Virgin Galactic ramps up SpaceShipTwo testing

SpaceShipTwo in feathered flight

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.

Space Adventures optimistic about the next decade of space tourism

Space Adventures lunar mission concept

Illustration of a Soyuz spacecraft and habitation module en route to the Moon for a circumlunar flight Space Adventures has proposed.

A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human spaceflight. In a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson said his company projects approximately 140 people to fly in space commercially in the coming decade. By comparison, during the last ten years seven people flew to space commercially on eight flights (one, Charles Simonyi, flew twice.)

Anderson said Space Adventures was asked by NASA and by Boeing (who Space Adventures has partnered with on development of a commercial crew vehicle, the CST-100) to provide an estimate on the demand for commercial human orbital spaceflight. That figure, he said, includes direct sales to individuals (the traditional “space tourist”) as well as lotteries and other competitions, corporate research, and educational missions. Anderson said the total specifically excludes what are often called “sovereign clients”, representatives of national space agencies flying for their governments. Those 140 people, he said, would fly to the ISS as well as Bigelow Aerospace facilities and one proposed by a Russian company, Orbital Technologies. “Realistically, having 140 individuals fly by the time 2020 rolls around is a pretty darn big accomplishment,” he said.

That estimate uses some relatively conservative assumptions on factors such as price and training time, Anderson said later. “For the majority of the next ten years, we would see prices roughly where they are now,” between $20 million and $50 million, he said. Price, he said, is probably the most important factor in demand, and there would not be dramatic changes in prices unless there was the development of a fully-reusable vehicle. Training time, he said would likely be no less than two months even for missions not going to the ISS. “I just don’t see a way to get that training time down any less than, say, six weeks,” he said. “There’s just too much stuff people need to know, they need to learn, in order to be prepared for the weightless environment.”

The other major aspect of the Space Adventures call Thursday was to provide an update on their circumlunar plans. Earlier this year Anderson announced that the company had signed up one customer for its proposed mission at a cost of $150 million. Anderson confirmed that on Thursday, and added that the company had started negotiations for the second seat available on the flight. “We are hopeful that the contract for the second client, and therefore the total locked-in mission, will be signed and announceable by the end of the year,” he said. Once the mission is “locked-in”, Anderson said they believe they will be able to fly it in about four years, or as soon as the end of 2015.

Anderson didn’t disclose the identities of either the signed customer or the potential customer they’re currently in negotiations with. However, Anderson did note, intriguingly, that the signed customer is planning some kind of research during the flight. The mission of that customer, he said, “is actually really, really meaningful. It is something that is going to address an issue and a concept that is of great importance to the world.” That work, which Anderson did not elaborate upon, will be “an amplifier to the attention” that circumlunar mission would receive and would “captivate a lot of people”.

Space Adventures also released some new images of the lunar mission concept, which features a habitation module launched separately on a Proton that would dock with the Soyuz spacecraft after the Soyuz completes a mission at the ISS. The hab module, along with the Soyuz modules, would provide 18 cubic meters of habitable volume for the three-person crew and would allow for “an extraordinarily comfortable trip to the Moon and back,” in the words of Richard Garriott, Space Adventures vice-chairman who flew to space as a customer of the company in 2008.

“We’re at an extraordinarily unusual moment in history,” Garriott said. “I good argument can be made that there’s every real possibility that the first human return to the Moon since the original Apollo flights may not be sponsored by any government of the Earth, but will be sponsored by private citizens.”

Orbital may wind down its commercial crew effort

Orbital Sciences was one of the companies that submitted CCDev-2 proposals but did not get funded, raising the question of whether they will stay involved in the larger commercial crew effort. On Thursday, company officials indicated they would likely not pursue further work in this area.

“It was disappointing that we weren’t selected” for a CCDev-2 award, Orbital CEO Dave Thompson said in a conference call with financial analysts to discuss the company’s first quarter financial results. “I don’t, at this time, anticipate that we’ll continue to pursue our own project in that race. We’ll watch it and if an opportunity develops we may reconsider. But at this point, I would not anticipate a lot of activity on our part in the commercial crew market.”

Thompson, though, was supportive in general of the commercial crew effort. “NASA is on a good track to turn over astronaut transportation to commercial operators, and I think ultimately the agency will be successful at doing that,” he said.

So why did Orbital not get a CCDev-2 award? From the source selection statement about the awards, it appears that Orbital did not stack up as well as Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), another company that proposed a lifting body concept. “SNC scored higher in business considerations and demonstrated a strong commitment to the public-private partnership associated with the Commercial Crew Program,” the statement reads. Also, SNC’s Dream Chaser could carry more people than Orbital’s Prometheus (seven versus four) and also required a “more modest Atlas V variant”, giving it more margin should the spacecraft’s mass increase. SNC’s proposal did have a flaw in terms of its launch abort capabilities, something NASA believes that the company hadn’t adequately understood, but given the proposal’s other strengths it got a higher rating than Orbital’s, enough for SNC to win a CCDev-2 award and Orbital to be shut out—perhaps for good.

SpaceShipOne details in Allen’s book

Paul Allen’s appearance on “Charlie Rose” this week wasn’t out of the blue: it was prompted by the release of his new memoir, Idea Man. The book covers the various interests in his life, and while much of the publicity about the book has centered on the passages about co-founding and working at Microsoft with Bill Gates, there is a whole chapter devoted to his interest in space. The bulk of the chapter, after talking about how the early Space Race captured his imagination about the topic, offers some interesting details about the development of SpaceShipOne, the suborbital vehicle he funded that won the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE in 2004.

Allen first met with Burt Rutan in September 1996 in Mojave, Allen recounts in the book. “Burt had already begun thinking about a supersonic plane that could fly above the atmosphere,” Allen writes. Two years later, in Seattle, this idea took the form of a crewed suborbital rocket. At the time, Allen said he had a relatively narrow goal: “I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before.” He was attracted to Rutan because of his perfect safety record, noting that for space tourism to be viable, it would have to have safety “comparable to the airline industry.”

At that time the project didn’t go forward since Rutan hadn’t come up with the “right design”, Allen writes. When Rutan did—the air-launched system with the feathered wings that provide the vehicle a “carefree” reentry—they reached an agreement in 2000, and by 2002 signed a contract creating Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV). They were initially not interested in the X PRIZE because it wasn’t funded, but when it became clear shortly after establishing MAV that it would, they changed the design of the vehicle to increase its crew capacity from one to three in order to meet the prize rules. That, Allen said, increased the system’s cost from a projected $9 million to $19 million. “Based on what I’d heard about bleeding-edge aircraft, I expected SpaceShipOne to come in overweight, underpowered, over budget, and behind schedule,” he writes.

While competing for the Ansari X PRIZE, Allen writes that Rutan in particular didn’t think that they had any competition from other teams, calling The da Vinci Project, the Canadian team that eventually made a last-ditch, but futile, effort to beat out SpaceShipOne, “especially far-fetched.” Curiously, Allen writes that they were concerned about “rumored covert efforts in Eastern Europe”, without offering more details.

Much of the rest of the chapter then discusses the development and test flights of SpaceShipOne. Allen was present for the first powered test flight on December 17, 2003, where test pilot Brian Binnie landed SS1 too hard on the runway, causing it to tumble off the runway but without significant damage. That incident, he said, set back their testing schedule by about two months, as they’d hoped prior to that to make the prize-winning flights in the summer of 2004; they instead took place in late September and early October.

After SpaceShipOne’s initial flight into space in June 2004, where the vehicle just barely made it above the von Kármán line (100 kilometers), Allen recalls there were concerns about whether SS1 could do the X PRIZE flights with a heavier load (it had to carry the mass equivalent of three people, although all the flights had only a single person, the pilot, on board). “In fact, SpaceShipOne hadn’t been pushed as close to its limit in June as it had seemed,” he writes. The vehicle was remarkably sturdy, with aerodynamic safety margins of 2.1 to 3 for various components (compared to 1.6 for a typical airliner), and engineers were able to reduce the vehicle’s weight to improve its performance. They also found they could put more nitrous oxide in the vehicle’s oxidizer tank by reducing the ullage, or empty space, that wasn’t needed since the oxidizer didn’t heat up and expand as much as first thought, in part because they took off in the early morning and quickly climbed to higher, colder altitudes.

Allen writes that a month before the June SpaceShipOne flight, Richard Branson approached him about licensing the SpaceShipOne technology. That led to a contract signed in September 2004 “that could net me $25 million over the next fifteen years.” Branson was at the prize-winning flight on October 4, and, as SpaceShipOne was ascending towards space, said to Allen, “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Allen didn’t respond, but according to his book he did think, If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much.

Allen could enjoy it, though, when SS1 safely returned and captured the prize. When he heard the roar of the crowd that had assembled in Mojave for the flight, “it struck me that SpaceShipOne was more than some momentary spectacle. It offered hope to everyone who aspired to journeys beyond the Earth.”

In the end, he writes, SpaceShipOne did come in over budget: he said the program’s total cost was $28 million, in the ballpark of previous estimates of its cost. He added that he achieved a “net positive return” on that investment by 2006, thanks to the prize money (he split the $10-million prize with Rutan), the Virgin licensing fees, and also the tax writeoff from donating SpaceShipOne to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “For a time I was tempted to stay involved in the effort to commercialize space tourism,” he writes, but made a decision to step back several months before SS1 won the prize, letting Virgin Galactic take the lead. As he told Charlie Rose earlier this week, he is now considering getting back in.

While Allen has a financial involvement with space tourism ventures, he’s not interested in flying himself. “But seeing up close what’s involved in spaceflight gave me pause. I’m not an edge walker.” What the SpaceShipOne experience did do, though, was restore his “boyhood sense of wonder” he had when he looked at the night sky. “It was good to get it back.”

Paul Allen considering new commercial space projects

Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who funded the development of the X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, is considering new projects in commercial spaceflight, he said in an interview this week. Interviewed Monday night by Charlie Rose on his eponymous show, Allen tackles a wide range of questions, including, about 26 minutes into the interview, commercial spaceflight. “A lot of people talk about the privatization of space. What’s the future?” asks Rose.

Allen then describes the general concept of suborbital space tourism, “and then after that, at some point, you’re going to have orbital space tourism,” he said. Rose asked if Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was involved in this field, which Allen confirmed: “Right, right, he’s very secretive about some of those things.” Then he added, almost offhandedly, “and I think it’s an area where I’m considering doing further initiatives.” Asked by Rose what he would like to do, Allen wasn’t specific, talking in general about the difficulties of orbital spaceflight versus suborbital.

Allen also praised the work done by Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX. “Elon Musk has done some amazing, amazing things with the boosters he’s developed to take people and cargo to space,” Allen said. At that point, Rose turned his attention to another Musk company, electric car maker Tesla, and that was it for the space segment of Rose’s show.

Assessing the CCDev-2 losers

Monday afternoon NASA announced the award of nearly $270 million to four companies for the second round of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) program. The four winners, and their awards, are:

  • Blue Origin: $22 million
  • Boeing: $92.3 million
  • Sierra Nevada Corporation: $80 million
  • SpaceX: $75 million

Those companies will work on their vehicle concepts under Space Act Agreements, maturing elements of their designs in anticipation of a full-fledged commercial crew development program. But what about the companies that didn’t win? NASA officials noted at Monday’s press conference that it received 22 proposals, selecting eight companies for additional due diligence. So what about some of the companies that didn’t make the cut?

United Launch Alliance: Perhaps the biggest surprise of the CCDev-2 announcement was that ULA didn’t receive any funding. The company was one of five first-round CCDev awardees and its launch vehicles factor significantly into the plans of other commercial crew development companies. ULA is likely to be back for future activities here, although perhaps as part of multiple teams proposing for commercial crew funding rather than a standalone competitor.

Excalibur Almaz: This company, which has plans to use Russian Almaz spacecraft for commercial space flights, was a surprise finalist for CCDev-2. Few details about what EA was proposing for CCDev-2 have been released by the company, but it’s likely the company will continue its commercial activities, although at what externally appears to be a slow pace.

Orbital Sciences: Orbital made a big splash last year with its commercial crew development plans, using a lifting body concept called Prometheus launched on an EELV, building upon interest in commercial crew that dates back to the 1990s. Failure to secure a CCDev-2 award will put the company into a tough spot: should they continue to work on this, albeit at a lower level, to stay in contention for future commercial crew awards, or instead focus on their separate commercial cargo program, the Cygnus spacecraft and Taurus 2 launcher?

ATK: Another surprise entry into CCDev-2 was ATK, which announced in February the Liberty launch vehicle comprised of a five-segment SRB developed for the Ares 1 and a modified Ariane 5 core stage for the upper stage. Without CCDev-2 funding, will ATK continue work on this project? Moreover, would it be cost-competitive for other applications against alternatives like the Falcon Heavy, announced by SpaceX earlier this month?

United Space Alliance: The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that operates the space shuttle had put forward a proposal to continue flying two of the orbiters, Atlantis and Endeavour, commercially. However, USA was not among the eight companies shortlisted for CCDev-2, and even company officials admitted last week that the proposal was “an extremely long shot”. That may be an understatement now.

On CCDev-2’s eve, Boeing’s plans

CST-100 illustration

Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.

NASA announced Monday morning that, later today, it will announce the awardees of its second round of Commercial Crew Development funding, aka CCDev-2. One of the leading contenders to get an award is Boeing: the company received a first-round CCDev award last year and has made progress on its spacecraft design, a capsule called CST-100. Boeing also has commercial partnerships with Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures, the latter involving selling seats on CST-100 flights to commercial customers, such as space tourists.

Speaking at a press conference during the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs last week, John Elbon, vice president and program manager at Boeing Space Commercial Crew Programs, said Boeing would continue development of the CST-100 concept under a CCDev-2 award. The goal would be to have a preliminary design review (PDR) this fall, and a critical design review (CDR), the last major step before actual construction of the vehicle, about a year later. That would put Boeing on a path to conduct a pad abort test of the CST-100’s escape system in 2013, followed by two uncrewed test flights in 2014 and finally a flight with two test pilots around 2015.

Exactly what Boeing would be able to accomplish under CCDev-2 will depend on how much funding is available; reports indicate as much as $300 million will be available, going to multiple awardees. Boeing got $18 million under CCDev-1 and contributed a “like amount” of company funds to the effort, Elbon said. He added that he hoped to be able to perform tests on airbags and parachute designs, as well as a lighter-weight version of the abort engine tested under CCDev-1.

While Boeing has emphasized that the CST-100 is compatible with a wide range of launch vehicles, including Atlas, Delta, Falcon, and ATK’s proposed Liberty rocket, Elbon said they plan to focus going forward on a single vehicle. “We’re currently in the process of going through a procurement for that launch vehicle,” he said, without specifying which one. He later said that while they would focus on that vehicle for integration work, they would still be open to working with over vehicles, including non-US vehicles like the Ariane 5 and Japan’s H-2.

But what if Boeing is, for some reason, shut out of the CCDev-2 program? The company would still be eligible to compete for the later full-fledged commercial crew development effort, but would clearly be at a disadvantage compared to companies that do receive CCDev-2 awards. “We’d have to assess the market and the likelihood that NASA would want to pursue this further, at a later time,” Elbon said. “We’re dependent on NASA as an investor in this process, and we’re also dependent on NASA as a foundational customer to close our business case.”

Whither OSIDA?

On Monday, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin signed into law a bill establishing tax credits on salaries of engineers hired by aerospace companies in the state. The legislation is designed to encourage aerospace companies in the state to hire employees (especially those educated in the state) by creating or moving jobs there.

Buried near the end of the article, though, is some news about the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority, the state agency that runs the Oklahoma Spaceport, a former Air Force base in Burns Flat. Fallin is seeking to effectively eliminate OSIDA as an independent agency by cutting its roughly half-million-dollar budget and folding it into another state agency, such as the Department of Commerce or the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission. “I’m actually working with our legislators and Department of Commerce on further continuing to market that facility,” she told the AP, “but yet also trying to figure out how we can have shared resources as it relates to the aerospace industry and especially (the Space Industry Development Authority).”

The spaceport was to be the home base for Rocketplane and its XP suborbital vehicle, but the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation last year, effectively leaving the spaceport without a customer. (Armadillo Aerospace has used the site for some low-altitude test flights in the past, but is flying their higher altitude space missions from Spaceport America in New Mexico.) Ironically, the tax credits Rocketplane received for moving to Oklahoma several years ago (what the company often called “winning the O Prize”) became one of the reasons legislators cited when they created a moratorium on tax credits last year that was partially lifted by the new law.

BBC gets a behind-the-scenes look at SpaceShipTwo

inside SS2

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.

Armadillo close to launching their “Tube” rocket

It looks like Armadillo Aerospace is preparing to flying their “Tube” rocket as soon as this weekend. John Carmack announced on the aRocket mailing list that they’re planning a flight of the rocket to about 30 kilometers (100,000 feet) this weekend from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The rocket, a long, narrow vehicle powered by a single LOX/alcohol engine, is designed as a “risk reduction step” towards eventual plans for a vertical takeoff/vertical landing human-rated vehicle. Armadillo has been performing some static and hover tests of the vehicle recently, as shown in this photo by Armadillo’s Ben Brockert about a week and a half ago.

In the brief message, Carmack said that if the launch goes as expected and they recover the rocket (which will descend under parachute), they plan to perform some upgrades and launch it again within a couple months, this time to over 100 kilometers. And if the launch doesn’t go well? “I imagine the mood in the shop will be pretty grim while building up a new version of this vehicle if all we got out of the previous one was a couple hover tests and a crash,” he writes.

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