I asked Will Pomerantz of the X Prize Foundation this morning to provide a brief preview of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge that starts tomorrow. Here’s will talking about the status of the teams and how the competition will compare with the 2006 NGLLC, also held at the Las Cruces airport.
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The two teams competing in this year’s Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (NGLLC), Armadillo and TrueZer0, set up at Las Cruces International Airport yesterday, and TrueZer0 formally got its FAA experimental permit yesterday as well (Armadillo got its permit earlier this month.) Current plans call for three flight windows each day (compared to two last year), starting at 7:30 am, 11 am, and 2:30pm MDT. Each window lasts two and a half hours, with a one-hour break between each. “Depending on the outcome of each flight attempt,” the X Prize statement noted, “the later flight windows are subject to change (for example, the last flight window on Saturday might not be used if it is not needed).” As previously noted, the event is not open to the general public but will be webcast. At the opening of dinner last night at the ISPCS in Las Cruces, Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, made a couple of announcements. One was the confirmation that the authority was completing a final agreement with Virgin Galactic for use of Spaceport America, as reported yesterday. The second was the formation of the Spaceport America Institute (SAI), a new non-profit organization. SAI is intended to be “catalyst for developing a reservoir of educationally valuable content from narratives, videography, digital images, operational data, and online exchanges.” Having an external organization, Landeene explained, gives it additional flexibility in obtaining funding for these educational efforts. At the ISPCS in Las Cruces this morning, Michael Blum, managing director of Repulse Bay Capital and a customer of Virgin Galactic, revealed some new details about the testing schedule for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo that came out of a meeting held on Richard Branson’s Necker Island retreat recently. WK2 has recently performed some high-speed taxi tests at Mojave, and the first flight of the aircraft is planned for 2-3 weeks. Video of that flight, he said, will be released to Virgin’s customers and the public shortly thereafter. After that, the first “captive carry” flights of SS2 and WK2 are scheduled to take place in June of 2009. (On these flights, SS2 will remain attached to WK2 throughout the plane’s flight.) By the end of 2009 the first powered flights into space of SS2 are scheduled. Blum said that there will be at least 30 test flights of SS2 before Virgin makes a decision about beginning commercial operations. He added that he thought the company was being very cautious, not wanting to rush the development of the vehicle and cause a “catastrophic” accident that could set back the suborbital spaceflight industry a “couple of decades”. Blum also repeated some existing medical statistics about Virgin’s customers, with 92-93% of them passing medical tests. He reiterated the need for training, especially 0-g flights, to avoid “sensory overload” during the actual suborbital flights. Today’s Las Cruces Sun-News reports that a formal agreement between Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America could be signed as soon as today. The agreement would finalize Virgin’s use of the spaceport once it’s completed (although there has been at least an informal understanding since late 2005, and signed an MOU for leasing the spaceport in 2007), and it’s one of three requirements for the state funding the spaceport won in 2006. (The other two are a final cost estimate below $225 million, which has been achieved, and a FAA spaceport license, which is in the final stages of being awarded.) Signing the agreement today or tomorrow would be good timing, since it could be tied into the ISPCS now underway in Las Cruces, although there’s nothing on the conference schedule for this right now. Immediately after the ISPCS will be the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (NGLLC), run by the X Prize Foundation with prize money provided by NASA’s Centennial Challenges program. It was only in the last few weeks that the date and location for the competition was finalized. Original plans called for the event to take place at Holloman AFB, where the 2007 competition (part of the X Prize Cup and Holloman air show) took place; there would be no public event this year, only the competition. However, classified activities will close the base on the planned dates of the event, forcing the organizers to scramble for alternative sites. They ended up at Las Cruces International Airport (home of the 2005 and 2006 X Prize Cup events and the 2006 NGLLC), keeping the same dates of October 24-25. As with the 2006 and 2007 competitions, Armadillo Aerospace will be present, trying for both the Level 1 and Level 2 competitions. However, it appears that they may have some competition this year, at least at Level 1: TrueZer0 (yes, spelled with the numeral “0”) is here in Las Cruces and, assuming they are able to get an experimental permit from the FAA, hope to be ready to compete. However, as the four-person team notes on their site, they’ve still yet to demonstrate their ability to perform most of the key requirements of the competition, whereas Armadillo has flown LLC Level 1 profiles since last year (although not yet completely successfully in the competition itself, unfortunately.) Although the event has moved off the air force base, the event is still closed to the public, save for ISPCS attendees and other VIPs. The event will be webcast, though, and if past experience is any prediction, that will provide you with a better view than you’ll get in person. The 2008 edition of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) will be taking place the next two days in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (I’m writing this from a hotel room in Las Cruces, and will be at the conference.) The conference started in 2005 as simply the ISPS; the “and Commercial” part of the title got added last year. The first day of the conference, though, is focused primarily on personal spaceflight: after a keynote by Gary Payton, Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force Space Systems, on operationally responsive space, there are panels on suborbital and orbital human spaceflight and the “power of prizes”, as well as a dinner speech by orbital space tourist Anousheh Ansari. The second day gets more into broader commercial issues, including the roles of universities and associations, but there are sessions planned on personal spaceflight “industry indicators”, astronaut training, and spaceports. I’ll be providing some coverage as time permits during the day, including brief news items on my Twitter feed, with some wrapups after each day. Test flights of Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, which had been delayed from September until late this year, may begin in November. Richard Branson commented on the status of WK2, as well as SpaceShipTwo itself, in an interview with Forbes.com this week:
I spent the day Wednesday at Space Investment Summit 5 in Los Angeles. I’ll provide a more detailed report later, but the brief summary of the meeting is that there is still investment taking place in the entrepreneurial NewSpace field, although the current financial crisis has put a damper on some activity, particularly anything involving larger amounts of money where institutional investors are traditionally involved. The audience was smaller than some earlier versions of this event, and perhaps more subdued if still optimistic about the long-term potential of the industry. One company I didn’t notice at the event was Rocketplane Global (or, if they were there, kept a very low profile.) It turns out on Wednesday that Dave Faulkner, the company’s chief technology officer and program manager, was briefing the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority on the company’s status, the Oklahoma newspaper The Journal Record reported Thursday. Faulkner’s comments, as reported by the paper, appeared to indicate that technical development of the XP vehicle has ground to a halt as the company tries to raise money:
Faulkner added that Rocketplane is in talks with two potential investors for “small amounts of cash” to tide the company over until the market rebounds. He didn’t say how much the company was looking to raise, but said that the $18 million the company got from the state in 2004 in the form of transferable tax credits (which Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer has described in the past as “winning the ‘O Prize'”) covers only about 10 percent of the XP’s development cost. George French has put a significant amount of his own money into the company, but that suggests that there is still a large chunk of money that Rocketplane needs to raise to be able to complete the XP’s development—no easy task in today’s economic climate. In an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, I look at the status of the Rocket Racing League (RRL), which was formally introduced to the public three years ago this month. The RRL took a big step forward about two and a half months ago, with its first public flights of the X-Racer vehicle at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh. Since then, though, there have been some interesting—perhaps even odd—developments, namely the RRL’s decision to go solely with the alternative engine developed by Armadillo Aerospace, and tested in late August and early September. RRL co-founder Granger Whitelaw said that XCOR’s engine, which by all accounts performed well at Oshkosh and in previous tests, did not meet the RRL’s “standards of safety, reliability, reusability, and performance”, according to one press account. That’s puzzled many observers, given XCOR’s good reputation as a developer of a number of safe and successful rocket engines. RRL did not respond to my inquiries last week, but on Tuesday they did announce that they have won FAA approval to perform X-Racer flights at a number of airports in the US. The league plans to select eight venues of the 20 approved by the FAA for exhibition flights in 2009, to be followed by competitive racing in 2010. The venues include several airshows, including EAA AirVenture and the Reno Air Races, and other airports scattered around the country, including Mojave, Las Cruces, and Moffett Field near NASA Ames in the Bay Area. One of those eight appears likely to be Oshkosh, Whitelaw tells MSNBC. Production of the racers—which use an airframe from Velocity Aircraft, now owned by the RRL, and an Armadillo engine—will ramp up early next year, with two to four planes ready by Oshkosh. Whitelaw also said that the RRL is looking into “vertical drag racers” (which, as it sounds, would be rockets taking off straight up for a short sprint to a predefined altitude) for next year as well, a concept that’s been promoted by Armadillo’s John Carmack for a few years. The most intriguing part of the MSNBC story, though, is at the end, where Whitelaw hints that his partnership with Armadillo might extend beyond developing engines for the RRL. Whitelaw said plans for an RRL demo at next week’s International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) were cancelled because “we need to focus on winning the Lunar Lander Challenge.” [Emphasis added.] When asked if the RRL was in talks to purchase Armadillo, Whitelaw only provided a “no comment”. While the RRL might be interested in acquiring Armadillo to be vertically integrated (just as it acquired Velocity), it’s not obvious what Armadillo would gain from such a deal. |
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