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The final day of the the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando wound down with a grab bag of sessions on research, markets, and other issues. One interesting presentation was by Paul Guthrie of the Tauri Group, who discussed a study they had done in cooperation with Space Florida to identify markets for suborbital vehicles. That work has identified seven potential markets: commercial human spaceflight, aerospace technology test and demonstration, basic and applied science, education, remote sensing, media and public relations, and point-to-point travel. This study is not intended to determine the sizes of those markets (that being left to a future study) or their timing, as some, like point-to-point travel, would presumably emerge much later than tourism and research.
The conference’s concluding panel examined training and roles for payload specialists who might fly with their experiments on suborbital flights. This panel covered again some of the ground of a session the previous day on crew training, with some of the same participants. Although some, like Astronaut4Hire’s Erik Seedhouse, have proposed rather rigorous training regimens for suborbital crews, others, like Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, believe that only a modest amount of training will be needed for suborbital payload specialists: on the order of one to three weeks, spread out over a larger period of time. “If we turn this into training where it looks like you’re going on an International Space Station mission, we’re really going to be in trouble. We’re defeating the purpose of low-cost spaceflight,” Stern said.
That discussion helped identify one of the themes of the 2011 NSRC. While the first NSRC last year in Colorado was primarily designed to helped put this market—research and education—on the map, the second one transitioned from the “why” of suborbital research to the “how”: how to fly payloads on suborbital vehicles, how to train payload specialists for the flights, and related topics. The next NSRC is scheduled for the February 2012 in the San Francisco Bay Area, hosted by NASA Ames. By then, perhaps, we’ll start hearing about results from payloads that have actually flown on suborbital vehicles.
The second day of the the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando focused more closely on the types of scientific research (biomedical, microgravity science, astronomy, etc.) that can be performed on commercial suborbital reusable vehicles and the issues associated with carrying out this research. One key topic is integrating payloads into vehicles. With a wide range of vehicle concepts under development, there are no standards for payload size, power, and other interfaces, and NASA has indicated that they will let the market set those standards rather than impose them themselves, even for the flights it funds.
This means that researchers are working closely with vehicle providers to work through issues of integrating their experiments on spacecraft. Blue Origin, for example, has several “pathfinder” research customers who are getting their payloads flown for free while working through these issues. Blue Origin has also come up with a “Cabin Payload Bay”, a standard payload box designed to more easily accommodate experiments with various power, data, and other services. Annamarie Askren, the Research and Education Market (REM) payload integration lead for Blue Origin, said the company would be publishing a payload users guide on its web site later this week with more technical details.
While many experiments will be automated, others will require a human presence (indeed, in some biomedical cases the human will be the experiment). These payload specialists will require training, but just how much is necessary is another area without clear standards. Dan Durda of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) recommended prospective payload specialists experience as many different training environments as possible, from piloting aircraft to scuba diving. Zero-g parabolic aircraft flights are almost a given, he said, to understand what weightlessness is like. Erik Seedhouse, the training director for Astronauts4Hire (A4H), a startup that proposes to develop a cadre of professional commercial astronauts for research and other applications, described a far more rigorous set of qualification standards that A4H has developed, including centrifuge and zero-g training, aerobatic flights, and more.
The training requirements for payload specialists—far more rigorous than what’s expected for tourists—and the specialized requirements for research experiments raise the question of whether research and tourism missions can be mixed on the same flight. Askren said Blue Origin is cautious about the ability to mix the two, given the “chaos” in the cabin during 0-g portions of parabolic flights. That’s not an issue, of course, for uncrewed vehicles, or for XCOR’s Lynx, which is small enough that almost every flight is a dedicated one for either tourism for research. “It’s your ride,” as XCOR’s Jeff Greason put it.
Monday was the first day of the the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. This conference, the second of its kind, is designed to bring together suborbital vehicle developers and the research community, an emerging market for commercial suborbital reusable vehicles. The conference has attracted more than 300 people, compared to the 268 who attended the inaugural NSRC last February in Boulder, Colorado. The three-day conference features presentation on both vehicle capabilities and potential research applications, as well as education, policy, and other issues.
The big announcement Monday was the news that the Southwest Research Institution (SwRI) has purchased seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx vehicles for research missions. SwRI bought a total of eight seats—six on Lynx and two on SS2—with an option for nine more. (XCOR actually announced its part of the deal last Thursday, while Virgin waited until Monday.) Three SwRI researchers will fly on this missions, conducing several experiments. SwRI associate vice president Alan Stern, one of three who will fly, said at a press conference Monday that the experiments include a biomedical monitoring harness, a microgravity physics experiment to study asteroid regolith, and an astronomical imaging sensor. (For some additional background on this, see my article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, incorporating some of these developments.)
On the vehicle side, five suborbital vehicle developers—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin, and XCOR—presented in a panel session at the conference. All but Blue Origin presented at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference earlier in February, and are summarized in my TSR article linked to above, so there were not much in the way of new developments (Blue Origin, not at the FAA conference, didn’t offer much in the way of vehicle development updates.) Armadillo’s Neil Milburn did say that Armadillo is currently performing cryo load tests on its “Tube” (aka “STIG”) rocket this week; if those go well they plan a first flight test as soon as March 9 from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
One other development of interest: in his plenary talk Monday morning, FAA associate administrator of commercial space transportation George Nield revealed that the FAA’s 2012 budget proposal includes a $5-million “Low Cost Access to Space” prize. Few other details about the proposed prize are available, although Nield said the FAA would work with other agencies, including NASA and the Defense Department, on implementing the prize.
[A brief public service announcement about the upcoming Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando, February 28-March 2. I attended the inaugural conference last year in Boulder, Colorado, and found it very useful; this one promises to be just as good if not better. Advance registration for the conference closes today, although on-site registration will be available.]
The 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference will be held in Orlando, Florida 28 February through 2 March. That’s less than two weeks away!
If you or your colleagues and students have not registered on line yet, you still can, until the end of Friday February 18th; just go to: http://nsrc.swri.org/. (After that, you can register in-person in Orlando at a higher price.)
Following on the success of the inaugural Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference in February 2010, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation is proud to again co-sponsor the 2011 sequel conference.
We can already see that the 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference promises to be a watershed gathering for researchers, educators, and industry/government. The meeting will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about the application of these new vehicles to research and education objectives. The meeting will also provide important networking opportunities for researchers and educators to meet with colleagues, government officials, and representatives from the suborbital industry. Vehicles are under development by companies including Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace.
This year’s registrants include a significant number of international attendees from Canada, Europe, and Asia, in addition to many from the United States.
Over 120 presenters—a 40% increase over 2010—will discuss everything from flight test progress to planned experiments in 7 different research fields to training and roles for research and educator payload specialists. In total, the meeting will feature 20 sessions, 4 discussion panels, a press conference, presentations or booths by 20 sponsors, and a public night presentation by Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides.
The meeting will also include invited talks by experts in diverse fields that include microgravity sciences, atmospheric science, space life sciences, planetary science, education, and crew training.
The 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference is the place to be to learn how to marry your research, education, or business interests to next-generation suborbital spaceflight.
For more information, and to register to reserve your seat, go to http://nsrc.swri.org/
See you there, soon—and don’t forget to register before the end of Friday February 18th when the website registration period ends! (After that you will have to register in person in Orlando, at a higher price).
It was a year ago this week that NASA announced a set of Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) awards, using $50 million they agency got as part of a larger grant of stimulus funding. The CCDev awards to five companies—Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon, Sierra Nevada, and United Launch Alliance—were announced at a Washington press conference also tied to the agency’s FY11 budget proposal, which included a new commercial crew initiative. While Congress, industry, and others debated that larger commercial crew program, the five CCDev awardees quietly worked on their various efforts. What have they done with that money? Here’s a summary of their work, based on reports the companies have submitted to the government and published on Recovery.gov, the web site that tracks stimulus fund spending:
Blue Origin reports it has completed work on its $3.66-million CCDev award with a second ground test of the engine it developed for the pusher escape system of its proposed vehicle. (According to the report, while the company has submitted its final report and completed its last project milestone, it has only received $1.125 million of its overall award.) In the previous quarter the company reported it completed work on the other aspect of its award, risk reduction work on a composite pressure vessel for its vehicle.
Boeing, which has received $16.5 million of its $18-million award, says it has now achieved 94% of its milestones, according to its latest quarterly summary. Boeing carried out a System Definition Review (SDR) for its CST-100 capsule in cooperation with NASA, the FAA, and independent experts, and “finalized re-plan of Abort System Hardware Demo resulting from the LAS down select decision.” It anticipates completing its final report in March, after finalizing review item discrepancies (RIDs) identified in the SDR and completing assembly of its abort system engine.
Paragon Space Development Corporation has completed its $1.44-million CCDev award work, according to its latest summary, with the completion of testing in mid-December of its Commercial Crew Transport Air Revitalization System, a life support system intended for use on commercial crew vehicles. During those final tests the unit demonstrated “as-specified carbon dioxide removal, moisture removal and thermal control for steady state and varying metabolic loads.”
Sierra Nevada Corporation, which got the largest CCDev award, $20 million, for work on its Dream Chaser vehicle design, indicated it has completed its work in its latest quarterly report. The company said it completed Milestone 4, structural testing of its engineering test article, of its CCDev award in December. Other work completed in the quarter included drop tests of a subscale Dream Chaser model at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and testing of an igniter for the vehicle’s reaction control system thrusters.
United Launch Alliance (ULA), like Boeing, is still finishing up work on its $6.7-million award, according to its latest quarterly report. In December ULA carried out a demonstration of its Emergency Detection System it’s developing under its CCDev award; that system is part of ULA’s efforts to human-rate its launch vehicles. The company said it received an extension from NASA until April “to enable us to finish critical timing analyses tasks” for its fault coverage analysis work.
The turmoil surrounding the management of Spaceport America in New Mexico has been relatively quiet the last couple of weeks, after the resignation of executive director Rick Homans at the insistence of the new governor, followed by the dismissal of the spaceport’s board of directors early this month. That situation is still in flux, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports this weekend, based on an interview with new Governor Susana Martinez. She tells the paper that there will be a “sense of urgency” (in the newspaper’s words) in filling the board and executive director positions, which remain vacant.
One revelation in the article is that Sir Richard Branson personally appealed to Gov. Martinez in a phone call to keep Homans on as executive director. Martinez, though, said she went ahead with plans to ask Homans to leave because she needed to better understand the current situation with the spaceport, including its contract with Virgin Galactic, and was finding it difficult to get those details. “What we want to do is get a hold of the contract (with Virgin Galactic) and make sure we know what the long-term commitment is financially,” she told the Sun-News. “They have not been very willing to share the very hard data of what is the state’s commitment long-term.”
On Sunday afternoon Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, and George Whitesides, president and CEO of Virgin Galactic, appeared on a panel at the Digital – Life – Design (DLD) conference in Munich. The half-hour panel, with the rather clunky title “New Space Mission”, was designed to provide attendees of this rather eclectic conference with a brief overview of the state of space tourism? (How eclectic? The panel took place immediately after a hip hop performance and before a talk by one of the designers on the movie TRON: Legacy.) The two also managed to make a little news about their respective ventures.
The panel’s moderator, Spencer Reiss of Wired, introduced Anderson as the person would sell you a ticket for a trip around the Moon, “and there’s only one ticket left, and it’s $150 million.” When Space Adventures announced its circumlunar flight plans in 2005, they said they would sell two seats for $100 million each. Anderson indicated a short time later that the price apparently had gone up, but, “we have sold one of those.” Reiss asked Anderson who the purchaser was, but Anderson didn’t give a name: “When we tell you, you’ll know who it is. You’ll recognize the name.” Anderson said “we’ve got people we’re finalizing with right now” for the second seat on the flight, which he said would take place around 2015.
Whitesides, meanwhile, said that Virgin Galactic was planning to begin operations in 2012, with Branson and his family, along with Burt Rutan, on the first commercial flight (as Virgin has planned for some time.) “It’s safe to say we expect certainly to be cash flow positive very quickly” once operations begin, he said. Virgin will start with one flight a week, moving to three flights a week during its first year of operations, allowing it to fly up to 500 people during that first year of operations. He added the company would probably spend “about half a billion dollars” before commercial operations begin.
Whitesides said that once the company is ready to expand operations beyond Spaceport America, it will look first to the Middle East, and not Europe as the company had previously indicated. “If we’re able to export the system, we would first export it to Abu Dhabi if the US government permits it,” he said. Back in mid-2009 Will Whitehorn, then-president of Virgin Galactic, said he was “pretty certain” Sweden would be next after Virgin Galactic, followed by somewhere in the Middle East. Since then, though, Abu Dhabi-based Aabar Investments took a 32-percent stake in Virgin Galactic for $280 million.
Video from the panel is below, but for some reason the last several minutes of the session, including Whitesides’s comments above, are missing:
The new year has not been a good one so far for Spaceport America, the commercial spaceport under construction in southern New Mexico. Early this month executive director Rick Homans resigned, apparently at the insistence of the administration of new governor Susana Martinez, who took office on New Year’s Day. On Thursday the governor announced the formation of a six-person “transition team” to examine the status of the spaceport and its finances. And late Friday Gov. Martinez dismissed the spaceport’s board, saying the spaceport needed “more robust private investment and new leadership to make necessary adjustments”, according to a statement obtained by the Las Cruces Sun-News.
An article in Sunday’ Albuquerque Journal suggests her concerns about management of the spaceport have some legitimacy. The article notes that the work on the spaceport was divvied up into 14 “bid packages” without a single prime contractor, which made it hard to manage the project; that may have led to the resignation last year of then-executive director Steve Landeene, according to the article. (Previous reports had suggested a conflict of interest over a land deal near the spaceport might have triggered the resignation.)
The article also raises questions about whether the spaceport will need to spend $10-20 million in the near future on a second runway at the spaceport to allow flight operations if there are crosswinds on the current runway. Homans said that there had been “some” research on the sensitive of SpaceShipTwo to crosswinds, but that most likely the problem would be addressed by flying in the morning when winds are at a minimum.
One issue with the article is that it suggests that delays in building the spaceport are the main reason flight operations haven’t begun there. “In early 2007, plans called for launches of small Virgin Galactic craft from the site to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere by the end of 2009, news report show,” the article states. However, even if the spaceport had been completed by 2009 or 2010, it still wouldn’t be hosting regular commercial spaceflights as development of SpaceShipTwo has also been delayed. (The spaceport actually has hosted some launches of sounding rockets by UP Aerospace, but these don’t require the expensive infrastructure being built for Virgin Galactic.) So the spaceport may indeed be running behind schedule, but it’s not the only thing taking longer than planned.
 EADS Astrium has proposed developing a suborbital spaceplane for several years, but has made little progress beyond some early-stage technology development work. (credit: EADS Astrium) Yesterday Scaled Composites competed a fourth glide flight of SpaceShipTwo. According to the flight log all test objectives were achieved on the 11.5-minute test, the first glide flight of the suborbital spaceplane since November 17. The test log notes, among other things, that water ballast was dumped from the vehicle prior to landing, “which produced a visible contrail.” Burt Rutan had a succinct evaluation of the flight, according to SPACE.com: “Went great.”
Contrast that with comments by the head of EADS Astrium about its suborbital spaceplane project, as reported by the BBC. “We continue to mature the concept, maintaining the minimum team, in order that when we find the relevant partnership we are ready and have progressed sufficiently,” CEO François Auque told reporters. “We keep the investment going.” The emphasis in those comments should be on “maintaining the minimum team”, since there’s been little evidence of major progress in the vehicle’s development. Company officials have said in the past that despite the company’s large internal financial resources, it was seeking outside investment before going into full-scale development of the vehicle. For example, at a space tourism conference in London in mid-2009, Astrium’s Hugues Laporte-Weywada said the company had slowed down work on the project, awaiting financing from potential operators before proceeding with additional work. “For sure we will not be the first” company to field a suborbital vehicle, he admitted at the time.
But with such significant sources of funding hard to come by—the company has previously estimated the development cost of the vehicle at as much as €1 billion (US$1.33 billion)—it’s not clear when, or even if, the vehicle will move into full-fledged development.
Space Adventures announced today that it has concluded an agreement with the Russian space agency Roskosmos and RSC Energia for additional Soyuz seats for future flights of space tourists, starting in 2013. Three seats will be made available as Energia increases production of Soyuz spacecraft from four to five a year; the additional Soyuz flight would be used for short (approximately ten-day) taxi flights to the station, and apparently not as part of regular crew rotation missions. Seats have not been available since Guy Laliberté’s flight over a year ago because all the seats on current and planned Soyuz missions are needed for ferrying long-term ISS crewmembers to and from the station.
“Since Guy Laliberté’s mission, there has been an increase of interest by private individuals, organizations and commercial entities seeking ways to access the space station,” Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson said in the company’s statement. “We have been speaking with these parties about science, education and multi-media programs and hope to make some major announcements in the coming year.”
Left unstated in the release is how those three seats will be spread out over those additional missions: will it be one seat each on three flights, or could one mission carry two paying customers with a professional cosmonaut? A Space Adventures spokesperson said no decision has been made yet on how to apportion the seats.
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