“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 [...]]]>

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.

On September 29th, SpaceShipTwo made its 16th glide flight, and first in three months, in the skies above Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The SpaceShipTwo test flight log at Scaled [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo is nestled between the twin fuselages of WhiteKnightTwo during a flyby at Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 17.

On September 29th, SpaceShipTwo made its 16th glide flight, and first in three months, in the skies above Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The SpaceShipTwo test flight log at Scaled Composites indicates that the flight did not go exactly as planned:

Test card called for releasing the Spaceship from WhiteKnightTwo and immediately entering a rapid descent. Upon release, the Spaceship experienced a downward pitch rate that caused a stall of the tails. The crew followed procedure, selecting the feather mode to revert to a benign condition. The crew then defeathered and had a nominal return to base. Great flying by the team and good demo of feather system.

Earlier this week, SPACE.com’s Leonard David provided a little more information about that glide test. That discussion makes the flight sound a little more harrowing than the writeup in the official log, with one observer claiming that the vehicle “dropped like a rock and went straight down”.

Scott Ostrem, chief engineer at The Spaceship Company, the Scaled-Virgin Galactic joint venture that will be manufacturing SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, offered an explanation at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Wednesday. “You come off the WhiteKnight and quickly going into a pitch-down attitude by design,” he said. “We pitched down a little too steeply on that flight and experienced a tail stall.”

There are several options to recover from such a stall, he said, one of them being using the vehicle’s unique feathering mechanism, designed to provide stability during reentry. “Our pilot chose to feather it. It’s an incredible testament to the feather design: instantly the vehicle stabilized at about 20, 30,000 feet,” Ostrem said. “We just then de-feathered and glided back down safely. It was a unique opportunity for us to prove out the feather design ata point where we weren’t necessarily intending to do it.”

That, however, has not stopped a series of rumors, whispered during breaks at the ISPCS and on the Internet, that the incident was more serious than what the companies have reported. Those include rumors that they were testing a maneuver in order to perform a drop test at the Spaceport America terminal dedication event held Monday. No such drop test took place, of course, but whatever happened did not prevent Virgin and Scaled from ferrying SpaceShipTwo from Mojave to the spaceport for the event.

For a decade now Armadillo Aerospace has been working a variety of designs for suborbital vehicles, initially in pursuit of the Ansari X PRIZE and more recently for commercial and government business: the company [...]]]>

Armadillo Aerospace's Stig rocket lifts off from Spaceport America earlier this year on its ill-fated flight. (credit: Armadillo Aerospace)

For a decade now Armadillo Aerospace has been working a variety of designs for suborbital vehicles, initially in pursuit of the Ansari X PRIZE and more recently for commercial and government business: the company has a partnership with Space Adventures to develop suborbital vehicles for space tourism flights as well as a NASA Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) contract to perform a series of test flights. Armadillo has also been working on a long “tube” rocket dubbed Stig (after the character on Top Gear; it’s also an acronym for “suborbital transport inertially guided”). Despite a setback earlier this year, the company has plans for two more Stig test flights this year.

The first Stig flight, designated Stig A-1, took place in May from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Unfortunately, the flight was not a success, suffering from several problems, including a roll problem and a failure of its parachute system. “It actually flew really well, it just didn’t land very well,” said Armadillo’s Neil Milburn during a Commercial Spaceflight Forum organized by SpaceUp Houston earlier this month. He showed a video of that fateful flight during his presentation at the Houston event.

Despite that setback (as well as the loss of another vehicle, a “SuperMod” called Dalek, in June), the company is moving ahead with future Stig flights. Milburn revealed at the forum that Armadillo is working on two more Stig vehicles it plans to fly later this year. Stig A-2, Milburn said, will feature a new film-cooled 5000-lbf (22,200-newton) engine. “It’s probably the best engine we’ve built to date,” he said. Armadillo hopes to launch that from Spaceport America in September. That will be followed in November by Stig B, which will have slightly better performance: while they hope to fly Stig A-2 to 80 kilometers, Stig B will be a “true 100-kilometer-capable vehicle”, he said.

The tube rockets are designed to be clustered and staged to allow for larger payloads to be carried on suborbital flights. The engine will also serve as the basis for its suborbital space tourism vehicle; Milburn said a first flight of a “prototype boilerplate vehicle” is planned for 2012. The vehicle will take off vertically with eight engines, turning off four in flight. In a shift, though, the vehicle will not perform a powered vertical landing. “We’re working on a GPS steerable recovery system with chutes” that they plan to test on the next Stig flight. He suggested the shift from a powered landing to using parachutes was intended to lower the fuel load on the vehicle.

Later, in the Q&A portion of the panel session, Milburn said Armadillo is looking, eventually, to orbital flight as well. “We intend to go orbital down the road,” he said. “We want to crawl before we walk and before we run.” He said they would be interested in launching from a coastal spaceport in Texas, like the one that been in some reports earlier this summer; “we’ve even talked about launching from the Gulf [of Mexico], if we can’t find a land base.”

For some time, a long pause in glide tests of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo raised questions about the progress the company was making, in partnership with Scaled Composites, on development of suborbital spacecraft. After a January 13th glide test, [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo during the feathered portion of a glide flight last week. (Clay Center Observatory/Virgin Galactic)

For some time, a long pause in glide tests of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo raised questions about the progress the company was making, in partnership with Scaled Composites, on development of suborbital spacecraft. After a January 13th glide test, the fourth overall for the vehicle, more than three months elapsed without another (although attempts to conduct a glide test in mid-February were aborted due to poor weather conditions, according to Scaled’s flight logs.)

That’s changed, though, in a big way. In less than three weeks, Virgin and Scaled have doubled the number of glide flights of SpaceShipTwo, with four flights between April 22 and May 10. Those flights included glide flights of longer duration on April 22 and 27, followed by the first flight of SpaceShipTwo that tested the vehicle’s ability to “feather” its wings, on May 4. That feathering, like that used on SpaceShipOne, rotates the tail section to a 65-degree angle, and is intended to provide for a stable reentry of the vehicle on suborbital spaceflights. On last week’s test, SpaceShipTwo flew in the feathered configuration for about 75 seconds before rotating the wings back to their normal configuration for landing.

Scaled and Virgin followed up that test with another glide test, this time without feathering, on Tuesday. That test was designed to perform testing on “flutter susceptibility” and also pilot proficiency, according to the flight logs. Why this sudden surge in testing isn’t clear, nor is there any indication from the company when they’ll be ready to start powered flight tests of SpaceShipTwo.

BBC reporter Richard Scott has a bit of an exclusive: a look behind the scenes of the development of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo as well as Spaceport America in New Mexico. The real exclusive is the first look inside [...]]]>

Screenshot of a video report by the BBC's Richard Scott showing the interior of SpaceShipTwo.

BBC reporter Richard Scott has a bit of an exclusive: a look behind the scenes of the development of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo as well as Spaceport America in New Mexico. The real exclusive is the first look inside SpaceShipTwo, briefly seen in the two-minute video. (Other videos in the article include an interview with test pilot Pete Siebold and a tour of Spaceport America.)

The video makes it clear that SS2 is still very much a work in progress: the interior is barebones, lacking even seats (although the fittings where the rotating passenger seats will be installed can be seen). The video also helps illustrate the relatively modest size of the cabin. While Scott is able to stand up normally in the cabin, it seems likely it will look a bit more cramped when fully outfitted and containing six passengers; he notes in the article that the cabin’s size “will probably mean them bumping into each other” during the weightless portion of the flight. The date of the video isn’t specified, but it shows SpaceShipTwo undergoing a fair amount of interior and exterior work at the time: the vehicle’s nose, for example, was removed.

One interesting note is something made in passing by Scott about SpaceShipTwo: “It’s going to be taking paying passengers into space from hopefully 2013.” That’s later than previous reports, which have suggested that Virgin would put SpaceShipTwo into commercial service next year. SpaceShipTwo, meanwhile, hasn’t made a glide flight since mid-January, according to Scaled Composites’ flight logs, although two attempts for glide flights in mid-February was aborted because of weather conditions.