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 An illustration of SSI's proposed G-Lab module, along with the scientific question that it hopes to answer. The Space Studies Institute (SSI) dates back about 35 years, founded by Gerard K. O’Neill in 1977 to support research on efforts to create a permanent human presence in space, such as through the space colonies that O’Neill, a Princeton University physics professor, first espoused in the early ’70s. SSI has had its up and downs since then, but started showing some signs of life a few years ago with a move of its offices from Princeton, New Jersey, to Mojave, California, a nexus of the entrepreneurial NewSpace industry, and restarting SSI’s series of Space Manufacturing conferences in late 2010. Last December Gary Hudson, a long-time space entrepreneur, took the position of president of SSI.
At the Space Access ’12 conference in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon, Hudson will announce a bold new initiative for SSI. At the conference Hudson will unveil what he calls a “rebranding” of the concept of “space settlement”, under the banner of “The Great Enterprise Initiative”. The initiative will be split into five areas, each addressing a key area of study needed to enable space settlement: transportation, environment, resources, society, and economy.
SSI plans to focus on the environment category initially, with one flagship project called G-Lab. G-Lab is designed to address a question yet unanswered after decades of space research: how much gravity is needed for the permanent human settlement of space? Clearly 1 g is sufficient, as demonstrated by life on Earth, while 0 g can have a variety of deleterious effects on humans, including bone and muscle loss. There is very little knowledge of the region between 0 and 1 g, though.
SSI plans to tackle this topic with G-Lab, an ambitious crewed lab module. The concept features a module that would fly in the same orbit as the ISS, trailing the station by about 10 kilometers through the use of electric propulsion. Tugs, like Orbital’s Cygnus and SpaceX’s Dragon, would transfer items between the lab module and ISS. Within the lab module would be dual centrifuges to create lunar and Martian gravity conditions for experiments on plants and small animals. The lab module is designed for launch on a single Falcon Heavy mission.
The plan, according to an SSI presentation, is to have operations begin as soon as early 2017. That requires significant—and, in the document, unstated—funding, with initial funding from donors planned for the fourth quarter of this year, after the signing of a Space Act Agreement with NASA this quarter.
This morning Space Access ’12, a long-running annual conference about amateur and entrepreneurial spaceflight, kicks off in Phoenix. This conference, dating back now nearly 20 years, brings together companies and individuals working on various suborbital and orbital space projects, as well as enthusiasts wanting to learn more. This year the conference has expanded to three full days (in recent years the conference started on Thursday afternoon), with an emphasis on full: Thursday’s and Friday’s sessions run until 10 pm MST, while the conference wraps up Saturday at “only” 6 pm.
A few things to look for at this year’s event:
An announcement from the Space Studies Institute: Thursday afternoon Gary Hudson, the new president of the Space Studies Institute, is scheduled to speak, with this annotation in the program: “do not miss – we can say no more”. We can expect that Hudson will have some kind of announcement about SSI programs or other activities.
The usual array of company updates: Several suborbital vehicle developers, including Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, and XCOR Aerospace, will be present to talk about their ongoing vehicle development efforts. Also on the schedule for Thursday night is Chuck Lauer to talk about Rocketplane Global, perhaps shedding more light on the news from earlier this year that he is reviving the previously-bankrupt company. Among the other companies in the NewSpace arena presenting at the conference are Altius Space Machines, Garvey Space, mv2space, and Orbital Outfitters. One established space company will be here as well: United Launch Alliance, the joint Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that builds the Atlas and Delta rockets and in participating in several companies’ commercial crew development efforts.
Some policy discussion as well: Regulatory, funding, and related policy discussions have also been a staple of Space Access conferences, and this year is no exception. Much of that will take place on Saturday, with a talk from FAA/AST, a presentation from Rand Simberg about his space property rights proposal, and panel discussions.
An emphasis on the “Maker” community: Space Access has for many years featured talks by individuals or groups working on rocket motors, rockets, and the like. More recently, though, there’s been a surge in interest in do-it-yourself (DIY) technical projects with events like “Maker Faires” and television shows. That will be emphasized here this year with a talk about a “Hackerspace” being developed in Mojave, as well as a panel on “DIY Space Access”.
Some missing names: Some companies traditionally don’t participate at Space Access, and that’s true again this year: Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin are among the companies who are at least not presenting at the conference. (SpaceX is also not presenting, although last year SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell did give a talk at the conference.) Some more familiar names will also be missing this year, though: Armadillo’s John Carmack and XCOR’s Jeff Greason, two long-time attendees, are not making the trip, and both companies will have very limited representation at the conference. In both cases, though, that’s because the companies are busy working on vehicles: Armadillo’s STIG-B rocket and XCOR’s Lynx Mark 1.
 Map of the coast of South Texas, with the approximate location of the proposed SpaceX launch site marked with the blue circle on the coast. The city of Brownsville is in the lower left. Last summer there was a flurry of speculation about an unnamed company interested in a spaceport in south Texas, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. That speculation later focused on SpaceX, which hinted it was looking at alternatives to Florida for commercial launches, but offered few additional details.
On Monday a notice issued by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and published in the Federal Register gave new life to that Texas spaceport concept. The FAA issued a “notice of intent” to start work on an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed launch site in south Texas; such an assessment is part of the work required to get a launch site operator (aka spaceport) license from the FAA. The statement explicitly identifies SpaceX as the user of the spaceport for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, as well as “a variety of reusable suborbital launch vehicles” that would likely be technology demonstrators for the company’s plans to develop a reusable version of the Falcon 9.
The spaceport will be located on the Gulf Coast at the end of Texas Highway 4, five kilometers north of the Mexican border and eight kilometers south of the spring break destination of South Padre Island. The site would carry out up to 12 launches per year, including up to two Falcon Heavy launches. The launch site infrastructure would be straightforward: a launch pad and integration hangar at the site itself, and a control center and payload processing facility an unspecified distance to the west of the launch pad. All the land and infrastructure would be owned by SpaceX.
The timeline for the environmental assessment isn’t specified in the register, beyond holding a “scoping meeting” for the EIS in Brownsville on May 15; there is also a May 30 deadline for comments regarding the EIS planning process. An EIS can take many months to complete, and that is only part of the process needed to win approval for a spaceport license. So it may be a while before we know if SpaceX is able to, and still interested in, pursuing a launch site there.
SpaceX has reserved a launch date at the end of April for a key Dragon test flight to the ISS. “I’m happy to say we have a launch date scheduled on the range and a berthing date with the ISS,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell announced during a panel at the Satellite 2012 conference in Washington, DC. “The launch date is April 30th, and we hope to berth on May 3rd.” She added that the launch window on the 30th is “almost an instantaneous window” and that “we only have the opportunity every three days”, scheduling apparently dictated by the orbital mechanics of rendezvousing with the ISS. “We may have to have a couple of [launch] attempts, but we’re certainly looking forward to getting that flight off,” she said.
This mission, a combination of SpaceX’s second and third COTS demonstration missions, was previously scheduled for launch in February but delayed in order to perform additional tests, focused primarily on the Dragon’s software. “We’re going to launch when we’re ready, and when the vehicle is ready, because we want very much for this mission to be a success,” SpaceX’s Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut, said at last month’s FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference, also in Washington.
A big focus on Monday’s sessions of the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, California, was on the progress that five companies—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace—are making on the vehicles that can carry the research payloads, and perhaps even the researchers themselves, in the near future. These companies all offered some updates on the technical and other developments that are bringing them ever closer to flight.
XCOR Aerospace made perhaps the biggest splash on Monday, although it was not directly related to any specific vehicle development milestones. The company announced it closed a new round of financing, raising $5 million that will take the company though the development of the Mark 1 version of its Lynx suborbital vehicle. Those joining the round include Esther Dyson, Pete Ricketts (former chief operating office (COO) of Ameritrade), and “several top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and former venture capitalists”, according to the company’s release.
The company separately announced that it had lined up three more payload integrators for the Lynx vehicle. One of XCOR’s customers, the Southwest Research Institute, said it had moved up two of the six Lynx flights it previously bought from XCOR from the commercial operators phase to the test phase in order to get an early opportunity to perform suborbital research. As for the Lynx itself, XCOR COO Andrew Nelson said work on the Mark 1 is proceeding well, with the company recently taking possession of fuselage components for the suborbital spaceplane. “Hopefully by the end of the year we’ll have a little air under the wheels,” that is, performing the initial test flights of the Lynx, he said.
Virgin Galactic did not say much about the status of SpaceShipTwo development, with company officials only offering that they hopes to start rocket-powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo “later this year” without being more specific. Once that happens, though, said Virgin Galactic vice president Will Pomerantz, “we follow pretty quickly from first powered flight to first flight to space, and then it’s not terribly long until we have our first commercial flight to space.” He also said that the company now has almost 500 customers signed up.
Virgin did announce, though, that it has picked NanoRacks to supply the experiment racks that will be used to fly research payloads on SpaceShipTwo. NanoRacks is best known as the company that provides experiment access to the ISS through a system based on the existing CubeSat standard. Each research flight, said Pomerantz, will be able to carry up to 590 kilograms of experiments, along with a Virgin Galactic payload specialist to operate the experiments.
Armadillo Aerospace provided an update on its STIG rocket, the latest of which, STIG-A III, launched from Spaceport America a month ago. Neil Milburn said the rocket flew to an altitude of no less than 82 kilometers (Armadillo’s summary notes that the best fit to the data it obtained is for a peak altitude of 94.5 kilometers), but a problem with the recovery system caused it to crash-land, destroying the rocket.
Instead of building another STIG-A rocket, Milburn said, Armadillo is now working on a new version, STIG-B, with a wider diameter (about 50 centimeters), cold gas thrusters in place of roll vanes for attitude control, and other upgrades. This version will have a “substantial payload capacity”, he said, capable of carrying a 10-kilogram payload as high as 140 kilometers and providing up to four minutes of microgravity. The STIG-B could be ready for its first flight as soon as May. “That’s a hell of a push,” he said. “That’s the kind of operational pace we have at Armadillo.”
STIG is designed to test technology that Armadillo plans to use on its crewed vehicle it is developing with Space Adventures. The vehicle, code-named Hyperion, will be able to carry two people up to 100 kilometers. “We should be making some announcements later this year about just when we should see the first boilerplate flights of Hyperion,” he said.
Masten Space Systems has recently carried out a series of tests of its Xaero vehicle, including this test flight to 61 meters altitude a week and a half ago. Those flights came after overcoming some difficulties once they installed the aeroshell on the vehicle (past Masten vehicles had no aeroshell), creating some unanticipated aerodynamic effects. “Every time we got 18 inches off the ground our IMU [inertial measurement unit] would get confused and think we were sinking, and we would take off again,” said Masten CEO Joel Scotkin. They eventually decided “to clobber it over the head with software” that has solved the problem, he said.
Scotkin said they plan to fly Xaero to 5-6 kilometers “in really the very near future” as part of its NASA Flight Opportunities award. The company is also working on upgraded vehicles, including the Xaero B and Xaero 20, which will fly by the third quarter of this year to altitudes of 20-30 kilometers. A separate vehicle, Xogdor, will be ready by the end of the year for flights to 100 kilometers.
Blue Origin is recovering from the loss of its suborbital vehicle in a test flight last August, an event that, while unfortunate, was not necessarily unexpected. “We always expected to lose it during flight testing,” said Brett Alexander, who joined Blue Origin last year as director of business development and strategy. “It was not meant to be the operational vehicle. We are building the next vehicle now.”
Alexander said that they’ve built a “1.1 version” of the crew capsule that will be used for a pad test of the pusher escape motor this summer as part of its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) second-round award from NASA. This version of the capsule has no windows, but Alexander said a later iteration for operational flights will include them.
Later this morning the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference kicks off at a hotel in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley and not far from the NASA Ames Research Center. The three day event, now in its third year, is an opportunity for suborbital vehicle developers to describe their vehicle plans and capabilities, and potential research customers for those vehicle to describe their areas of research and their requirements.
The morning plenary sessions feature an array of special speakers, including Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 astronaut who is here in his capacity as a former X-15 test pilot and thus with experience in suborbital flight. Later Monday representatives of five suborbital vehicle developers—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace—will provide updates. Later sessions will focus on selected research topics, from microgravity science to life sciences to astronomy, as well as outreach, media, markets, and policy.
While the conference sessions are not (to the best of my knowledge) being webcast, you can keep tabs on the conference by following the #NSRC2012 hashtag on Twitter, with summaries of key conference events to follow here over the next several days.
A little over two months ago a new company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Stratolaunch Systems, shook up the space industry with plans to develop the world’s largest airplane to perform air launches of a medium-sized rocket. After that initial burst of publicity the company faded from view, but it has remained busy laying the groundwork for, and tweaking the design of, its innovative system, an official with one of Stratolaunch’s partners said last week.
“As we move forward, we’re focused a lot on the technical issues right now,” said Jim Halsell, a former astronaut who is currently the technical director of the space division of Dynetics, one of the companies working with Stratolaunch Systems, in a talk at the FAA’s 15th Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, DC, last Thursday. Halsell gave an overview and status update about the Stratolaunch system, including offering a few new details.
The focus for Stratolaunch right now is laying the foundation—figuratively and literally—for its launch system. That includes a groundbreaking last month of a facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California to build its gargantuan airplane. “There’s a squadron of earthmoving machines laying the foundation for the manufacturing facility and the tee hangar in which the aircraft will be manufactured,” he said. Halsell also revealed that Stratolaunch has taken delivery of the first of two 747 aircraft, which the company separately announced last week. Those planes will be disassembled so that parts, including their engines and landing gear, can be used for the custom-designed Stratolaunch plane. Halsell added the second 747 would arrive “soon”.
Stratolaunch’s plane, with its dual-fuselage design and giant wingspan, has attracted the most attention. “Our technical challenge, clearly, is to build something as light as possible, empty-weight wise, so as to maximize the payload capability that we can offer,” Halsell said. Scaled Composites is working to make “a design that closes” by the time manufacturing begins this summer on the initial elements of the plane, the wing spar and wing box.
However, he said the designs released in December are still being modified. “Even now, as we’re doing the systems trades and perfecting the carrier aircraft design, I would share with you that it’s going to move away from looking like two 747s that were pasted together, because that was a fairly early—not inappropriate, but more conceptual—design,” he said. The basic elements of the plane, including the dual fuselages and long, straight wing, will remain, though. “Stand by for further refinement of the design, but when you see it, it’ll all make sense.”
One thing Halsell declined to talk about in detail was the business case for the system, including what the company planned to charge for launches. “We can bring our costs into a very competitive range” with a sufficient tempo of launches, he suggested. “We now have something that we believe will be extremely competitive with the medium-launch market.”
He suggested, though, that Paul Allen—who is putting in an initial investment of perhaps several hundred million dollars into Stratolaunch—has reasons beyond simply financial ones for supporting development of this air-launch system. “Our primary investor, Paul Allen, was drawn to this project because he’s at a point in his life where he wants to be involved in projects that not only make good business sense,” Halsell said, “but also, he wants to be involved in furthering mankind’s progress in the space program, especially when it comes to US launch capability.”
An effort to update a law to extend liability indemnification to commercial spaceflight suppliers is dead for this year in New Mexico. The state legislature adjourned Thursday without taking up the proposed bill, which had stalled out in both the state House and Senate because of opposition from trial lawyers. A late push, including letters from Gov. Susana Martinez and support in the local media, such as this Albuquerque Journal editorial on Wednesday, weren’t enough to sway legislators.
New Mexico Spaceport Authority executive director Christine Anderson was in Washington, DC, on Thursday, participating on a panel about various state spaceport efforts at the FAA’s 15th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference. She confirmed after the panel that the proposed legislation was dead this year, but that they would try to reintroduce it next year. She also expressed interest in getting that liability protection into federal law in some manner.
The spaceport’s anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, has similar goals. “We’re very hopeful that next year we can be successful in the New Mexico Legislature to get some of the provisions that we’re trying to get in New Mexico in place,” said Jon Turnipseed, head of safety for Virgin Galactic, during a panel on legislative issues at the FAA conference Thursday. “Obviously, it would be brilliant if we could get some type of a national” law to address this issue, he added.
The governor of New Mexico is asking legislators to reconsider their opposition to an updated spaceflight liability bill, as time runs out in the current session. Earlier this week a Senate committee failed to advance the bill, which would update the state’s existing liability indemnification law for commercial spaceflight by extending the same protection to suppliers. A companion bill in the House is also stalled, increasing the chances that the legislation will not pass before the state legislature adjourns from its brief session next Thursday.
In a letter Thursday to members of key House and Senate committees, Gov. Susana Martinez (R) and several legislators from both parties asked those committees to reconsiders their votes to block the legislation. “Simply put, this would make it extremely difficult for Spaceport America to achieve its mission of providing commercial space flights and boosting local economies in the southern part of the state,” Martinez wrote in the letter to members of the committees blocking of the bills, adding it was “a step in the wrong direction.”
It’s not clear the tactic will work: several members told the Albuquerque Tribune that the letter would not change their minds. “This kind of pressure is going to make me say no even more so. I can’t believe she has the gall to do this,” said Rep. Eliseo Alcon (D), whose serves on the House Business and Industry Committee, where the House version of the bill is stalled. Proponents have until February 16, when the legislature is scheduled to adjourn for its 2012 regular session, to get the legislation passed.
Some, including Gov. Martinez, have suggested that money has played a role in blocking the legislation. The Journal notes that the state’s trial lawyer association, which opposes the bill, has donated $67,000 to 25 current members of the state legislature, nearly five times the $14,000 donated by Virgin Galactic, the spaceport’s prime tenant and a supporter of the legislation. “Some have suggested that political donations have influenced some legislators to put the interests of a small but powerful special interest group ahead of the priority of economic development and growth shared by all New Mexicans,” wrote Martinez in her letter to legislators. She argued that the investment already made by the state in the spaceport “should weigh more heavily on legislators than lobbyists dollars targeted at a few individuals.”
An effort to update New Mexico’s commercial spaceflight liability indemnification law has run into a roadblock. As noted here last week, the New Mexico legislature is considering legislation to update its 2010 indemnification act, with the major provision being to extend the law’s immunity from lawsuits to suppliers of spaceflight operators. State officials have warned that without the update, some companies would reconsider plans to set up operations at Spaceport America, including Sierra Nevada Corporation (which, in addition to supplying the hybrid rocket motors for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, is developing its own orbital spaceplane, the Dream Chaser.)
However, on Tuesday the proposed legislation, Senate Bill 3, failed to be approved by the Judiciary Committee of the New Mexico Senate, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The bill failed to pass out of the committee to the full Senate on a 6-5 vote, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. That effectively blocks the bill from being considered by the full Senate.
Opposition to the bill appears to be coming from trial lawyers, who see the legislation as depriving consumers of legal protections they have in other industries. (Of course, commercial spaceflight is an emerging field, raising the question if it should have the same level of legal protection as more mature industries.) The current law and the proposed bill, it should be noted, do not give spaceflight companies absolute immunity in the event of an accident that injures or kills a spaceflight participant: there are exceptions in the case of gross negligence or intentional injury.
Backers of the bill, including sponsor Sen. Mary Kay Papen, a Democrat from Las Cruces, aren’t giving up hope for the bill. While stalled in a senate committee, the full senate could have the opportunity later in the session to vote on the bill if a companion bill passes in the House.
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