New Suborbital Spaceships Spark Scientific Frenzy (SPACE.com)

Anticipation is on

the rise for a new crop of commercial suborbital spaceships that can serve the

scientific and educational market. These reusable rocket-propelled vessels are

expected to offer quick, routine and affordable access to the edge of space,

along with the capability to carry research and educational crew members.

There are a number of

"cash and carry" suborbital craft under development by such groups as: Armadillo

Aerospace, Blue

Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, as well as XCOR Aerospace.

Vehicle builders

still face rigorous shake-out schedules, flight safety hurdles, as well as extensive

trial-runs of their respective craft before suborbital

space jaunts

become commonplace.

But some 250

scientists, educators and the makers of suborbital rocket vehicles met last

month in Boulder, Colorado to discuss the tantalizing science opportunities

offered when suborbital trips are routine during the Next-Generation Suborbital

Researchers Conference.

What's the

attraction?

The attraction for

investigators at the meeting was to gauge use of suborbital

craft to carry out a variety of high-altitude science studies,

including access to three to four minutes of microgravity for experimentation,

discovery and testing.

Suborbital flights up

to 62 miles (100 km) above Earth could serve numbers of disciplines, such as astronomy,

the life sciences, microgravity physics, or to plumb a little-known atmospheric

region dubbed "the ignorosphere."

Lori Garver, NASA's deputy

administrator, said that the government is keen on stimulating the suborbital

market, seeing it as bridge building to orbital flight.

To this end, Garver

noted that the space agency is seeking Congressional approval in their fiscal

year 2011 budget for $75 million in planned funding over five years for NASA's Commercial

Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program.

"Suborbital puts us

on a sustainable, step-by-step path to building an industry that evolves to low

cost access to orbit," Garver said. "We're really on the cusp of an exciting

new capability for our country and for our economy."

Charles Miller, senior advisor for commercial

space and program executive for CRuSR at NASA Headquarters, Washington,

D.C. told SPACE.com: "Industry will pick the point design. Some of them will

succeed, some of them will fail. Over time it's vastly superior at accelerating

innovation in the nation."

Miller said the

backing by NASA's CRuSR program is akin to the government becoming an anchor

tenant customer for air mail delivery in the 1920s. That relationship, he said,

helped the industry close their business case and raise private capital.

"We see the same

thing happening in commercial suborbital research," Miller continued. "NASA is

going to be an early customer," with other federal agencies, universities and

the private industry becoming customers too, he suggested.

Flight rates: still

to be proven

Yet to be

demonstrated is the hoped-for flight rates of suborbital vehicles. Quick

turnaround of these craft is central to realizing the profit-making potential

of over-and-over sojourns by piloted and unpiloted vessels to the suborbital

heights.

As pointed out in a

handout from Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California: "Reusable Launch

Vehicles – Just Gas 'Em Up and Go!" The company said it intends to begin

precursor flights later this year, flying an unpiloted reusable craft up to 22

miles (36 km) in a beta testing program. The California-based company won $1

million last October in a NASA contest to build reusable rocket-powered craft designed

to mimic lunar landers.

From the scientific

perspective, for the story to close for science, flight rates have to be high,

said Alan Stern, chair of the scientific organizing committee for the

conference and associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute's Space

Science and Engineering Division in Boulder.

Stern

also chairs the Commercial Spaceflight Federation's Suborbital Applications

Researchers Group and is a former NASA associate administrator for science. He called

attention to the fact that passenger

suborbital flights will be risky business.

"Risk

is not new to scientists and educators," Stern added. "Scientists risk their

lives going to the bottom of the ocean, to the tops of mountains, to the poles

of the Earth. Scientists have lost their lives in space exploration, as have

educators," he said, noting the tragic loss in 1986 of the Challenger shuttle

crew that included Christa McAuliffe, America's selected Teacher in Space.

But

safety is also key, advised George Nield, Associate Administrator for

Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration.

"As much as I wish it

were, safety is not an absolute," Nield pointed out. "Misfortune will always be

an uninvited possibility whenever a rocket launches."

Safety is a mindset...a

professional tension, Nield counseled, and for all the people involved in

providing a rocket trip, they must be constantly on alert. They have to be

determined to "get it right this time, next time, all the time," he said.

Entrepreneurial

approach

The initiative of roaring

skyward to the edge of space on repeat voyages was spotlighted in a recent

report – "Revitalizing NASA's Suborbital Program: Advancing Science, Driving

Innovation, and Developing Workforce" – issued late last month by the prestigious

National Research Council.

NASA's suborbital

program conducts research using aircraft, balloons, and rockets. It enables

cutting-edge research in areas such as climate science and astrophysics and is

vital in developing technologies and training personnel, says the report issued

late last month.

An NRC recommendation

from a blue ribbon committee of experts observes: "NASA should continue to

monitor commercial suborbital space developments. Whereas the commercial

developers stated to the committee that they do not need NASA funding to meet

their business objectives, this entrepreneurial approach offers the potential

for a range of opportunities for low-cost quick-access to space that may

benefit NASA as well as other federal agencies."

Pay attention to the

ignorosphere

One scientific

pursuit that seems a perfect match for suborbital vehicles is ultra-high upper

atmospheric research, said Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research

Center, Moffett Field, California. That area is too high for balloons, too low

for satellites and too expensive for repeat sounding rocket visits, he said.

Very little

information exists on this upper atmosphere region, often called the

"ignorosphere," Worden noted. Suborbital vehicles rocketing from various

spaceports around the globe could sample this region, he said.

"There's beginning to

be evidence that there is some very complicated coupling mechanisms,

particularly in changes of solar ultraviolet flux on the upper atmosphere and

climate changes on the ground. We don't know how that works," Worden said.

Add to the research

mix that life may well exist in that region, Worden pointed out. "If you have

life in these upper regions of Earth's atmosphere, that begins to tell us where

we can look in other places," he said, such as life in the upper atmosphere of

Venus or perhaps Mars.

"These are the kinds

of things that add up to significant research that's clearly world-class,"

Worden concluded.

Leonard

David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He

is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space

World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

 

Item Resource