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Thursday night SpaceUp Houston hosted a Commercial Spaceflight Panel featuring representatives of a number of orbital and suborbital spaceflight companies. The four companies working on orbital systems—ATK, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX—largely provided reviews of their recent work under funded or unfunded Commercial Crew Development agreements with NASA that have generally been reported elsewhere. The two suborbital companies, Armadillo and XCOR, did provide a little bit of news on their vehicle developments, however.
Neil Milburn of Armadillo Aerospace said the company was continuing work on its latest suborbital rocket, STIG-B, a scaled-up version (“we opted to supersize it,” explained Milburn) of the STIG-A rocket it launched from Spaceport America in New Mexico late last year and in January of this year. While Armadillo previously said they planned to launch STIG-B as early as this May, Milburn said they’re now planning on a launch from Spaceport America in late July or early August.
They’re also working on getting their FAA launch license, which they’ll need for STIG-B. (They’re generating revenue from these flights from payloads from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, making them ineligible for an experimental permit.) “It’s our first attempt at a license,” he said, a process that appears to be going smoothly. “We’ve got FAA on track for breaking their world record for issuing a license.” That license, he said, should be in place to support a late July launch attempt.
Khaki McKee of XCOR Aerospace discussed the status of Lynx development, running through a long list of components that are in various stages of fabrication. The Lynx’s aerodynamic design is “almost finished,” she said, with one more round of supersonic wind tunnel tests planned at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (similar to what the company indicated back in April.) The fuselage for the first Lynx vehicle is now in the shop, she said, and other components are out for bid or under work with vendors.
McKee also hinted that some more major news will be forthcoming from the company in coming months. “In the next couple of months we’re going to be making some very major announcements,” she said, adding that some of them will be “kind of breathtaking.”
 Mike Melville raises his arms after exiting SpaceShipOne following his suborbital flight on June 21, 2004. To the left, in the yellow shirt, is Burt Rutan; in the blue shirt and cap is Paul Allen. (credit: J. Foust) On June 21, 2004, Scaled Composites made history in the skies above the just-renamed Mojave Air and Space Port in the high desert of Southern California. Scaled’s White Knight carrier aircraft took off from the airport, with the SpaceShipOne suborbital spaceplane attached underneath. After climbing to an altitude of 14,300 meters (47,000 feet) at 7:50 am PDT, the White Knight crew released SpaceShipOne, which fired its hybrid rocket motor several seconds later. With Mike Melvill at the controls, SpaceShipOne ascended towards space, achieving a peak altitude of 100.124 kilometers (328,491 feet) before gliding back to a runway landing at Mojave. That flight was the first time a commercially-developed crewed spacecraft flew into space—if only briefly crossing the 100-kilometer Kármán Line that is a commonly-used demarcation of space.
That flight, and the two that followed in late September and early October of 2004 that claimed the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, were supposed to be the beginning of a new era of commercial spaceflight. The strong public interest in the flight, the two dozen other teams competing for the prize, and the entrance of Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic locked up a deal with Scaled and its funder, Paul Allen, shortly before the X PRIZE-winning flights, all foretold the beginning of an era when suborbital spaceflights, for tourism or other applications, would be relatively common, at least when compared to the small number of orbital launches that take place worldwide each year.
That future, though, has been on hold for a while. The final SpaceShipOne flight, on October 4, 2004, remains to this day the last commercial suborbital human spaceflight. Rather than putting SpaceShipOne into service, as many imagined would happen to the prize-winning vehicle since the $10-million prize purse was only a fraction of its development cost, Scaled and Allen instead put the vehicle into the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where it hangs today next to another prize-winning vehicle, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. (Allen later revealed that the tax writeoff from the donation, coupled with the prize money and technology licensing fees from Virgin, allowed him to get a “net positive return” on his investment in the project.) Development of its successor, SpaceShipTwo (SS2), has gone on slowly, and other ventures working on suborbital vehicles have also seen little progress.
This lack of progress also has its own form of Boyle’s Law, in this case named after MSNBC science reporter Alan Boyle. “When it comes to private spaceflight, the future always seems to be two years away,” he quipped in May 2007, summarizing the state of the industry. At that time, for example, Virgin was planning to put SpaceShipTwo into commercial service by late 2009, a date it missed. Rocketplane Global also planned to start test flights of its suborbital vehicle by 2009, which it also missed because of Rocketplane’s financial issues that eventually forced the company into bankruptcy.
Now, though, the future may be a little closer than two years off. Virgin and others are making progress—slower than they might have liked, but progress nonetheless. Customers may not be flying into space commercially this year, but their future flights may now be more like a year off.
Virgin Galactic remains the most visible of the commercial suborbital companies, thanks in large part to the Virgin marketing machine. Technically, though, the company is making progress in recent weeks. SpaceShipTwo took to the air on a “captive carry” flight on June 8, the first time the vehicle was airborne since a trip to Spaceport America in New Mexico last October. The test log indicates that this flight was a “rehearsal for glide flight”, suggesting that SS2 will fly free again some time in the near future for the first time since last September. Those flights are a prelude to powered test flights by SS2, which have been waiting on the development of its rocket motor, called Rocket Motor Two (RM2). Just yesterday they performed a static test of RM2, the first such test at Scaled’s facility in Mojave (previous tests had been conducted by Sierra Nevada Corporation elsewhere in Southern California). “These tests provide an end to end test of all the vehicle’s rocket motor systems and additional confidence before committing the vehicle to powered flight test,” the test log states.
Late last month, Virgin also announced that it had secured an experimental permit for flight tests from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). The permit is needed for Virgin and Scaled to perform those powered SS2 flight tests. “Scaled expects to begin rocket powered, supersonic flights under the just-issued experimental permit toward the end of the year,” Virgin stated in its announcement. First will be glide tests to study SS2’s aerodynamic performance with the additional weight of the rocket motor; those flights will start this summer and continue into autumn.
It’s possible, though, that Virgin could be beaten in commercial service by another Mojave-based company, XCOR Aerospace. XCOR is making steady progress on its Lynx suborbital vehicle with tests to begin later this year and the first “air under the wings”—in the form of a brief powered hop off the runway at Mojave—possible by the end of this year. A press release from XCOR yesterday about an agreement to provide flight training services to Excalibur Almaz indicated that its first Lynx flight is planned for “later this year or in early 2013″ with several Lynx suborbital flights per day by 2015.
There are other ventures as well. Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems are working on suborbital vehicles that take off vertically and land either by parachute (Armadillo) or under engine power vertically (Masten). These vehicles will be initially uncrewed, although Armadillo does have plans for a crewed vehicle and an agreement with Space Adventures to market those flights. Both companies have test flights planned for later this year. Blue Origin, whose public focus (or, at least, as public as the secretive company gets) has been on orbital spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program, still has plans for suborbital vehicles.
Eight years after SpaceShipOne first flew in space, the lack of progress can seem disappointing compared to the hopes and expectations of the crowd that gathered that sunny morning in the desert north of Los Angeles. But, perhaps, the future that we were promised that historic day is finally arriving.
Commercial spaceflight has gotten a lot of public attention with the successful spaceflight of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station last month. A pair of events today and tomorrow will offer an opportunity for politicians and the public to hear about, and perhaps express their opinions on, the current state of commercial spaceflight.
At 10 am EDT Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing titled “Risks, Opportunities, and Oversight of Commercial Space”. Five people are scheduled to appear before the committee, including NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier and two former astronauts, Pam Melroy (now working for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation) and Michael Lopez-Alegria (now president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation). Rounding out the hearing are Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace and Gerald Dillingham of the GAO. The hearing will be webcast on the committee’s website.
At 8 pm EDT Thursday, SpaceUp Houston is hosting the 2012 edition of its “Commercial Spaceflight Panel” at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The two-hour panel will feature speakers from four companies with funded or unfunded Commercial Crew Development awards from NASA (ATK, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX), as well as two suborbital companies (Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR), and Southwest Research Institute, which plans to perform suborbital research on commercial vehicles. That event will also be webcast.
The administrator of NASA said Monday he expects the space agency to announce multiple awards for the next round of its commercial crew development effort by the middle of next month.
Speaking in a media telecon Monday morning, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said he expected the awards to be announced “no later than, say, mid-July or so, that’s our hope,” he said. NASA had previously indicated that the awards would come by August, but chatter in the industry suggested that timetable could be moved up based on the progress NASA was making with scheduling oral presentations by companies submitting proposals.
Bolden said later in the telecon that NASA plans to select “upwards of three companies” in this round of the program, called Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap). However, he said they would fund the equivalent of “two and a half” companies: two will get full-sized awards and a third would get a half-sized award. (Although not explicitly stated, Bolden’s language suggests that other companies could get unfunded Space Act Agreements, as was the case in the earlier rounds of the program.) That award system aligns with what Bolden and a key member of Congress, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, agreed to earlier this month as part of a deal to address the concerns Wolf had with the commercial crew program.
NASA did not disclose on the call how many companies submitted CCiCap proposals, citing the sensitive nature of the ongoing competition. It’s likely, though, that at least five major players submitted proposals, including the four companies with second round Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) funded agreements: Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and SpaceX. In addition, the ATK/EADS Astrium joint venture proposing the Liberty launch vehicle, which has an unfunded CCDev-2 award from NASA, has also indicated they’ve submitted a proposal for CCDev-2.
How big these full- or half-sized awards have yet to be announced, and will depend in part on what the companies are asking for. Bolden said he will continue to push for full funding for the commercial crew program in Congress for fiscal year 2013: just under $830 million. The House and Senate versions of the appropriations bill that includes NASA, though, fund the program at $500 and $525 million, respectively. “We will ask for a significant increase in 2014 and the other years if we are to hold to the 2017 first flight for commercial crew to the International Space Station,” he said.
NASA officials also said on the telecon that, contrary to some language used in media reports about the commercial crew competition, the CCiCap awards are not a “downselect”. What that likely means is that any company will be able to submit bids for the next phase of the program after CCiCap, which will be run under more conventional Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) rules. That causes some confusion since Congressional critics like Rep. Wolf had pushed NASA to downselect to even a single company going forward, something NASA objected to in order to preserve competition and redundancy.
The news about the commercial crew competition overshadowed the primary purpose of the hastily-arranged telecon, which was to announce a memorandum of understanding between NASA and the FAA regarding regulation of commercial spaceflight. For commercial cargo, and future commercial crew, missions to the ISS performed for NASA, the FAA will license the launches and reentries as they do today, with NASA taking responsibility for crew safety and mission assurance oversight. That division of labor (which does not apply to commercial cargo or crew missions that don’t involve NASA; the space agency will have no oversight role in those cases) was largely expected.
 Illustration of Moon Express's proposed lander. (credit: Moon Express) On Wednesday, during a summit of the teams participating in the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) competition in Washington, Moon Express announced it was acquiring another team, Next Giant Leap (NGL). The acquisition will “leverage and carry forward the substantial work” done by NGL and its partners, although the release does not go into specifics about how NGL’s technology or other capabilities will be integrated into Moon Express. Moon Express’s Bob Richards tells MSNBC that NGL’s control system, developed by Draper Labs, is perhaps the biggest part of the acquisition.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; Richards would only say the deal “involved a payment to Next Giant Leap” (unclear if it was cash, equity, or some combination), and that two NGL co-founders, Michael Joyce and Todd Mosher, would join Moon Express as advisors.
While this specific deal might have been a surprise, the fact that teams are acquiring one another, and making other hard decisions about their future plans, should not be. “This year is going to be a very interesting year: it’s the first of the two shake-up years when reality hits and teams really figure out whether they need to move forward or decide they have gone as far as they can go,” said Alex Hall, senior director of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, during a talk at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Washington on Sunday.
Although the GLXP prizes remain available through the end of 2015, meeting that deadline requires making some decisions soon, such as making launch arrangements, and raising the money needed to pay for those launches. “That is the big issue for the majority of the teams, being able to get the funding in time to make those down payments, or to put their parts together if they’re building a rocket,” she said.
Hall showed the results of a survey of the then 26 teams participating in the competition, where 46 percent said they had raised less than a quarter of the funding they needed, and 35 percent said would merge with another team or drop out of the competition if they didn’t raise “major” funding this year. “If you’re not at the point by the end of this year where you’re substantially far along in both your spacecraft and your launch contract negotiations, you’re probably not going to be making an attempt before the end of 2015,” she said.
So, expect some more changes among the 25 teams now remaining in the competition in the months to come, as some seek to merge to improve their chances to win the prize, while others may have to throw in the towel. “Things really are going to get very interesting,” Hall said.
This week marks a transition for two long-time space entrepreneurs, who are stepping away from their current ventures to look for new opportunities. At the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Washington on Friday, David Gump said he will be leaving his position as president of Astrobotic Technology, the Pittsburgh-based company competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP), as of the end of this month. Gump said he plans to return home to the Washington area (where his family remained while he worked for Astrobotic in Pittsburgh) and do some space consulting as president of CircumSpace Management Group.
Speaking on the same space entrepreneurship panel at ISDC on Friday, Rex Ridenoure, the president and co-founder of Ecliptic Enterprises, said he would be stepping aside from day-to-day activities at the company at the end of the month. Ridenoure has been working at Ecliptic, best known as makers of the RocketCam, since its founding 11 years ago, and he told attendees he felt it was time to shift into a new role. “I’m going to say in a more strategic role on the board,” he said, saying he would also be doing some consulting for Ecliptic and other commercial space companies.
Speaking at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Washington on Friday, Mark Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)( indicated that initial flight tests of his company’s Dream Chaser vehicle would begin soon. “We begin our flight tests probably next week,” he said in remarks largely overshadowed by the excitement at the conference over the successful berthing of SpaceX’s Dragon with the ISS earlier in the morning. “It is amazing to me, having been working with this on paper for so long, that it is going to be starting.”
That comment was about the only advance notice of that test flight, which took place Tuesday in the Denver area. In the captive carry flight, the Dream Chaser was suspended from a helicopter flying around Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in the Denver suburb of Broomfield, not far from Sierra Nevada’s facilities in Louisville, Colorado. The company released little information about the test flight: a press release Tuesday from the company focused on several milestones SNC achieved in its CCDev-2 commercial crew award from NASA, including a “Captive Carry Flight Test Readiness Review”. The release, though, referred to the captive carry test in the future, saying it “will occur near the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County, Colo.” Well, it has…
Also worth noting is that, in the past, SNC has talked about performing Dream Chaser test flights (captive carry and/or drop tests) with Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo vehicle. This test was done instead with a helicopter; it’s not clear when (or if) they’ll transition to WK2, given that WK2 will presumably be busy in the coming months with SpaceShipTwo flight tests.
When the SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully lifted off from Florida about 48 hours ago, placing the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, the celebratory remarks flowed. Members of Congress offered their best wishes, as did organizations representing both the emerging commercial spaceflight industry as well as the more traditional, mainstream aerospace industry. On Tuesday morning at the Global Space Exploration Conference in Washington, officials from several space agencies offered their congratulations. And SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted last night he got a special call as well—even if he almost missed it:
Those congratulations are well deserved, of course, but perhaps a bit premature. SpaceX has already demonstrated its ability to place Dragon into orbit, doing it in its first COTS demonstration mission in December 2010. While the Dragon quickly moved beyond the capabilities demonstrated on that initial flight by deploying its solar panels (not used on its brief 2010 flight) and testing other systems, the real demonstration of Dragon starts early this morning when it approaches and flies around the ISS. If that goes well, it will closely approach and berth with the station on Friday morning. Those tests are arguably far more critical, and demanding, than launching the spacecraft.
If SpaceX is successful, though, the company will deserve congratulations far greater than anything it’s received so far.
In less than 24 hours, technology and meteorology permitting, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will lift off from Cape Canaveral carrying a Dragon cargo spacecraft on a test flight to the International Space Station. If all goes well, it will berth with the station early next week, demonstrating its ability to transport cargo to the station.
This is a key demonstration for SpaceX and, by extension, the commercial spaceflight community, but is its importance being overemphasized? Much of the media coverage of the flight has called this a “milestone” for commercial space, among other similar language. That coverage is understandable, but it may unnecessarily raise the stakes for what is a test flight, one where things can go wrong. That runs the risk of creating the perception that if the mission doesn’t complete all of its milestones—such as maneuvering around but not berthing with the ISS—the mission will be seen as a failure.
“It’s such a high-profile launch that a failure could set not only the company back, but set NASA’s policy back and call it into question,” former astronaut Tom Jones told Fox News in an article titled, “Commercial space race at make-or-break moment with looming launch”. But should the stakes be that high?
“It’s a very ambitious mission. If they get even half of their mission objectives done successfully, that would still be an historic first,” said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, during a conference call with reporters Thursday organized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF). “Please remember that, succeed or fail, test flights are called test flights for a reason… They very rarely go perfectly.”
During the call, I asked Greason and the other participants, CSF president Michael Lopez-Alegria and NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, how to manage expectations accordingly given that this is a test flight and things can go wrong. They tried to emphasize that this is a test flight, and even partial success should be treated as a major positive accomplishment for SpaceX and the industry.
“This is a combination of two test flights, and you can argue that if you got the objectives of the first test flight complete, that would be a win,” said Lopez-Alegria. That’s a reference to the fact that this mission is intended to combine the objectives of the second and third test flights in SpaceX’s original award from NASA. “Anything above that would be even better.”
He went on that achieving those objectives, such as safely moving around the station in a specific trajectory, are fairly technical, making it difficult for the public to easily judge success or failure. “Black-and-white judgments are going to be difficult, less visible for the public to perceive,” he said.
Garver acknowledged that how the public perceives the outcome of the mission will be different from the detailed technical analysis by NASA and SpaceX. “Success will be judged by the public,” Garver said. “We realize the characterization of it by NASA will be different than what the public decides.”
Greason added that SpaceX is attempting an ambitious mission, historically speaking. “The whole Gemini program had test objectives that, in essence, are all being condensed into this one mission,” he said. “If they get even halfway there, that’s still one for the books.”
Will those engineering nuances be appreciated by a public that may not understand the major challenges associated in flying a spacecraft in the vicinity of another and then, carefully and precisely approaching it? How understanding will the public be if Dragon achieves some, but not all, of its objectives? The more the mission is portrayed in terms of a “make-or-break” event for commercial space, the more eager those same people will seek to provide a black-and-white, success-or-failure judgment for its outcome, as inaccurate as that may be technically.
“One success does not prove a reliable capability, even if everything goes great,” Greason said, “and one failure or one setback doesn’t mean that the problems found won’t be fixed, either.”
 Illustration of the ATK/EADS Astrium Liberty system, featuring the Liberty rocket and a crew capsule. (Credit: ATK) Early last year Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and EADS Astrium unveiled a new launch vehicle called Liberty, using a five-segment solid rocket booster built by ATK for the lower stage and a modified Ariane 5 core stage built by Astrium for the upper stage. The companies hoped to win funds from NASA’s second-round Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) competition, primarily as as an alternative to the Atlas 5 for vehicles being proposed by companies other than SpaceX (which, of course, is using its own Falcon 9).
The companies didn’t win CCDev-2 funding but did get an unfunded Space Act Agreement to support continued study of the vehicle. In the meantime, though, the companies that did get CCDev-2 funding for their vehicles—Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and SpaceX—all selected other vehicles for their spacecraft: SpaceX using its own Falcon 9, while the other three picking the Atlas 5. Liberty, it appeared, was left without a ride.
Wednesday, though, in a briefing at the Spacecraft Technology Expo in Los Angeles, the companies announced their new plan: developing their own full-service crew transportation system, also called Liberty, using the previously-announced Liberty rocket and a crew capsule. That capsule is based on a composite crew capsule previously built by ATK for testing by NASA during Constellation. The vehicle’s service module is a slimmed-down version of the one bring developed for Orion by Lockheed Martin, while the crew escape system is the Max Launch Abort System (MLAS), developed originally as an alternative to Orion’s traditional escape tower system and successfully tested at NASA Wallops in 2009.
ATK and Astrium officials, at the LA announcement, said that Liberty could be ready soon: initial test launches of the abort system would take place in 2014, with test flights of the full system in 2015, the second carrying a two-person test crew. “We have our first test crew picked out,” Kent Rominger, ATK vice president and program manager for Liberty, said, without divulging their names.
Rominger emphasized the design safety of the Liberty system, calling it “the safest ever designed.” That assessment is based on what he described as a simple design as well as the demonstrated reliability of solid rocket motors and the Ariane 5 core stage (there have been nearly 50 consecutive successful Ariane 5 launches, going back nearly a decade.) Rominger said that the risk of a fatal accident on the shuttle was no better than 1 in 200, while the Liberty system would be better than 1 in 1,200.
Liberty looks like the Ares 1 rocket that was under development by NASA for Constellation before its 2010 cancellation, which had concerns about thrust oscillation causing significant vibrations in its upper stage. However, Rominger and John Schumacher, CEO of Astrium in North America, said that the Ariane 5 core stage behaved differently than the original Ares 1 upper stage, with far less vibration. “Ares 1 was really a system tuning problem,” Rominger said, as its upper stage has natural frequencies coupled with the lower stage. The Ariane-derived upper stage doesn’t have the same tuning, he said. “We can confidently say we don’t have a problem.”
The initial market for the Liberty system is crew transportation to the ISS, but Schumacher said they have identified other markets, including cargo transportation, launches of US government satellites, tourism, and so-called “sovereign clients”, governments that want a human spaceflight program without having the ability to develop their own systems. (Notably absent from the list is commercial satellite launch, perhaps because EADS Astrium doesn’t want to compete with its own Ariane 5.)
The companies confirmed they were seeking funding from NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capabilities (CCiCap) competition, but didn’t disclose financial information, including the prices they planned to charge for their services (beyond that they would be cheaper than current Soyuz flight costs of over $60 million a seat.) Rominger said they would continue development of Liberty if they don’t receive CCiCap funding, but at a slower pace than the schedule they described that called for an initial crewed flight in 2015. “There’s no way I can meet a schedule like that without an award from NASA,” he said.
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