An initial group of a dozen prospective scientist-astronauts will begin a two-day training program today at the NASTAR Center just outside Philadelphia in preparation for future flights on commercial suborbital vehicles. The training will include both classroom instruction and “altitude chamber training, multi-axes centrifuge training for launch and reentry accelerations, and several distraction factor exercises”, all designed to prepare people for the experience of suborbital spaceflight. As noted here previously, there’s growing interest in using suborbital vehicles being developed to service the space tourism market for scientific applications as well, something that will be the focus of a conference next month in Colorado.
Among those at the NASTAR Center for the training program are former CNN space reporter Miles O’Brien and SpaceRef’s Keith Cowing, who will covering the event at OnOrbit, including live streaming video during the training sessions. They also advise checking out the the blog of one of the attendees, Joe Hill, who writes that she is “desperately excited about this opportunity but more than a little afraid” that she might not be able to handle the G-forces or other factors that will be tested in the training. There’s also the Twitter tag #suborbital to follow, although there’s not much there now.
Also, attendees will get to sport a new “Suborbital Scientist” patch that NASTAR announced yesterday, the result of a student competition won by an MIT grad student.
After years of effort, Florida’s Cecil Field got some good news Monday: they got their commercial spaceport license from the FAA. The former naval air station outside Jacksonville, currently used primarily for cargo and general aviation, will now be able to host horizontal launches of reusable launch vehicles for suborbital space tourism and potentially orbital launches as well.
There’s just one problem: it’s not clear if anyone will use Cecil Field as a spaceport any time soon. The license covers only horizontally-launched vehicles, so vertically-launched suborbital RLVs, like those proposed by Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, and Masten Space Systems, would not be able to use Cecil. Also, the license apparently covers only some classes of horizontal vehicles, as a section of the final environmental assessment (EA) for Cecil’s spaceport license states:
Under the Proposed Action, JAA would offer the launch site to launch operators for two types of horizontal, piloted RLVs, referred to as Concept X and Concept Z launch vehicles. The Concept X vehicle contains two turbojet engines and two rocket engines powered by Jet-A fuel and liquid oxygen (LOX). The Concept Z vehicle consists of two components – a carrier aircraft mated with a suborbital launch vehicle. The carrier vehicle would have turbo jet engines while the launch vehicle would use a hybrid rocket engine powered by nitrous oxide and hydroxylterminated polybutadiene.
The Concept X vehicle sounds like Rocketplane Global’s XP vehicle (although the XP has one rocket engine, not two) while the Concept Z vehicle is clearly SpaceShipTwo. What’s not included here is a vehicle that takes off horizontally under rocket power, like XCOR’s Lynx.
The problem for Cecil is that Rocketplane Global is currently in stasis, with no guarantee that it will resume development of its vehicle (which would fly from Cecil 48 times a year, according to the EA). Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic is committed to Spaceport America, and Cecil Field hasn’t been included among the other sites the company has publicly stated it’s interested in, such as Sweden and the UAE. Moreover, the EA only anticipated four flights a year of the Concept Z vehicle.
Todd Linder, of the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, tells Reuters that his agency is working with “several potential customers”, but declined to identify them. “The big difference between Cecil Field and the New Mexico spaceport is that we have facilities already in place,” he said. That’s true, but arguably the bigger difference is that Spaceport America has a tenant signed up, and Cecil Field doesn’t. Infrastructure is necessary, but as facilities like Oklahoma Spaceport can attest, they’re alone not sufficient.
One final note: in a blog post announcing the license, Space Florida president Frank DiBello noted that Cecil Field isn’t the only facility that the state is contemplating developing for supporting suborbital spaceflight. “This capability – in addition to similar potential sites currently being researched at Kennedy Space Center and in Southern Florida – is critical to providing our state with the competitive edge it needs to be a key player in the U.S. space tourism industry,” he writes. KSC has the Shuttle Landing Facility, a runway that will soon no longer be needed for its primary mission of supporting shuttle landings. The southern Florida reference is less clear, as no specific proposal for a facility there has been announced.
In The Space Review last month I noted an emerging market for commercial suborbital vehicles: research and education. There’s growing interest among scientists in a variety of disciplines to take advantage of vehicles under development to serve the space tourism market to fly experiments at a fraction of the cost of sounding rockets and other options. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, created an advisory team, the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), to help promote the potential uses of suborbital vehicles to the research community.
A key part of this outreach effort is the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC), which will take place February 18-20 in Boulder, Colorado. The early registration deadline for the conference is in just a week, January 15, as the conference organizers state in the announcement below:
NSRC Pre-Registration Deadline: 15 January
Pre-Register for NSRC Before Jan 15 to Guarantee Your Seat: The early registration deadline for the Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (Boulder, Colorado; 18-20 February) is right around the corner next week—on January 15th.
We are encouraging those interested in attending to register early because attendance will be limited by the meeting facility size; early registration is also less expensive than full registration.
About NSRC: The Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) will bring together researchers from government, industry, and academia, NASA and FAA officials, and firms building next-gen suborbital vehicles. NSRC will provide a forum to learn about the experiment and EPO capabilities of these new suborbital systems and their revolutionary capabilities. NSRC will also provide an opportunity for attendees to make inputs on vehicle design requirements for science and education.
In this week’s issue of The Space Review I reviewed By Any Means Necessary!, a book by Greg Olsen in large part about his trip to the ISS as a private citizen in 2005. The book is broadly an autobiography, from his childhood to his post-flight activities, but it is largely centered around his efforts to get into space.
One interesting thing about the book is that it is published not by a conventional publisher but by Olsen’s own company, GHO Ventures, which he set up several years ago to manage his investments. That may make it a little difficult to find in brick-and-mortar bookstores; it’s also not available on the web sites of Barnes and Noble and Borders, but is available on Amazon.com. Interestingly, the copy I ordered from Amazon stated at the back that it was printed in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 19th—three days after I ordered it. The quality of the book, though, is quite good, indistinguishable from books released by large publishers.
An issue that came up in the comments of the review was Olsen’s hopes that his flight would, in effect, pay for itself through research he would perform on the mission. He doesn’t go into great detail about this in the book, but does discuss his (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to get an export license for an infrared camera his company, Sensors Unlimited, had developed that he wanted to take to the station. (He needed the license since he was training in Russia and launching from Kazakhstan.) He also wanted to perform some gallium arsenide crystal growth experiments using the “glovebox” on the station, but the glovebox “became unavailable”, he writes in the book. (Chris Faranetta, in the review’s comments, states that the glovebox furnace was broken and would not be repaired “due to concerns over the crew handling materials that contained arsenic”; there were also concerns about getting export approvals for the materials that Olsen wanted to fly.)
As I note in the review, Olsen is the first space tourist to write a book about his flight to space, but he won’t be the only one for long. Anousheh Ansari is working on My Dream of Stars with co-author Homer Hickham, of Rocket Boys fame. That book is being published by Palgrave Macmillan with a release date of March 2.
The efforts of the emerging NewSpace field to reshape the space industry have attracted the attention of a leading trade publication, Aviation Week & Space Technology, which named “The Space Entrepreneur” as its 2009 PErson of the Year in this week’s issue. “Collectively, they are in the vanguard of a new industry, poised to transform how humans venture into space in ways that most observers can scarcely imagine today,” the Aviation Week article states. “Space entrepreneurs had a big influence on aerospace in 2009, although it does not begin to compare with the impact they are likely to have in years to come.”
The article devotes a fair amount to Masten Space Systems, who won $1.15 million from NASA’s Centennial Challenges program in 2009 in the Lunar Lander Challenge. (Dave Masten is featured on the cover of the issue as well.) Also mentioned in the article is XCOR Aerospace, whose CEO, Jeff Greason, served on the Augustine committee that made the case for commercial crew transportation to low Earth orbit.
A contrarian view, though, is expressed by John Marshall, an aerospace consultant who serves on NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. He tell’s Aviation Week that he’s skeptical that there’s a big market for commercial human spaceflight, particularly to orbit. “There is a very small, unique industry that is potentially there,” he said of suborbital spaceflight, and acknowledged that there is a government market for cargo and crew transportation to orbit. “After that, I don’t see any market. I don’t see Hilton Hotels putting a vehicle in there to be able to accommodate space tourism anytime soon.” Commercial space companies, he added, “are a long way away from endorsing the same kind of safety culture that a mature airline has.”
Yesterday industry publication Web Host Industry Review reported that UK-based hosting company DediPower had been selected to host the Virgin Galactic web site. The announcement made it sound like Virgin was expecting a wave of traffic to come to the site in the future: it mentions that DediPower would provide a hosting solution “capable of handling the large volume of traffic expected for the site” and it was providing custom solutions “to accommodate the traffic volume”.
Other data, though, hasn’t indicated overwhelming demand for the site in the past. The ranking service Alexa gives virgingalactic.com a traffic rank of 79,100 as of Thursday morning; the rank is based on a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews. The site did see a spike in activity on December 7 for the SpaceShipTwo rollout, when it got into the top 5,000 or so of sites, but that traffic ebbed in the following days. Looking at two years’ worth of data, there have been a few similar, predictable spikes in traffic: the unveiling of the design of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in January 2008, the rollout of WhiteKnightTwo that July, and the groundbreaking of Spaceport America in June of this year. However, there hasn’t been any sustained, heavy demand that would keep the site regularly in the top 100,000 sites on the web.
However, the Virgin Galactic site has undergone a redesign in recent weeks, shortly before the SpaceShipTwo rollout, with a greater emphasis on interactivity, such as the ability for visitors to post comments on press releases. That, couple with increased visibility as SpaceShipTwo goes through its flight test program and heads towards commercial service, might indeed leave result in increased traffic on the site in the future.
KRQE-TV of Albuquerque published this week a three-minute video tour of Spaceport America from a recent tour of the spaceport, part of a new bus tour program being offered to allow the public to see the spaceport under construction. The video includes a number of aerial shots that shows the current progress on the spaceport’s long runway as construction crews lay down layers of concrete and asphalt.
Will Spaceport America get a second paved access road? Right now the primary access is from the north, via the town of Truth or Consequences, on a road paved earlier this year to permit spaceport construction to begin. That results in a fairly roundabout trip for visitors coming from Las Cruces and points south: about 90 minutes from Las Cruces. Earlier this week the New Mexico Spaceport Authority said it seek $7.5 million from the state to pave a second road that runs from I-25 at Upham, NM north to the spaceport. If paved, the 26-mile (42-kilometer) route could cut travel time from Las Cruces to the spaceport in half. Funds for the paving were authorized by the state legislature in 2006 as part of the overall spaceport project, but not funded.
Later this week, though, state officials backtracked: Fred Mondragón, head of the state’s Economic Development Department and chairman of the spaceport authority, said they would not seek state funds for the road because of a projected budget shortfall that’s expected to sharply limit capital expenditures in the state. Instead, he said that they will look for federal money for the road, or try to find savings from other parts of the overall project to get the road paved.
Mondragón also said the spaceport authority will seek legislation next year that would provide a liability indemnification for space tourism operators in the state, similar to existing legislation in Virginia, Florida, and most recently, Texas. The bill would not protect operators from gross negligence but would provide some protection in the event of accidents, and thus reduce insurance premiums for operators like Virgin Galactic. A similar bill was proposed in 2009 but not approved by legislators, concerned that it provided too much protection to operators; the 2010 version will be scaled back, although the report wasn’t specific as to how.
XCOR Aerospace announced this afternoon a major business development for the suborbital vehicle developer: a contract to provide suborbital space launch services for a South Korean organization. XOCR will provide and operate a Lynx Mark 2 vehicle to the Yecheon Astro Space Center under a “wet lease” model, pending export control approvals. The center will use the Lynx for “space tourism, educational, scientific and environmental monitoring missions”, according to the announcement.
The center, formerly known as the Yecheon Astronomy Foundation, is not well-known, at least outside of Korea: the center’s web site is in Korean, and a Google search primarily turns up references to this announcement. The press release states that the center has put together “a broad coalition of regional and national entities” to fund the project.
That funding, estimated to be $30 million, could be critical to XCOR. At the Space Investment Summit 7 conference in Boston in late September, XCOR COO Andrew Nelson said that the company was looking for abut $10 million in investment or sales to fund development of the Mark 2 vehicle, which will be able to fly to higher altitudes than the single Mark 1 prototype under development.
More than a week after the truncated SpaceShipTwo rollout event at Mojave Air and Space Port, it’s increasingly clear that the decision to evacuate the event averted a disaster. Airport general manager Stu Witt described the evacuation to the Bakersfield Californian, saying he made the decision when he saw the wind lift up a corner of the giant main tent twice. “When I made the call it was calm,” he said. “People probably thought I was from outer space.” It did, though, turn out to be a wise decision, since it was only a little over a half-hour after the announcement that winds collapsed the giant tent. “I believe there are people living today because of the decisions made that night,” Kern County supervisor Jon McQuiston said.
Getting some people to evacuate was a challenge, since by that point the party was in full swing. Some people tried to get their coats and other items they had checked, only to be turned away by police and firefighters, the Tehachapi News reported Friday. Witt told the Bakersfield paper that one firefighter had to resort to his experience as a football lineman to “convince one gentleman to annul his marriage to the vodka bar.” But most were cooperative: “When the gentlemen with guns say you need to get out, people get the picture,” Kern County Deputy Fire Chief Mike Cody said.
Meanwhile, event organizers are responding to criticism that they had not properly prepared for this contingency. “We’ve heard, ‘You don’t know how to set up tents,’ since this happened,” Richard LoGuercio, owner of the company that supplied the tent, told BizBash, “but I’ve got guys in the back with 20 to 30 years experience. Am I embarrassed that this thing went down? Absolutely not.” The tent, valued at $200,000, was insured, he said.
The caterers of the event were thankful that they were able to salvage the food. “It was a proud moment to be able to shortly afterward tell Richard Branson that even though there was a lot of damage, we saved the food,” Janine Micucci of Along Came Mary, the event’s caterers, said. That food, she said, was then donated to the needy.
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