Below is a brief video interview I conducted with John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace at the end of the Space Access ’09 conference. (This was recorded outdoors at the end of the day, hence the low lighting; you should also turn up your audio.) He talks about their current plans for both the Lunar Lander Challenge as well as suborbital vehicles, as well as how the company is now making money and what lessons he’s learned from the early days of the venture.
Look for a couple more video interviews from the conference to appear here in the coming days.
Back in January the Orlando Sentinel reported that the Florida governor’s office was directing an investigation of Project Odyssey, a space tourism training program in Pensacola funded with state money that was announced in December, after it appeared that the project’s director was heavily involved in its formation and funding while a state employee. Now that initial investigation is done, and the news isn’t good for Project Odyssey or its director, Brice Harris.
As the Sentinel reports today, the state’s inspector general has found that Harris “likely violated” state law by helping arrange $500,000 in state grants for the project and then going to work for the Andrews Institute, the Pensacola medical center where Project Odyssey is located. During a review of 5,000 emails by the office, “it appeared the Project Odyssey consumed most of Harris’ e-mail communications and work time while he was employed with OTTED,” the inspector general’s report states, referring the Office of Trade, Tourism and Economic Development, where Harris worked prior to joining the Andrews Institute. OTTED provided half of the $500,000 for Project Odyssey, with Space Florida contributing the other half. “The emails indicate that Harris’ involvement in Project Odyssey was disproportionate to his time expended on his various other OTTED related duties.”
The inspector general’s report recommended that the case be referred to the state’s ethics commission “for further evaluation and determination of ethics law violations.” The entire project is now in jeopardy, regardless of any technical or economic merits it may have, because of this controversy. “There’s no reason to be spending state dollars to subsidize rich people who will be flying on future flights into space,” Barney Bishop, a member of the Space Coast’s Economic Development Commission, tells the Sentinel. “I would hope they’re going to cancel this contract, because it makes no sense on the face of it, and now there are questions about how it was set up in the first place.”
But who will fill that seat? Last Friday Space Adventures’s Eric Anderson said the seat could be filled by either one of their customers or a Russian professional cosmonaut. A headline on the Interfax news service Thursday, though, stated: “Russian or Japanese astronauts may replace Kazakh in September flight toISS” (the text of the article, unfortunately, was not available). Unless the Japanese astronaut is a Space Adventures customer, it would seem the company may be shut out of this flight opportunity. However, Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov did say in another Interfax article earlier this week that future tourist flight opportunities would depend on NASA’s decision on the shuttle program, with the apparent implication that a shuttle life extension might free up some seats on Soyuz flights for commercial passengers.
Even that, though, appears to have slowed down. Last year the league announced plans for exhibition races at eight sites in 2009 from a list of 20 venues, primarily air shows. However, Whitelaw tells MSNBC that plans call for two rocket racing vehicles to fly at the Reno Air Races in September. Those would be powered by Armadillo’s engines, and Whitelaw said that they are making a number of modifications to the aircraft based on the flight tests performed last fall. Unlike last year, it does not appear that the league will be flying at Oshkosh. The economy, as you might have guess, gets the blame for the slowdown in activity.
Software developer Symantec announced Wednesday the winner of its contest to send someone into space: Jorge Patricio León López, who was selected from 30 finalists after participating in a weightless aircraft flight by Zero-G. As the press release claims, “In addition to being one of the first to participate in a commercial space travel flight, León could be the first Chilean in space as no Chilean has participated in a space flight at this time.”
After Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) lost its funded COTS Space Act agreement with NASA to help develop the K-1, the conventional wisdom was that the company was effectively dead. After all, RpK had difficulty raising the hundreds of millions in private financing needed to develop the vehicle even with the NASA imprimatur; it would seeming be that much harder to do it without the COTS agreement. And, indeed, given RpK’s low profile in the 18 months since the award’s termination, that would seem to be the case.
However, Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer, speaking Saturday at the Space Access ’09 conference in Phoenix, said RpK was still alive, if only barely. Company president George French “has essentially stabilized everything to try to get to a new financial structure,” Lauer said. What has buoyed their hopes has been the NASA commercial resupply contracts issued late last year to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, with costs up to four times what RpK had proposed with the K-1. “We were kind of the first canary in the coal mine looking for private banking/hedge fund types of deals” when the economy turned south in 2007, he said. “If the market is 4x and we had even a small number of launches, we could have financed.”
“The only way to get to low-cost orbital transportation is to get away from expendable systems and go to reusable, and K-1 is the only 100% fully reusable orbital system anywhere close to flying,” Lauer said. “Within three years of funding we could be in flight… It’s tough, it’s certainly tough now, but it’s not impossible.”
The suborbital side of the company, Rocketplane Global, has also been focused in the last year on funding rather than technology. “We’re well north of $100 million of additional capital needed,” he said, with $24 million invested to date that has gone into design and development of the XP spaceplane.
At the 2008 Lunar Lander Challenge last October, Rocket Racing and Armadillo Aerospace announced a joint venture to develop vertical takeoff, vertical landing vehicles for suborbital space tourism. However, Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmark revealed at Space Access ’09 this morning that this deal—at least, as announced in October—has fallen through. Carmack said that while there are relationships with both Rocket Racing and an unnamed third party, the deal as announced “did not come to fruition”. Carmack added, though, that he anticipates making some announcements in the next month that may be related to any suborbital vehicle work.
Carmack also revealed some details about Armadillo’s plans for Level 2 of the Lunar Lander Challenge. He said they are planning now to be ready to compete for the prize when the “season” opens in early July, the first public reference I’m aware of regarding how the X PRIZE Foundation plans to run the LLC this year in lieu of a once-a-year event in New Mexico. Carmack added that they would be prepared to fly again later in the year if someone else successfully completes Level 2 this year with a higher level of accuracy. Flying early, he said, would allow them to then focus their work on other projects rather than LLC vehicles.
The high point, arguably, Friday at Space Access ’09 was a presentation by Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace. There were no major announcements in his talk (a contrast to last year, when XCOR spoke at Space Access immediately after announcing their Lynx suborbital vehicle) but there were some items of note:
Their engine development work is going quite well, with Greason saying that it was not a “rate-limiting” step. What has turned out to be more of a challenge, he said, was the reaction control system, with small thrusters that you would think not to be a big deal to build but are more of a challenge.
Greason shared some insights into XCOR’s long-term vision of what an orbital vehicle would be like. He said a system would have to be a two-stage system (SSTO is too hard); in such a case, you really want both stages to return to the launch site to avoid the costs and other complexities of ferrying. That’s more of a challenge for the first stage, which drives the need for wings to allow the stage, after boost, to turn and fly back to the landing site. Greason said what XCOR is envisioning is winged reusable first stage and an upper stage that might initially be expendable: similar to some of the “hybrid” launch system designs studied by the Air Force in recent years.
Greason also addressed regulatory issues, noting that while he believed several years ago that the industry would be largely self-regulating, there does need to be more efforts made in sharing safety-related information by industry, as well as more of an effort by government (namely FAA/AST) to request and disseminate that data. I’ll cover that in more detail in a later post.
The other interesting highlight from Friday’s sessions was a presentation by Scott Zeeb and Todd Squires of TrueZer0, the team that competed in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge last October. They said that they’re not likely to compete for Level 1 again, concluding that the cost and effort needed to do so was not worth the $150,000 second prize. They are, though, planning to compete for Level 2, but not until 2010.
Coming up today in the last day of Space Access ’09 will be some presentations by Rocketplane Global, Armadillo Aerospace, and Masten Space Systems, among others.
Eric Anderson of Space Adventures held a short teleconference Friday afternoon (Friday morning here in Arizona) to discuss a new development in his company’s efforts to fly paying customers to the ISS. Highlights:
The new development was that there is a possibility that a seat may become open on the Soyuz TMA-16 mission, scheduled for launch at the end of September of this year. That seat was supposed to be occupied by a Kazakh cosmonaut, but according to Anderson the Russian space agency Roskosmos has indicated to him that the seat might become available to either Space Adventures or a professional Russian cosmonaut.
Who might fly on that mission, if the seat becomes available, isn’t clear. Both Esther Dyson and Nik Halik, the backups for Charles Simonyi and Richard Garriott, respectively, would be available, but it could also be a different customer.
Anderson was also uncertain about exactly when a decision on the seat would be made. Since it traditionally takes close to six months to train for a flight, a new person would have to start training soon, even if a final decision hadn’t been made. (Dyson and Halik would, presumably, need far less training time.)
Anderson said that he thinks that, from time to time, flight opportunities might become available on taxi flights to the ISS in the coming years even as the station’s crew expands to six people.
Space Adventures is continuing to pursue plans for a dedicated flight to the ISS, now scheduled for as early as 2012 (previously the notional date was 2011). The company has been in discussions with potential customers besides Google’s Sergey Brin, Anderson said, and that while the company has been affected by the economic crisis (without specifying how), potential customers are taking the long-term view towards an eventual spaceflight.
Anderson said that pricing is continuing to rise (Simonyi’s current flight cost $35M, according to multiple reports) because of both demand and inflation, but he hopes that it will level off at some point.
Space Adventures sent out an announcement late Thursday that they will be holding a teleconference for media Friday at 1 pm EDT to “discuss [the] future of space tourism, [and] available seats for upcoming orbital flights”. From the announcement:
Join Eric Anderson, co-founder, president and CEO of Space Adventures, to discuss the future of space tourism. As Dr. Charles Simonyi prepares for his return to Earth from the International Space Station amid reports he is the “last space tourist,†Eric Anderson will discuss Space Adventures’ upcoming missions – including a new and exciting development.
I am hoping my travel plans will allow me to call in for this, and if so, will report here on what that “new and exciting development” turns out to be.
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