Wednesday was the first of two days of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The conference, now in its sixth year, started as an opening act for the X PRIZE Cup, but has now not only continued after the end of the Cup, but has grown into one of the major commercial spaceflight conferences. Wednesday’s sessions didn’t provide any major breaking developments, but here are a few highlights and other interesting tidbits:
In a session titled “Closing the credibility gap”, speakers from Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and Armadillo Aerospace discussed the importance of testing to demonstrate to customers, investors, regulators, and others that their ventures are, in fact, credible. During her presentation Virgin Galactic operations manager Julia Tizard mentioned that “full scale hot firing” of the rocket motors for SpaceShipTwo is underway in preparation for powered flight tests next year. (It should be noted that the log of RocketMotorTwo test firings was last updated in August.)
Neil Milburn of Armadillo Aerospace said in another panel that the company plans to bring out two vehicles, Super Mod and the “tube vehicle”, to Spaceport America by the end of this year for test flights under NASA’s CRuSR program, pending FAA approval. Super Mod will be able to fly to at least 40 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 60 kilometers, while the tube vehicle (Milburn admitted that vehicle needs a better name) could go all the way to 100 kilometers.
Earlier, Milburn said that Project M, a low-profile NASA project Armadillo had been associated with, has changed its name to Project Morpheus. The project had originally sought to land a humanoid rover (based on the Robonaut that will be going to the ISS on the next shuttle mission) on the Moon within 1,000 days (hence M, the Roman numeral for 1,000). The name change reflects a change in focus on the program for more terrestrial technology development.
Tim Pickens, the founder or Orion Propulsion who now works for Dynetics, said Dynetics’s role in projects like the Rocket City Space Pioneers Google Lunar X PRIZE team is part of an internal investment by the company to become one known for building space hardware. He added that in “the next few weeks” you would see some major investments by the company along those lines.
Bigelow Aerospace’s Robert Bigelow said despite the ongoing construction of a 185,000-square-foot factory in Las Vegas devoted to the production of expandable modules, he still considered the company to be in R&D mode. The company is looking for customers, and recently signed several memoranda of understanding with countries interested in leasing modules, but he said the company would not take any money from customers until at least 2012, pending the state of crew transportation development. (The company has a considerable presence at the conference; more on that in a later post.)
The web site Evadot recently published a comprehensive “team scorecard” ranking all the current teams participating in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The scorecard lists 22 teams and their cumulative scores based on the following metrics:
Funding – 20 possible points – Measures how far along the teams are in their acquisition of funding based on their publicly stated estimated mission costs
Innovation – 10 possible points – Measures how much innovation is being used across the entire project. This includes new inventions and clever reuses of existing resources and technology
Social Savvy – 10 possible points – It’s 2010 and connecting with people will require the use of social networks and other avenues in order to gain mindshare of both influential thinkers and the “people on the street”
Connections – 10 possible points – Measures how connected are the people involved in the team leadership to the outside help and expertise they will need to execute their mission.
Progress – 10 possible points – Measures our perception of their progress to being able to launch.
Feeling – 10 possible points – Measures just our gut feeling about the team. Things like that look in a leader’s eyes when they speak.
Inspiration – 10 possible points – Measures the ability to inspire others.
Rover/Lander Completion – 10 possible points – How complete is the actual build.
Participatory Exploration – 10 possible points – Measures the teams involvement in involving others. People need to feel directly connected to the exploration of space in order to have a long term impact on their thinking.
It’s certainly a comprehensive examination of the teams, and Michael Doornbos deserves credit for putting it together. However, if the goal is to measure which teams are closest to winning the prize, the categories and their weighting should be reconsidered. Some comments:
1) While the scorecard weights funding more than any other category, it’s still not weighted heavily enough. Getting enough funding to carry out a mission is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the competition, given that none of the teams are independently wealthy or (with, perhaps, the exception of new team Rocket City Space Pioneers) have the backing of major corporations. You can have a great concept, an impressive social media strategy, and inspiration oozing out your virtual pores, but without money you’re never getting off the ground.
2) Similarly, hardware development should be weighted more: it’s a key differentiator between teams making serious progress towards going to the Moon versus those with flashy web sites and gorgeous illustrations, but nothing else.
3) Several of the other categories should be weighted less, or even combined or eliminated: social savvy, connections, feeling, and inspiration among them. Social media is nice to have, but beyond the requirements set forth by the competition it’s not essential. And some of the metrics are admittedly extremely subjective (see “feeling”).
4) Since progress is captured in other areas, such as funding and hardware development, having a separate progress category seems redundant.
A simplistic alternative would be to give one-third weight to funding, one-third to hardware development, and one-third distributed among the other categories. Even that, though, may underweight funding and hardware.
SpaceShipTwo during its first glide test on October 10, 2010. (credit: Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic)
In a press release this afternoon, Virgin Galactic declared the glide test this morning by SpaceShipTwo a success. The WhiteKnightTwo aircraft VMS Eve released SpaceShipTwo (VSS Enterprise) at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), and SS2 glided to a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port 11 minutes later, shortly after 8 am PDT (11 am EDT). Pete Siebold piloted SS2 with Mike Alsbury as co-pilot; Sieblod, in the release, declared SS2 “a real joy to fly”.
Some details about the flight test activities from the press release:
Other detailed objectives of the flight were successfully completed, including; verification that all systems worked prior and following the clean release of Enterprise; initial evaluation of handling and stall characteristics; qualitative evaluation of stability and control of SS2 against predictions from design and simulation work; verification of performance by evaluating the lift-to-drag ratio of the spaceship during glide flight; practice a landing approach at altitude and finally descend and land.
Virgin also used the flight test to announce a four-part documentary series with the National Geographic Channel about the development of SpaceShipTwo. The first part will air next Monday, October 18, at 10 pm EDT/PDT to cover the work leading to Sunday’s glide test. Later parts of the documentary, according to the announcement, “will include SpaceShipTwo’s first rocket-powered flight; following Rutan, Branson and his two children as they make preparations for their historic flight; and being there as the spaceliner’s first passengers take their incredible trip.”
Finally, a picture below showing the release of SS2. Look carefully at the pylon between the fuselages of WK2 where SS2 was mounted. Have a nice flight?
[Update 2: SpaceShipTwo has successfully completed its first glide test, landing at Mojave Air and Space Port shortly after 8 am PDT (11 am EDT) Sunday morning, a little more than 10 minutes after being released by WhiteKnightTwo.]
[Update: the first glide test is indeed taking place Sunday morning; follow along at the Popular Mechanics liveblog, reporting from Mojave.]
The long wait for the first free flight by SpaceShipTwo may nearly be over. Popular Mechanics reported Saturday that, according to its sources, Scaled will perform the first glide test as soon as Sunday morning, taking the aircraft up to an altitude of 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) and then release it. SpaceShipTwo most recently flew a captive carry flight with the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft on September 30th; according to the published test log the flight was a “rehearsal mission” for upcoming glide tests.
Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.
When Space Adventures announced last week a joint press conference with Boeing to discuss “a unique agreement between the two companies on commercial crew transportation services”, as the announcement put it, it seemed obvious what that agreement would involve: Space Adventures would sell seats on the CST-100, the commercial crew capsule that Boeing is developing to primarily serve other markets, such as transporting NASA crews to and from the International Space Station.
And that, in fact, was the announcement made yesterday. However, the nearly 90-minute press conference, held in a conference room at a Boeing office in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC, provided plenty of opportunity for both companies to expound on the agreement and provide more details (or, in some cases, the lack of details). In short, Space Adventures will market “excess seating capacity” on CST-100 flights, primarily to the ISS, to potential spaceflight participants as soon as 2015.
Specific details about such flight, though, have yet to be worked out. John Elbon, vice president and program manager for commercial crew transportation systems at Boeing, said the notional model they were working from is taking advantage of any crew transportation flights NASA would procure as part of a future commercial crew program. The CST-100 is designed to accommodate up to seven people, but current NASA crew rotation models would require only four seats. The remaining capacity could be used for extra cargo, or for one or more spaceflight participants. He also didn’t rule out the possibility of dedicated flights, although this agreement between Boeing and Space Adventures does not include any flights to Bigelow Aerospace’s proposed commercial orbital facilities (Bigelow is a partner with Boeing on its current $18-million NASA Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev, award.)
Neither company would divulge how big they think the market is for such flights, but they were confident that there would be sufficient customers, even with a ticket price in the tens of millions. “We believe that we will be able to bring the spaceflight experience to a greater number of people than we would have before,” Anderson said. He added that “every flight opportunity that we have had the opportunity to sell, we have sold”, and thus the market was not constrained by the number of people who want to fly, but instead the number of flight opportunities.
Of course, this is all contingent on Boeing developing the CST-100, which the company said is, in turn, dependent on receiving NASA funding through a commercial crew program—a hot topic of debate across the Potomac from Boeing’s offices. “If we had to do this with Boeing investment only,” Elbon said, “we wouldn’t be able to close the business case.” NASA, he said, provides the program both development money as well as business transporting astronauts to and from the ISS. He said there are examples of past markets that got started with government investment, and Anderson noted aviation industry was supported by government airmail in its early years. “I think the argument that if it’s not purely funded and purely financed by private industry that there’s no market, I think that is, with all due respect, hogwash.”
Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle on a flight as part of the Lunar Lander Challenge in September 2009.
On Monday NASA announced that it has made $475,000 in awards to Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems for experimental flights of suborbital reusable vehicles. These are the first contracts for test flights under the agency’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, which is designed to support flight opportunities on commercial suborbital vehicles for a variety of research purposes. The flights will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico (for Armadillo) and Mojave Air and Space Port in California (for Masten) this fall and winter, reaching altitudes of between 5 and 40 kilometers.
The announcement coincided with a “Flight Opportunities” panel at the AIAA Space 2010 conference Monday afternoon in Anaheim, California. As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a panel session: most of the scheduled panelists were unavailable for one reason or another, but officials from the CRuSR program and the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (CRuSR’s parent organization) were present and offered some additional details beyond what was in the NASA release. For example, the $475,000 awarded was split roughly evenly between the two companies, with one getting approximately $250,000 and the other approximately $225,000. (I was later told that Masten got the slightly larger award.)
The NASA press release mentioned that the vehicle will be carrying antennas to support the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) navigation system for the FAA, but that will not be the only payload they will carry. Dougal Maclise said at the panel session that the vehicles will also carry a “flight monitor” from NASA Ames to measure the flight environment of the vehicles, including acceleration and vibration. A third payload is a “particle agglomeration” experiment from the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California Berkeley tat has previously flown on the ISS. The key requirements for all the experiments, he said, is that they be “self-sufficient, autonomous, and expendable”.
The flights will begin as soon as October, with Armadillo flying out of Spaceport America; the Masten flights will begin late this year. Those two companies were pretty much the only ones who could meet CRuSR’s requirements to perform test flights, even at relatively low altitudes, within six months of contract award (a requirement in the solicitation). Virgin Galactic has not yet started glide tests of SpaceShipTwo, let alone powered flights, while XCOR Aerospace will not be ready to begin vehicle tests in the next six months. (Blue Origin’s status is more secretive, as usual for them, but there’s no evidence they are in an active flight test program.)
County commissioners in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, approved earlier this week a plan to pave a road to Spaceport America. The paving will be paid by the spaceport project, although the county is contributing the equivalent of $200,000 in engineering and surveying services for the project, which will pave an existing road to cut the travel time to the spaceport for people coming from the south. Spaceport developers are also dealing with a drop in the water table in the region that has affected a number of nearby residents, whose wells have gone dry as a result of heavy use of water during the spaceport’s construction, particularly when paving its 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) runway. The water table is “showing all the right signs of recharge”, said Spaceport America director Rick Homans, but residents are still concerned about any long-term affects.
On the other side of the country, Maryland governor Martin O’Malley visited Wallops Flight Facility, home to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), earlier this week. Wallops is in Virginia, but close to the Maryland border; many people who work there live in Maryland. The statement by O’Malley’s office about the visit said little about the commercial potential of the spaceport, instead playing up the impact of NASA and other government space-related spending on state’s economy. By contrast, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has played up the commercial potential of Wallops, including plans by Orbital Sciences Corporation to launch ISS cargo missions from MARS using its new Taurus 2 rocket.
Virgin Galactic has responded to yesterday’s report that the company is only accepting US citizens for its flights by, in effect, saying the article is completely off base. The Irish Independent article claimed that an Irishman living in England, Cyril Bennis, had been told by the company that it was currently only accepting US citizens. A Virgin official said Monday that Bennis had inquired about flying non-US citizens on its flights and was told that they were accepting deposits from Americans and others alike “because we fully intend to be able to fly these pioneering people”. (That would include, of course, Sir Richard Branson, who has previously said he and his family would go on the first SpaceShipTwo commercial flight.) The company will do so “in a way which fully complies with all applicable laws and regulations including those which relate to US export controls”; as noted yesterday, there’s already precedent for allowing spaceflight participants to be trained for such flights without going through ITAR-related paperwork. “Unfortunately we were not contacted by the Independent before the piece was published and so had no chance to correct an entirely inaccurate report,” the Virgin official said.
Is Virgin Galactic only accepting US citizens now? That’s the claim of an article Sunday in the Irish Independent, which reports that an Irishman living in England “received a legal notice from Virgin Galactic stating that at present only US citizens can be considered for inclusion.” The company has signed up and accepted deposits from a number of people outside the US, so it’s not clear what would cause this change in direction, if in fact correct. The obvious concern would be something having to do with US export control regulations, but Bigelow Aerospace won a ruling last year that ITAR-related agreements were not needed for prospective spaceflight participants.
Even without that issue, Bruce Dickinson isn’t interested in flying on Virgin Galactic. The 52-year-old British lead singer of Iron Maiden, who is a licensed commercial pilot and Star Trek fan, would seem to be in the ideal demographic for space tourism, but he tells QMI Media he’s not interested right now because of price and safety issues. “I think I’d want to take a long hard look at those little suborbital things before I got on one,” he said. “And for the amount of money it costs, well, I could think of a lot of things you could do that would be a lot more fun, and last a lot longer.”
Those who do want to, and are able to, fly on Virgin Galactic may be able to enjoy a little bit of a shortcut to Spaceport America. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority approved Friday a proposal to pave a road on the southern approach to the spaceport. The road, from the Upham exit on I-25, will shorten the travel time for people coming to the spaceport from Las Cruces from one hour and 40 minutes down to one hour as they will no longer have to take the current northern approach through Truth and Consequences. The money for paving the road comes from “unexpected savings” on other aspects of the project because of a “good bid climate”, freeing up the $11.5 million needed for the paving.
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