems unlikely to be a stepping stone to either low-cost spaceflight or even broader terrestrial applications, other than scientific research that zero2infinity mentions in its literature.

“So if you’ve always longed to travel into space but don’t want to trash the planet doing so, space ballooning is the way to go,” the New Scientist article concludes. Sadly, that conclusion is inaccurate: there’s limited, disputed evidence that commercial spaceflight will “trash the planet”, and a high-altitude balloon flight is not “travel into space”, something I’ve railed against in the past. High-altitude ballooning and suborbital (and orbital) spaceflight can coexist; the former can serve as something of an appetizer for the latter, even. But ballooning is not a substitute for spaceflight.

The 15-minute video from 1998 starts with an animation of the unique flight profile of the company’s Roton SSTO RLV: launch vertically into orbit, deploy its payload, then land vertically using [...]]]> Robin Snelson recently posted on Ustream a video press release from the legendary Rocket Rocket Company, an entrepreneurial RLV developer from the late 1990s:

The 15-minute video from 1998 starts with an animation of the unique flight profile of the company’s Roton SSTO RLV: launch vertically into orbit, deploy its payload, then land vertically using helicopter-like rotors. It then follows with interviews with a number of company officials, many of whom read like a who’s who of NewSpace today: in addition to Rotary founders Gary Hudson and Bevin McKinney, there are cameos by Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong, who went on to found XCOR Aerospace; Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites; and Brian Binnie, a test pilot for Rotary who later flew SpaceShipOne for Scaled.

The video apparently predates the 1999 rollout of the Roton Atmospheric Test Vehicle (ATV) at Mojave Airport. The ATV made a few low-level flight tests using its rotors (powered by tip thrusters), but the company’s financial problems prevented additional test flights as well as the development of additional prototypes. The ATV was destined to go to a helicopter museum near San Diego, but an attempt to airlift the ATV by a Chinook failed. Instead, the ATV is now installed in a small park by the Mojave Air and Space Port headquarters:

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 [...]]]>

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.

“In some ways, the most dangerous thing that can happen to true believers is to give them everything that they’re asking for and watch them fail.” So said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace, in his talk Friday at the Space Access ’10 conference in [...]]]>

Jeff Greason speaking at Space Access '10 on Friday

“In some ways, the most dangerous thing that can happen to true believers is to give them everything that they’re asking for and watch them fail.” So said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace, in his talk Friday at the Space Access ’10 conference in Phoenix. While supporters of NewSpace might argue that they haven’t gotten everything they’ve wanted yet, clearly there is more interest in, and scrutiny of, the commercial space industry in general and entrepreneurial space ventures in particular. “I am both thrilled and terrified at the magnitude of the opportunity that is now facing our industry,” he said.

Greason, in a panel on key technologies the previous night at the conference, had expressed concerns about the decline of the American space industrial base, which he reiterated in his longer speech. “The dinosaurs are dying off faster than we can evolve to fill their niches,” he said, referencing an old analogy that likens the old space industry to dinosaurs and NewSpace to mammals.

That is putting pressure on the industry to step up, something that he worries it might not be ready to handle. “I’m not sure we’re ready to do all the things the United States government is depending on this industry to be able to do,” he said. “That’s just too bad, because we’re going to have to do it anyway.”

That means, he said, that it’s time for the commercial space industry to mature. “It is time to grow up,” he said, saying that it needs to adopt the characteristics of more mature industries: “They are much more interested in growing the pie than they are in fighting over the scraps. They sell pieces to each other. They do not tear each others’ efforts down.” That extends to not just NewSpace companies but also established companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. “Like it or not, we are all now on the same team.”

Greason cited one example—without naming names—that demonstrated that NewSpace in particular wasn’t yet mature. “In a rational universe, what would happen is, if you have a program that has a vehicle and no engine, and you have other companies that are building vehicles and have engines, you would go and buy engines, because you would then have a vehicle and could make money,” he said. “For whatever reason that’s not happening. I would be glad to sell people engines, but they don’t want to buy them.”

Greason said one could argue that if a vehicle developer bought an engine from another vehicle developer, each would be enabling a competitor, but both would be making money as a result, “so who cares?” Greason said there will come a time when the industry will reach a tipping point and shift from vertical integration to horizontal integration. “That’s part of how we’ll know we’ve crossed an irrevocable threshold as an industry,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”

“So it’s a hard road, it’s a long road, but we’re getting there, and the size of the opportunity that we’re faced with is terrifying and wonderful,” he said. However, he also said that might be the last chance for the commercial space industry in the US to demonstrate its capabilities. “If we blow it this time, I don’t know that we’re going to get another chance, because I’m not sure there’s going to be a United States space industry for us to work for.”