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At Space Access yesterday Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems provided a brief update on his company’s vehicle development efforts. He noted that when they decided not to participate in the Lunar Lander Challenge last fall, they thought they were two weeks away from flight. “We are still two weeks away from flight,” he said, having run into a number of technical problems in the intervening months. “But we think we’re really there this time.” Those flight tests will be of its initial small-scale prototype, the XA-0.1; once those begin they’ll start work on the larger XA-0.2, the vehicle they’re developing for this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge, unless other works keeps them from participating. “We’re going to try and fly in the Lunar Lander Challenge. There is a hope that we won’t because we’re too busy with other stuff, with other contracts.” Masten said their appearance at last year’s X Prize Cup, where they test-fired an engine, attracted the attention of some people who have asked them to perform some R&D work.
Incidentally, today’s Los Angeles Times has an article about Norton Sales Inc., the North Hollywood junkyard that has a huge amount of used aerospace parts, from valves to rocket engines. Featured in the article are Dave Masten and Jon Goff of Masten Space, visiting the warehouse to look for parts. “It’s dangerous coming to a place like this,” said Masten. “It’s like shopping on an empty stomach.” Other Norton Sales customers include Orion Propulsion, Scaled Composites, and SpaceX.
You can buy a lot of things on Amazon.com, from books and DVDs to clothes and jewelry. Did you know that you can also buy a full-scale replica of Goddard, the Blue Origin spacecraft? It’ll only cost you $9,999,999.00 (on sale from $11,999,999.00!). The product description: “A full sized replica of Goddard. This is a great item which is detailed from the cockpit to the tail. Shown above you can see some of the detail that goes into building these fantastic replicas.” Be warned, however: the shipping weight is just over 22 trillion pounds, so it’s not going to make the UPS guy very happy.
The replica is sold by a vendor named TVPATAM, whose store includes a mix of ordinary items (camera, headphones) and the Goddard replica, along with a Space Rock Paperweight and G Suit (made of “a heavy duty denim twill” in three sizes and four colors), each for $999,999. It looks like someone (perhaps associated with Blue Origin?) has a sense of humor.
(Via collectSPACE and rich text.)
We’ve pretty much established here already that, despite various media reports, William Shatner is not one of the celebrities who have signed up for suborbital spaceflights with Virgin Galactic. Still, this explanation from Shatner in an article from The Times of London is a bit humorous:
“One little tile burns and you drop to your death? I’ve been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through. One of the things you have to do is get used to weightlessness and they have a Boeing plane that does an outside loop so you’re weightless for about 30 seconds. It’s called the Vomit Comet and I don’t like to vomit.â€
Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace gave an overview of his company’s work at Space Access this morning. He noted that the company actually turned a profit last year, with revenues of approximately $3.8 million; the profit was an artifact of the timing of the contracts it was working on, and he said he doesn’t anticipate being profitable again this year, although revenues should be similar to 2006. Because XCOR doesn’t have an independently wealthy founder or patron, “we have to flip burgers for a living”: doing developmental work for a number of government and commercial customers. XCOR selects that work based on the problems XCOR is facing for its own projects, thus in effect getting a customer to pay for XCOR’s R&D. “We have turned R&D from a cost center to a profit center,” he said.
XCOR is working on three engine projects: a 50-lbf engine for RCS applications, a 1,500-lbf engine for the Rocket Racing League (RRL), and a 7,500-lbf engine with ATK for NASA. The efforts are all going well, and Greason said that the RRL engine work, which had been going slowly at the request of the customer, is now ready to go back into high gear. XCOR is also still developing its own suborbital vehicle design, although Greason gave few specific details about the project, and no development schedule or funding information (although he did say later that have not finished raising all the money they need for the effort, but are close.) He did say that XCOR will, in the future, offer more details about its long-term roadmap, in much the same way Masten Space Systems does. “Suborbital is not the last step on our road.”
John Carmack gave an extensive status report on Armadillo Aerospace at the Space Access conference yesterday. Armadillo’s near-term emphasis is on preparing for the 2007 Lunar Lander Challenge, having made some upgrades to Pixel and Texel, such as stronger landing legs. They are also working on their modular vehicle approach: putting together progressively more capable vehicles by adding identical modules, which consist of a pair of LOX/ethanol propellant tanks mounted on top of an engine. A four-module vehicle would be just powerful enough to send a small payload to 100 kilometers; such flights could take place by the end of this year or early next year from Spaceport America in Armadillo’s best-case scenario. A nine-module version, with a capsule on top, could be used for commercial human suborbital flights; Armadillo is looking to building a barebones capsule but also is in talks with an unspecified company to develop it. Farther down the road Carmack envisions an orbital vehicle with two or three stages and as many as 64 modules, something that has raised more than a few eyebrows among industry insiders. “When I talk about these larger-scale operations to most of the people in the industry, I always get ‘that look’, whenever I talk about 64 engines or 64 modules,” he said. “It’s an initial knee-jerk reaction, but when you come down to it, I don’t think it’s justified.”
Along with the technical plans, Carmack also addressed the business side. Armadillo has always been difficult to classify: they have significant facilities and equipment, but rely almost exclusively on volunteer labor, and have been funded mostly out of Carmack’s checkbook, to the tune of $3 million to date (with a burn rate of about $500,000/year). Is Armadillo a fledgling business or just an expensive hobby? Carmack did say that they have been looking at a number of commercial opportunities, and while not many of them “have turned into real money” they are seeing an increase in outside revenue over the last few years. With Carmack saying that he can continue to support Armadillo’s efforts out of his pocket “until the bottom drops out of the videogame market”, he doesn’t seem to be in a big rush to close deals, and said that even with a huge infusion of money it would be difficult for them to go more than two or three times faster than their current pace. “When the capability is demonstrated, the business case is just going to close itself.”
“We’re absolutely going to be carrying people to space, whether it’s next year or the year after,” he said. He admitted that he has made similar statements in the past, but this time “we are making steady, incremental progress towards that.”
For some more details about Carmack’s talk, check out postings at HobbySpace and Transterrestrial Musings, including some additional commentary from Sam Dinkin.
A roundup of a few items going on in the field not associated with the Space Access conference:
During her presentation at the Space Access ’07 conference this afternoon, Michelle Murray of FAA/AST mentioned that Blue Origin had a successful* test flight yesterday (March 22), their second under their experimental permit and the first since their initial flight in November. No other information about the flight is available, but I’ll update this as information comes out.
* “successful” here means successful in protecting public safety, the FAA’s primary concern for these tests. There has been no information released about the success of the flight itself.
Update: I fired off a quick query to Blue Origin’s media contact and got the following boilerplate reply: “Blue Origin’s policy is not to comment on or confirm whether any test flights are scheduled or conducted.”
At the Space Access ’07 conference this morning, George French III of Rocketplane Inc. announced that the company has signed a letter of intent with Bigelow Aerospace regarding transportation to Bigelow’s orbital habitats. French provided only a few details about the agreement, which basically states that once Rocketplane’s K-1 is ready to carry passengers, and once Bigelow’s modules are in orbit, they’ll do business to ferry passengers to and from the facilities. Rocketplane officials didn’t want to disclose too many additional details since this announcement since this announcement is really a prelude to Robert Bigelow’s planned big announcement next month at the National Space Symposium about his overall business plan, but Rocketplane wanted to get a bit of the news out for the Space Access audience.
There was not much else new about the company in its conference presentation. One minor change is that they now refer to the former Rocketplane Ltd. part of the company, the one developing the XP spaceplane, as “Rocketplane Global”, while the K-1 development is the responsibility of Rocketplane Kistler (the former Kistler Aerospace); the overall company is simply Rocketplane Inc. The “Global” part in the name is designed to reflect the company’s long-term plans to set up XP operations outside the US, such as Japan, and eventually move into the point-to-point transportation market.
The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the state is close to a final lease agreement with Virgin Galactic for the spaceport, although state officials wouldn’t set a timetable for the completion of the agreement. That agreement was one of three conditions that officials in Doña Ana County set on the upcoming local tax referendum. Earlier this week state officials sought to reassure votes that the spaceport cost would not exceed $225 million, another condition on the deal. (The third is obtaining an FAA spaceport license, which is in progress.) The article also notes that the next launch from the spaceport by UP Aerospace, whose inaugural launch in September ended in failure, will now take place no earlier than April.
In the state capital, Santa Fe, legislators in the state House approved a number of bills, including one that that provides $25 million for spaceport roads. The Senate, which was temporarily boycotting the special session of the legislature in a tiff with the governor, is expected to reconvene by Saturday and take up the bills.
As Charles Simonyi prepares for his launch to the ISS early next month, SPACE.com reports that he will get a bit of a bonus: He will spend 13 days in space instead of the previously-planned 11, in order to ensure that the the landing of the Soyuz flight at the end of the taxi mission takes place in daylight in Kazakhstan. In case you were wondering, no, Simonyi won’t be charged extra for spending two additional days at ISS, according to a Space Adventures spokesperson.
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