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 [...]]]>

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.

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 [...]]]>

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.”

As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people to [...]]]>

Eric Anderson (left) and John Carmack talk about their suborbital partnership at ISDC on Thursday.

As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people to at least 100 kilometers altitude, with Space Adventures selling the seats, starting with its existing customer list of about 200 people, including several former astronauts.

The presentation, featuring Space Adventures president and CEO Eric Anderson and Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack, offered few technical or schedule details about their plans. There is no finalized vehicle design yet: a video shown in the presentation showed a number of differenent Armadillo concepts, from a cone sitting atop four propellant tanks with a central engine to the “fishbowl” concept Armadillo showed off in 2008 for the short-lived suborbital joint venture between Armadillo and the Rocket Racing League. Carmack also offered no timetable for the beginning of tourist flights, although he did note the company hoped to be flying unmanned scientific payloads to altitudes of approximately 100,000 feet (30 kilometers) in the next year, and to 100 kilometers altitude in the following year.

Instead, the presentation was examining in more general terms the companies’ plans, including why Space Adventures, who has made a name for itself for nearly a decade by arranging flights to the International Space Station, would get into the suborbital spaceflight business. Anderson noted that when Space Adventures was founded in the late 1990s, its focus was on suborbital spaceflight at a time when many vehicle developers were saying “we’re only two years away,” he recalled. “We didn’t have any idea at the time that we would be fortunate enough to be able to launch private citizens to orbit before suborbital flights,” he continued. Later, Space Adventures considered working with a Russian company to develop a suborbital vehicle called Explorer, which he said they abandoned because “frankly, it got too expensive.” As Armadillo made progress with their vehicles, “I was just so impressed” with their efforts he was convinced they were the company that could really reduce the cost of space access.

While neither Armadillo nor Carmack discussed the cost of the project, they did confirm that Space Adventures was providing Armadillo with funding to support it, at least in part. Alluding to past partnership announcements that failed to pan out, Carmack said, “One of my new rules on this is that I’m not going to get up and talk about something unless a check has cleared.” And since Carmack was getting up and talking about this, he confirmed, “Space Adventures has actually paid Armadillo Aerospace to begin developing a new suborbital vehicle.” Carmack said later that under their agreement, Space Adventures will pay Armadillo unspecified amounts upon achiveing certain milestones in the vehicle development effort. “The amount of money that has changed hands here is not trivial, but it’s not enough to fund the vehicles,” he said. “It isn’t enough money to pay for these vehicles, it’s enough money to make me think about not pursuing other contracts.” He added that he expected to kick in more of his own money into the venture, but also looked to getting funding from NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program for flying scientific payloads.

The timelines that they did reveal suggest that Space Adventures and Armadillo will not be the first to market for commercial suborbital space tourism, given the progress being made by companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Carmack addressed this as well, in the process perhaps raising the hackles of some of his competitors in the audience at the ISDC. “It’s a fool who doesn’t think he has any competition,” Carmack said. On Virgin, he said, “I think they have explicitly not chosen the most cost effective solution on this. I don’t think they will be able to compete on price, eventually, but some people will prefer their experience.”

Carmack was critical of XCOR from a funding standpoint. “I believe that, if fully funded, they could build a vehicle that could fly, that could service passengers,” he said. “I do not believe they are fully funded.” He then issued something of a warning to other companies, after earlier noting that Armadillo planned to accelerate its development plans and hire more people. “I think one of the best things about having the other companies in the industry is that it’s developed some very skilled and talened people, and we’re probably going to steal some of them.”

Carmack also said he felt Armadillo’s VTVL vehicle was a superior approach to a winged vehicled like SpaceShipTwo or Lynx. A ballistic reentry, he said, is better than a winged reentry, noting one fatality from the X-15 program. Launching a winged vehicle, he added, is “a lot harder than making a ballistic vehicle fly right up.” Thus, for greatly reducing the cost of suborbital spaceflight, “the powered [vertical] landing has significant benefits.” After the presentation I talked briefly with XCOR COO Andrew Nelson, who said, “People will want a lot of different experiences. We believe that most people will want something involving wings.”

Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about 13,700 [...]]]>

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg)

Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about 13,700 meters (45,000 feet). The flight went well, according to all accounts, and Burt Rutan said in a Virgin statement, “The captive carry flight signifies the start of what we believe will be extremely exciting and successful spaceship flight test program.”

The flight also took place roughly on schedule. As Virgin Galactic’s Stephen Attenborough said last month at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, the first captive carry test would take place by the end of the first quarter of this year (which it achieved with a little over a week to spare). Captive carry tests would continue through the second quarter with the first glide test some time in the third quarter; the first powered test flight would, he hoped, take place by the end of the year.

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in flight (credit: Mark Greenberg)

One minor thing I noted. As you can see in the picture above, SpaceShipTwo flew without an engine, or, apparently, an engine nozzle: just a black plug of some kind where the engine would go. See the closeup below:

Compare that to an image I took of the vehicle during the rollout ceremony last December, when there was at least a replica engine nozzle in place:

One of the most intriguing NewSpace companies is Blue Origin, perhaps because they’re also one of the most secretive. Backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos—and thus without the [...]]]>

Illustration of Blue Origin's orbital crew vehicle, designed to be launched on an Atlas 5, as shown on a NASA slide at an FAA conference last week.

One of the most intriguing NewSpace companies is Blue Origin, perhaps because they’re also one of the most secretive. Backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos—and thus without the funding concerns of many other companies in this field—the company has been working for several years on its “New Shepard” vehicle that takes off and lands vertically. While the company has done a few test flights in 2006-2007 that required experimental permits from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, it hasn’t done any such flights recently, and speculation continues about what the company is, or isn’t, up to, and how long it might be before they have a vehicle flying.

The company has been closely guarded, revealing few details about its developments: its posting in January 2007 about its first test flight (which took place the previous November) has been its biggest bit of publicity. Those who have gotten a look inside the company, though, have been duly impressed. One of those is Dan Rasky of NASA Ames, who visited the company as part of an effort to develop a technology roadmap for commercial RLVs. “I joke with people that if you want to see what a billionaire’s clubhouse looks like, go visit Blue Origin,” he said at a public workshop last week in Washington.

However, Blue Origin isn’t quite as black as it has been. Late last year they announced that they has selected three investigations that would be the first suborbital research payloads the company plans to fly. At that time the company said that the crewed flight opportunities for New Shepard would be in 2012, with the possibility of flying remote-controller or autonomous payloads as early as 2011.

More recently, the company won a small contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program that has provided a bit more of a peek of what the company is up to. The $3.7-million contract covers the development of two items: work on “pusher” launch escape system and a composite pressure vessel. The escape system would use thrusters below a crew cabin that pushes the cabin away from its launcher in the event of a malfunction, instead of the “tractor” escape systems mounted on top of a crew capsule that pulls it away; the company had been planning something like that for its New Shepard vehicle, whose crew module is designed to separate from the propulsion module and land separately. A composite pressure vessel would, most likely, provide a lighter-weight option for any sort of vehicle that Blue Origin might be developing.

What is interesting is that Blue Origin is actively looking beyond suborbital spaceflight to orbital missions. Proof of that came in a presentation last week by Alan Lindenmoyer, who managers NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Programs, including CCDev. Speaking at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, he presented slides describing all five CCDev awards, including for Blue Origin. The Blue Origin slide, shown below, revealed that the company was proposing a “bi-conic space vehicle” that could be launched on an Atlas 5 402, a variant of the Atlas 5 with two Centaur engines in its upper stage and no strap-on solid rocket boosters. The slide notes that the composite pressure vessel that would be tested under the CCDev contract would be structural test article of their planned suborbital vehicle “as a subscale demonstrator for the orbital Space Vehicle”.

Blue Origin CCDev award details

Robert Milliman of Blue Origin, who was present at the February 2 NASA press conference in Washington where NASA unveiled the CCDev winners, as well as existing COTS/CRS awardees Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, didn’t provide many details about what the company’s plans were. “The [Blue Origin] team is dedicated to creating technologies for an enduring human presence in space,” he said before briefly describing the technologies funded under their CCDev award.

In very brief comments after the press conference, he said that Blue Origin was still focused on its suborbital program right now, proceeding “step by step”. He didn’t provide any specifics, such as schedule, about the company’s development of New Shepard or any future orbital vehicle, other than to say that flight tests are “coming up”.

It’s not surprising that Blue Origin sees suborbital as a step towards orbital flight, although the concept they proposed for their CCDev contract indicates that, at least in the relatively near term, they’re less likely to scale up New Shepard into an orbital vehicle than use some of that technology for a crewed vehicle that could be launched on an ELV.

A Blue Origin representative is scheduled to speak Thursday at the Next-Generation Suborbital Research Conference in Boulder, Colorado. Maybe we’ll learn a few more details about their vehicle plans. And maybe not.