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 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.”
One of the nice things about flying on Virgin America (among some other airlines) is having access to the Internet in flight. On one of those long transcontinental flights, it’s great to make the time productive by having access to the web, email, and the like. But what if you’re making a quick trip into space?
Flightglobal.com reports that Virgin Galactic is investigating the possibility of having Internet access on its suborbital flights. The system being considered, according to an unnamed source, would use X-band frequencies to provide connectivity between SpaceShipTwo and the ground. It doesn’t take much to imagine people using the system to post tweets, status updates, and the like from their brief jaunts into space.
There are, though, two problems with this proposal. One is technical. For space communications, X-band frequencies are traditionally reserved for government applications, including military satellite communications and deep space transmissions to spacecraft throughout the solar system. It’s not clear how a commercial venture would be able to use those frequencies. The other is more practical: if you’re spending $200,000 for a relatively short spaceflight, are you really going to be taking the time to post a Facebook update in-flight?
One Virgin official suggested the latter issue made it unlikely the company would develop an in-flight Internet access system. “I like Twitter as much as anyone else, but put the phone down,” advised Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects, during a Commercial Spaceflight Forum organized by SpaceUp Houston on Thursday night. “Hopefully our passengers are not clamoring to look at their Blackberries and iPhones while in outer space.”
That approach makes some sense. Certainly there will be some data connectivity needs on these flights, both for vehicle telemetry as well as for transmitting data from any experiments carried on the vehicle, but a full-fledged Internet access system, like that on airliners, doesn’t seem necessary.
If you saw the news earlier this week, it might have sounded like that SpaceX’s plan to fly a Dragon Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) mission to the ISS this fall was a done deal. “The Hawthorne, Calif.-based private rocket maker said Monday its Dragon capsule will launch on Nov. 30 on a cargo test run to the orbiting outpost,” the AP reported. “California-based rocket maker SpaceX will send a resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station in November,” Wired UK reported. Done deal, right?
Not quite. As SpaceX itself stated in an updated posted on its web site Monday, “NASA has agreed in principle” to allow SpaceX to combine its planned “C2″ and “C3″ COTS flights into a single mission that would launch on November 30. However, NASA hasn’t given a final approval for the combined mission, as it evaluates SpaceX’s plans to carry secondary payloads (including two ORBCOMM communications satellites) on that mission. “NASA will grant formal approval for the combined COTS missions pending resolution of any potential risks associated with these secondary payloads,” SpaceX said in its update.
If all that sounds familiar, it should. Last month, at a press conference after the final shuttle landing, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said the agency “technically had agreed” to combine the C2 and C3 COTS flights but had yet to give formal approval—effectively the same situation as today. That statement came right after an Aviation Week week article that reported on plans for the combined C2/C3 mission with a November 30 launch. That AvWeek article said that plan depended on how SpaceX would handle the secondary satellite deployment.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything new in the latest SpaceX update. The company says it carried out a “wet dress rehearsal” of the Falcon 9 that will launch Dragon on the C2/C3 mission last week, erecting the launch vehicle (minus Dragon) on the pad and fueling it. The update also includes some photos of the Dragon that will fly that mission, as well as components for the following Falcon 9 launch, intended for the first operational cargo mission to the ISS next year.
Last Thursday, as most expected, Boeing announced it had selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket to launch its CST-100 commercial crew vehicle, at least for a series of three test flights in 2015. (John Elbon, Boeing’s program manager for the CST-100, said that the company would recompete launches for the operational CST-100 missions, if funded, although barring any problems ULA would seem to have the inside track in that recompete.) The announcement, though, did offer some insights on Boeing’s plans and thoughts about NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program in general.
Of the three test flights using the Atlas 5 (a fourth will be a pad abort test that won’t require a launch vehicle), only one will be crewed: the last flight, which will place the CST-100 in orbit to rendezvous with the ISS. Elbon noted that two Boeing test pilots would fly that mission. Boeing hasn’t hired any test pilots, but Elbon said that they were in the process of selecting their first, who would participate in the CST-100 development to provide a pilot’s perspective. “We’re just starting the interview process,” he said. “Of course, it’s interesting to look at flown astronauts as candidates for this, and certainly we’ll consider that as we make selections. They could also be test pilots, maybe, that haven’t flown in space, or some mix of all that.”
Boeing isn’t the only company to select the Atlas 5 for commercial crew launches: two of the other three CCDev-2 awardees, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada Corporation, also have proposed launching their spacecraft on that vehicle. (SpaceX, of course, plans to use its own Falcon 9 for its crewed Dragon spacecraft.) George Sowers of ULA said part of the contract with Boeing covers work on the Atlas 5 launch site at Cape Canaveral to allow for crew access in and out of the vehicle on the pad. That work, Sowers noted, would not be specific to the CST-100 but could also support Blue Origin’s and Sierra Nevada’s vehicles. “Our preference is to have something that we could attach to the existing mobile launch platform, and not have to build a dedicated tower or gantry,” Sowers said.
Elbon also touched upon other burning issues regarding CCDev: the contracting mechanism and funding for the program. Last month NASA officials said they were tentatively planning to shift from a Space Act Agreement (SAA) to a contract that would still have some of the features of an SAA but also adhere to Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). That has generated an outcry of opposition from many companies, concerned about being overwhelmed with contracting bureaucracy and worried this could be a first step towards moving to traditional cost-plus contracts.
Elbon took a more nuanced view to the debate. “I think it’s unfortunate that the debate is centered around the contract mechanism and is not focused on the attributes that whatever mechanism is put in place needs to have,” he said, adding that he believes an SAA-based or FAR-based approach can be successful if those attributes are there. The biggest issue, he said, is who is responsible for design decisions: “The design decisions in this current environment rest with us as the developer,” he said, referring to the SAA-based CCDev-2 award Boeing currently is working out. ‘We can move much more rapidly through the design process by being able to make those decisions internally and not go through a series of boards and panels that vet things in the NASA system and then work contract changes to cause those things to happen.”
Another issue, he said, is ownership of the intellectual property (IP) involved in the development effort. “If truly our objective here is to develop a commercial market, it’s important that we retain the intellectual property so that we can use that vehicle for other purposes” beyond flying NASA astronauts to and from the ISS, as well as to keep that IP out of the hands of potential competitors.
“The debate really needs to be centered on what those things are and figuring out how to carry those things going forward,” he said of the key attributes for CCDev contracts. “I’m really disappointed in the direction that the debate took in the press conference” that unveiled NASA’s plans last month.
Regarding CCDev funding, Elbon expressed concerned about potential FY2012 budget cuts. What’s in the president’s budget request—$850 million a year from 2012 through 2016—is “in the neighborhood of what it would take to make this program successful,” he said, “so I would hope Congress would consider funding the program at or near those levels.” However, the House is proposing only $312 million for CCDev in 2012 in its appropriation bill awaiting consider by the full House. Funding has already had an effect on Boeing’s plans: Elbon noted that their initial test flight plans “was based on a different level of CCDev-2 funding that we received,” causing the company to push back its test schedule slightly. “There’s been about a quarter’s worth of impact due to the funding that came out of CCDev-2 as we went forward.”
 Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule. Since unveiling its plans for developing a commercial crew spacecraft, Boeing has emphasized that its CST-100 spacecraft was launch vehicle agnostic: it could launch on an Atlas 5, Delta 4, or Falcon 9. And when ATK announced its plans in February for the Liberty launch vehicle, Boeing officials added it to the roster of vehicles compatible with the capsule. Now, however, the company plans to focus its attention on a single rocket.
At a media teleconference scheduled for noon Eastern time today, Boeing officials will announce the formal selection of the vehicle that will be used for the CST-100’s test flights in 2015 and operational missions to the ISS and other orbital destinations. This downselect is not surprising: at an April briefing, CST-100 program manager John Elbon said that they would select a specific vehicle to “really lay out the abort scenarios” and details associated with them.
The clear favorite in this vehicle competition is the Atlas 5. Two other Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) awardees, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, have already picked the Atlas 5 to launch their crewed spacecraft, and ULA has an unfunded CCDev agreement with NASA to continue work on human-rating that launcher. ULA also offers the Delta 4, which does have Boeing heritage, but does not appear to be the subject of active human-rating work. Falcon 9 would require Boeing to depend on a competitor, SpaceX, for its launcher, while ATK’s Liberty, unlike the other three, isn’t flying yet, raising the question of whether it would be ready by mid-decade or not.
Last week NASA officials raised alarm in some corners of the space industry about its proposal to shift from a pure Space Act Agreement (SAA) for the next Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) round towards a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of both an SAA and a traditional contract. Not surprisingly, this topic came up again Thursday at the NewSpace 2011 Conference, although some made it clear contracting mechanisms were the lesser of their concerns about the future of CCDev.
Brent Jett, deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program at NASA, told attendees during one panel session of the conference that he was aware of the concerns industry has raised since he and program manager Ed Mango outlined their proposed approach last week. “I know there’s a lot of angst in the community about the direction of the Commercial Crew Program,” he said. “There’s a group of people out there who strongly feel that Space Act Agreements is the only way to do it, the only way a program can be successful. There’s another group of people out there—not in this room, but within the government, within NASA—who strongly feel that to ensure crew safety, a cost-plus contract is the only way to it. So it’s almost like the debate in Washington over the debt ceiling.”
Companies have made clear their concerns about shifting from the SAA structure of previous CCDev rounds to this hybrid approach, which would incorporate many more elements of Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs). But beyond general worries about an increase in paperwork associated with the FAR, what are the specific problems with NASA’s proposed approach?
Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s space systems division, said he didn’t absolutely reject NASA’s approach request. “From our company’s perspective, we don’t really have a concern, one way or another,” he said. However, the hybrid approach NASA is proposing could have some sticking point, he said, such as how to account in a FAR-based contract for the coinvestment companies are supposed to make in their systems, as well as how to account for the cost and schedule impacts of any changes imposed by NASA. “It’s not that these are things that can’t be overcome, but it’s an unusual set of circumstances, and I think that’s why many people are looking at one more round of Space Act Agreements leading to a FAR contract.”
Garrett Reisman, the former astronaut who is managing SpaceX’s CCDev-2 work, said his company wanted to stick to the fixed-price milestone-based approach used in CCDev and COTS. A FAR-based approach would require SpaceX to hire “a whole bunch more accountants” to deal with the overhead imposed by the FAR, he said. “In addition, it’s a big corporate culture change,” he said, noting that SpaceX engineers don’t fill out timecards. “It’s all an overhead burden we don’t currently have.”
How to handle the contract for the next round of CCDev might be overshadowed by a bigger concern: how much funding, if any, that will be available for it in the next round of the program. The House version of the FY12 appropriations bill that funds NASA would give CCDev $312 million, the same as for FY11 but well below the administration’s request of $850 million.
“What we really need is money, and support from Congress and the executive branch,” Jett said. Support from the executive branch is there, but Congress, given what it’s proposed so far in FY12, is lagging. He noted the CCDev budget is about one tenth the budget of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), which combined would get just over $3 billion in FY12 in the House bill.
“I can tell you that if that number holds for the next year, it’s going to be very challenging for us to maintain multiple partners, to maintain the type of progress we’ve made, and meet a goal to fly folks in the mid part of the decade,” Jett said. “At some point we’re going to have to spend more than a couple hundred million dollars a year.”
Company officials agreed with that concern. “The bigger issue [than contracting mechanisms] is making sure we have the proper funding for this program and making sure all of us make our milestones and go forward,” Sirangelo said.
“These are the things that keep me up at night,” Reisman said. “Worrying about how we can possibly succeed with the budgets cut way down.”
Much of the attention commercial spaceflight has been getting recently has been focused on NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, including, as noted here, concerns about contracting mechanisms for future phases of the program. But CCDev is very much based on the earlier Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program for developing commercial cargo transportation to and from the ISS; the success of CCDev is dependent in part on the success of COTS. And the two companies that have COTS agreements with NASA are making some news recently on their efforts.
SpaceX has, for some time, been working to get NASA to agree to combine their second and third COTS missions (their first successfully flew last December), allowing them to both approach and berth with the station on the same flight. Last Wednesday Aviation Week reported that NASA has tentatively agreed to combine the two flights, pending resolution of some issues, including the planned deployment of two small satellites during that mission. If approved, the mission would launch as soon as November 30, berthing at the ISS on December 7.
The following day, at the STS-135 post-landing press conference at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier confirmed that NASA was close to working out a deal to combine the two SpaceX flights, designed C2 and C3. “We technically have agreed with SpaceX that we want to combine those flights, but we haven’t given them formal approval yet,” he said. “We still want to go through some more analysis” on various technical aspects of the mission, he added, but said that if those issues can be worked out, combining the C2 and C3 flights made the most sense. “Overall, what we want to do is get to cargo delivery as fast as we can, and if the systems are mature enough and the design is mature enough, combining those two flights is that best way to get cargo to the ISS in the fastest manner possible.”
(While that news took place last week, there was very little notice of it then, perhaps as it was lost in the attention about the final shuttle landing. But when SpaceX tweeted effectively the same news Tuesday, although with a nine-day gap between launch and berthing, instead of seven from the AvWeek announcement, it got a lot more attention.)
The news is a little different for the other COTS awardee, Orbital Sciences. Its original plans called for a single demonstration mission of its Taurus 2 launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft in late 2010; like SpaceX, it suffered delays, pushing that mission back to later this year. Last Thursday, company officials announced that they were delaying that mission further, into next year. “We are targeting a test firing of the full stack in November, with a test launch, with a non-Cygnus payload on the top, in late December,” said Orbital senior vice president Frank Culbertson at an AIAA commercial space panel on Capitol Hill. The official COTS demo flight is now planned for late February 2012, he said, with full-fledged cargo flights to follow in the spring.
In a briefing with financial analysts earlier that day to talk about the company’s second quarter earnings, company executives blamed the delay on development of the launch site infrastructure at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. “Work related to installing and checking out the Wallops launch complex’s propellant and pressurization management systems has taken longer than we previously anticipated, delaying the turnover of the launch pad to us by some 6 to 8 weeks from the planned date,” Dave Thompson, chairman and CEO, said.
Another issue for the Taurus 2 was a problem last month during a test firing of one of the AJ-26 engines that powers the rocket’s first stage. During the test, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a metal fuel line ruptured, “badly damaging” the engine on the test stand, according to a Space News account of the test.
“Orbital, Aerojet, and NASA have substantially completed our analysis of the cause of this test failure,” Thompson said on Thursday’s call, and were now screening the remaining AJ-26 engines that Aerojet has. Thompson said it appears that two-thirds of the engines can be used “as-is”, but one third “will require some level of rework or repair.” That two thirds, though, would be enough to avoid any schedule delays.
NASA’s Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev, program has so far been using a relatively unusual contracting mechanism that has provided both the agency and participating companies with greater flexibility to make progress on those systems. However, NASA officials indicated Wednesday that in future CCDev rounds they may shift to a somewhat more traditional contract, a move that has alarmed industry.
The first and second rounds of CCDev, as well as the earlier Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) cargo program, have been run as Space Act Agreements (SAA), a form of contracting known in bureaucratic lingo as other transactional authority (OTA). SAAs do not have the same contracting overhead as a traditional contract, be it fixed-price or cost-plus. The COTS and CCDev SAAs have been milestone-based, meaning that NASA provides payments to participating companies based on the progress they make—which also means that NASA doesn’t pay up if companies don’t achieve their stated milestones, and can cancel those agreements if necessary, as happened with Rocketplane Kistler in the original COTS round.
At a commercial crew forum held by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday, CCDev program officials talked about their plans for the next phase of the program, which would come next year. The “Integrated Design” phase would last two years and bring participating companies up through the critical design review on their systems, the last step before starting actual construction. This two-year phase would be followed by a Development, Test, Evaluation, and Certification (DTEC) phase, which would also include the initial flights to the International Space Station.
NASA’s original intent, according to Brent Jett, a former astronaut serving as deputy program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, was to use an SAA again for the Integrated Design phase. “As the team dug a little bit further into the Space Act Agreement, we did find several key limitations,” he said. The biggest one, he said, is that NASA cannot mandate requirements under an SAA, including for crew safety, but only provide them as a reference for industry. “Even if industry chose to design to those requirements, NASA is not allowed to tie any of the milestones in an SAA to compliance with those requirements,” he said. “That means NASA cannot accept the verification of those requirements and certify the system the way we need to for commercial crew under a Space Act Agreement.”
Jett noted that, under COTS, NASA was able to exploit something of a loophole in those rules, which allow the agency to levy safety requirements when a NASA facility—the ISS—was involved. NASA could do the same for CCDev, but only for operations at the ISS. “We would not be able to levy any requirements concerning ascent, entry” or any other portions of the flight not directly dealing with approaching and docking with the ISS.
NASA’s proposed approach for the next CCDev round, according to commercial crew program manager Ed Mango, “combines the best elements of an SAA with the features of a contract that wil allow NASA to approve the tailoring of requirements and the certification of a vehicle.” This “non-traditional contract” would continue to use milestone-based payments and also exempt companies from the cost accounting standards of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). “We believe that we are much closer to an SAA in our approach than we are to a traditional contract,” he said.
Representatives of industry present at the forum strongly objected to this proposed approach, though, largely out of concerns that, even with the cost accounting exception, adhering to the FAR would be very expensive. “Instead of taking an American flag to the station, we should have taken the FAR to the station and left it up there,” said Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, referring to an American flag flown on the first shuttle mission that was left behind by the last shuttle crew, to be retrieved by the first commercial crew vehicle to visit the station. “You can’t take a traditional approach and expect anything but the traditional results, which has been broken budgets and not fielding any flight hardware.”
Others challenged the NASA conclusion that an SAA could not be used for commercial crew. Bobby Block of SpaceX noted that his company had an option on its COTS award—not exercised by NASA—to develop a crew capability as part of an SAA. Brett Alexander, former president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said NASA should provide more documentation to support its conclusion that an SAA would not work for CCDev, given that past analyses, by both NASA’s Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, have concluded that SAAs are suitable for this. “[NASA’s Office of the] General Counsel has not divulged what its legal reasoning is,” he said, “and I think they need to do that—not a couple charts, not things that you brief, but a legal brief that says, ‘here’s why,’ so that we can have that discussion.”
Mango and Jett said they were open to suggestions and feedback from industry on their proposed strategy for the next CCDev round. At the same time, NASA released yesterday a “Sources Sought Synopsis”, required under the FAR as the first step in the next phase of the CCDev program if they proceed under their proposed contract strategy. “I don’t want people to think that we’re locked in to this idea of a contract,” he said, but “we need to work in parallel so that we can continue to move forward.”
A decade ago the Texas spaceport scene was relatively active. No fewer than three spaceports had been proposed by various local entities to attract RLVs and other commercial launch vehicles. One was the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, located in Brazoria County, south of Houston; the second was the West Texas Spaceport, near Fort Stockton; and the third was the Willacy County Spaceport, located on the Gulf coast north of Brownsville. (A summary of the status of those spaceports at the time can be found in the 2002 edition of the FAA’s “Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts” report.) However, as the RLV boom went bust, these spaceport plans either went dormant or, in the case of the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, were cancelled.
Now, through, one of those proposed spaceports may have found new life. A recent article in the McAllen (Tx.) Monitor (which is actually a reprint of one last week in the Valley Morning Star in the Rio Grande Valley) reports that Willacy County officials have found a new tenant for their proposed spaceport. According to the county judge John F. Gonzales Jr., an unnamed aerospace company is planning to lease 50 acres spread across two sites; it would invest up to $50 million for its facilities and hire 100 to 200 people. At least one site would be on the coast, apparently to be used for launches over the Gulf into orbit.
Judge Gonzales, though, declined to disclose the name of the interested company, saying that he was bound by a confidentiality agreement. He did say that the company did test its rockets in December and it “recovered a reusable container similar to 1960s-type space capsules”, according to the article. “They’re the first private company to have successfully launched a low-altitude space flight and successfully recovered it,” Gonzales said. All those comments make the company in question sound like SpaceX: it launched a Falcon 9 in December from Cape Canaveral, placing the Dragon capsule in orbit. That capsule returned to Earth later the same day, making SpaceX the first non-government entity to recover a spacecraft from orbit. However, it’s not clear why SpaceX would have any interest in the Texas site, given its investment in developing its Cape Canaveral site.
Some have suggested that the company in question could be Blue Origin, which already has a test site in west Texas, north of the town of Van Horn. As RLV and Space Transport News pointed out earlier this year, Blue Origin has a patent for a “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles and Associated Systems and Methods”, which covered the powered landing of a booster stage on a barge or other ship in the ocean after launch from a coastal launch site. However, what we know of Blue Origin’s activities don’t seem to match what Gonzales said in the article, but then, there’s a lot about Blue Origin we don’t know about.
 Elon Musk gives a speech accepting the Heinlein Prize on June 29, 2011, in Washington, DC. At a luncheon on Wednesday in Washington, the Heinlein Prize Trust awarded its second Heinlein Prize for accomplishments in commercial space activities to Elon Musk, the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX. At the luncheon, which attracted an audience from the public and private sectors, including NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation George Nield, Musk received the $250,000 prize and its accoutrements, a “Laureate’ Diploma” and a sword. Yes, a full-sized sword, the “Lady Vivamus Sword”, from the Heinlein novel Glory Road. “I love the sword in particular, it’s pretty awesome,” Musk said. (Musk, who attended the luncheon with his wife, Tallulah Riley, and two of his young sons, had to remind the boys that the sword, with a sharpened blade, was not a plaything.)
In his acceptance speech, Musk provided an overview of what SpaceX is doing (accompanied by a video, as is the case with nearly every company presentation, regardless of the venue). He did note in the Q&A session after his speech that the company has been “slightly’ profitable the last four years and anticipates being profitable again this year, so the company doesn’t have an immediate need for capital. However, he said he is considering an initial public offering (IPO) of stock, perhaps late next year. “The public markets are a very efficient way to raise capital,” he said, “and it’s probably a good move to have a capital reserve.” SpaceX has talked from time to time over the last several years about doing an IPO; one drawback he acknowledged Wednesday is that by going public it opens up the company’s plans to scrutiny from investors who may have shorter time horizons than Musk and other current investors. “How will the public markets respond to super-long-term thinking?”
That “super-long-term thinking” was a reference to comments he made in his speech about his goal of making humanity a multi-planet species, something that requires a major reduction in launch costs. “This is the first time in four billion years that it’s possible for life to become multiplanetary,” he said. “That window may be open for a long time, and I’m reasonably optimistic about life on Earth, but it may be open for only a short time. And if it is only open for a short time, we must take advantage of it and take action now to make like multiplanetary.” To do that, he said, requires “orders of magnitude” changes in cost and reliability, something that SpaceX hopes to achieve over time.
Doing so, he said, requires being on a “path of continuous improvement” in launch capabilities, something that doesn’t exist today. “Space has not been on a path of continuous improvement. It has arguably been on a path of decline,” he said, noting that we could go to the Moon in 1969 but we’re retiring this month the only US vehicle that can carry people to orbit. “That trend line is going in the wrong direction. It needs to be dramatically reversed, and I’m hopeful SpaceX will make a significant contribution in that direction.”
While Musk might be interested in fostering a multiplanet species, not everyone in his family is necessarily onboard. In his opening remarks, prize trustree Art Dula, referring to Musk’s two sons in attendance, said that “these are the fellas that are going to ride these rockets when they go beyond Earth orbit,” at which point one of the boys cried a note of protest: “No I’m not!” (or something to that effect.) “Oh, my goodness,” Dula said to laughter from the audience. “Well, we hope anyways.”
 Elon Musk (center) holds the sword and diploma he received from members of the Heinlein Prize Trust, including Art Dula (second from right).
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