Northrop Grumman has completed a feasibility study of commercial lunar lander configurations for the Colorado-based Golden Spike Company. Part of the study includes a novel low-mass ascent stage concept, which Northrop Grumman calls Pumpkin.
The suborbital spaceflight industry and researchers are preparing for this year’s Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, which takes place at the Omni Interlocken Resort in Broomfield, Colorado on June 3-5.
Keynote speakers at the conference will include NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, former Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale, Commercial Spaceflight Federation president and former Shuttle astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, FAA associate administrator for space transportation Dr. George Nield, Mojave Air and Space Port Manager Stu Witt, and the associate administrator for NASA’s new Space Technology Mission Directorate, Dr. Michael Gazarik.
For the first time this year, the program will feature dedicated three-hour provider tracks offering “deep dive” coverage of three suborbital transportation providers (Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace). The schedule also includes panel sessions on topics such as Life Sciences, Astrophysics and Solar Physics, Microgravity, Education and Public Outreach, Planetary Science, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Citizens in Space will present two papers at the conference.
During the session on Markets, Policy, and Training, we will present “Citizen Science and Citizen Space Exploration” by Edward Wright, Lt. Col. Steve Heck (USAF-ret.), Maureen Adams, Michael Johnson, Dr. Sean Casey of the Silicon Valley Space Center, and Ravi Kamitreddy, MD, of VitalSpace and the Scripps Translational Science Institute.
During the session on Payload Accommodations, we will present “The Lynx Cub Payload Carrier for Small Suborbital Experiments” by Edward Wright, Charles Hill and Dr. Frank Little of the Space Engineering Research Center, and Prof. Justin Yates, Eric Chao, Cress Netherland, Donald Boyd, and Austin Goswick of the Texas A&M University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Both papers will be presented Tuesday afternoon, June 4.
A number of organizations will have hardware on display, including a mockup of the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier being developed by Citizens in Space in cooperation with the Space Engineering Research Center and Texas A&M University.
On Monday evening, there will be a public lecture by Dr. Alan Stern, former NASA associate administrator for space science and leader of the Suborbital Application Researchers’ Group, on “The Promise of Commercial Spaceflight.”
Conference registration is currently $295 but goes up to $350 on April 25. Onsite registration is $385. Onsite registration for students is $150.
Making the Invisible Visible is a short film by Christoph Malin, parts of which are excerpted from Don Petit’s lecture on space photography techniques.
Actress/singer Sarah Brightman is still a cosmonaut in training, but her plans to visit the International Space Station may be in peril, according to an article published by RIA Novosti.
The decision is said to rest in the hands of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA.
(Austin) Richard Garriott de Cayeaux presented an interesting chart during his talk on “The New Golden Age of Space Exploration” at South by Southwest. It shows the number of humans who have been sent into space by various space agencies:
NASA — 332
RFSA — 107
ESA — 33
CSA — 9
JAXA — 8
Space Adventures — 7
China — 6
Bulgaria — 2
Others — 19
The sixth most successful space agency, by this measure, is a private company: Space Adventures. Note that China is number seven. If suborbital companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace are successful, they may quickly exceed the 332 astronauts who have been flown by NASA.
Yet, alarmists still worry that China is about to “overtake the United States” in space, by copying projects which the United States and the Soviet Union accomplished 40 years ago.
NASA has powered down the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity as a precautionary measure due to a solar flare.
In 2003, a solar storm damaged a radiation instrument on the Mars orbiter Odyssey. NASA does not believe the radiation from this flare poses any danger to Curiosity but is being extra cautious due to recent computer problems with the $1.6 billion rover.
This shutdown illustrates the need for good space-weather forecasting for in-space operations, but space weather also affects the Earth. It will be important for future space travelers as well.
Dennis Tito, the first citizen space explorer to visit the International Space Station, has created the Inspiration Mars Foundation to raise funds for an even more dramatic mission: a human flyby of the planet Mars.
Citizen space explorers and space entrepreneurs will appear at the prestigious South By Southwest (SxSW) film, music, and interactive-media festival, which takes place in Austin next month.
A panel on “Crowd-sourcing the Space Frontier” will include Anousheh Ansari, who visited the International Space Station in 2006 and was name sponsor for the Ansari X-Prize in 2001, and Citizens in Space project manager and citizen-astronaut candidate Edward Wright.
Also participating on the panel will be NASA Open Innovation Program manager Christopher Gentry and Darlene Damm, founder and co-president of DIY Rockets. The panel will run from 11:00 am to noon on Saturday, March 9.
Richard Garriott de Cayeux, who visited the International Space Station in 2008, will speak on “The New Golden Age of Spaceflight” at 11:00 Monday, March 11. Garriott de Cayeux is also vice-chairman of Space Adventures, which markets flights to the International Space Station.
Also on Saturday will be a keynote address by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, at 2:00 PM.
South by Southwest attracts over 32,000 people each year. Admission to these talks will require an Interactive, Gold, or Platinum Badge. Badges are still available at walkup rates of $1150, $1350, or $1595. (Sorry, we do not have any free or discount passes to hand out.)
Anousheh Ansari aboard the International Space Station
A panel discussion on “Space Medicine in the 21st Century: Commercial and Governmental Opportunities” will take place in Menlo Park, California next Thursday (February 21).
The discussion will be led by Dr. Marlene Grenon, assistant professor of vascular and endovascular surgery at the University of California San Francisco. Dr. Grenon, who is also a graduate of the International Space University, is conducting studies simulating the effects of microgravity on Earth at both the physiological (organ) level and the cellular level. She was the lead author on a recent article in the British Medical Journal, ”Can I take a space flight? Considerations for doctors,“ which was widely reported by Forbes, NPR, and Space.com, among others.
Other MDs on the panel are Alex Garbino, physiological monitoring lead for the Red Bull Stratos medical team; NASA astronaut Col. Yvonne Cagle (USAF-ret.); and Ravi Komatireddy, KL2 Scholar of Wireless Health at the Scripps Institute. Also on the panel is Walter De Brouwer, Ph.D., founder of the personalized health electronics company Scanadu, which is competing to win the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize.
Last year, Dr. Komatireddy was part of a team that tested a ViSi Mobile Monitor device aboard a microgravity flight provided by the NASA Flight Opportunities Program.
The panel, presented by the Silicon Valley Space Business Roundtable, takes place at the offices of the Orrick Law Firm, 1020 Marsh Road, from 6:30 to 9:00 PM. Admission is $35 for regular admission, $25 for Roundtable members, and $15 for students. Registration is available here.
The photo above shows a sight that can only be seen from space: The Moon against a black sky, with the Earth in daylight. Fewer than .00001% of the world’s population have had the opportunity to see this sight. That number will increase dramatically in the next few years, when suborbital spaceflight becomes commercially available.
At first glance, the Moon appears oddly dark. We think of the Moon as being quite bright, almost pure white. That’s because we’re used to viewing the Moon at night when our eyes are dark adapted. Of course, the Moon isn’t really white, or light in color, at all. The observations and photos taken by the Apollo astronauts, the samples they brought back, all prove that. Viewed alongside the oceans and clouds of Earth, the Moon shows its true color in this photograph.
The Moon also appears unusually small in this photo. That is due to the well-known Moon illusion, or rather the lack of a Moon illusion. When we observe the Moon in the night sky, our brains trick us into seeing the Moon as larger than it really is. That doesn’t happen when you look at a photograph of the Moon. The photo above is optically accurate, but the photo below has been altered to show the scene as you might actually perceive it from space, due to the Moon illusion:
Dr. Justin Wilkinson of NASA’s Crew Earth Observations Office narrated this stunning compilation of images from LEO.
That’s right, LEO. Low Earth Orbit. Where Carl Sagan and Bob Zubrin told us there’s nothing worth seeing. The place we “have to get out of.”
For the record, only 530 people have flown in space. More than 3,100 have climbed Mt. Everest. 220 of those climbers have died in the attempt. In recent years, the fatality has declined to “only” four percent. Higher than Soyuz or the Space Shuttle.
Yet, some would tell us that astronauts in LEO are not explorers and there’s nothing worth seeing Out There.
Related: Astronaut Don Petit talks about photo techniques he used aboard the International Space Station in this video.
Astronauts 4 Hire is a private company that intends to provide a pool of trained payload specialists for suborbital spaceflights. The following video shows some of their current training activities.
The following video is a recent interview with Dr. Helen Sharman, who became Britain’s first astronaut and the first woman to visit the Mir space station in 1991. Dr. Sharman spent 8 days in space, launching aboard the Soyuz TM-12 capsule on 18 May 1991 and returning aboard Soyuz TM-11 on 26 May 1991. (Note: This is a lengthy interview, running for a bit over one hour.)
Dr. Helen Sharman was a 26-year-old researcher studying flavor chemistry for the Mars candy company when she applied for Project Juno in 1989.
Project Juno was the first step in a gradual transition from the old paradigm of government space programs to the new paradigm of citizen space exploration. The project, which gegan in 1989, was a joint venture between the Russian government (which was seeking to reach out to the West as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost) and a consortium of private sponsors including British Aerospace, Memorex, Interflora, and ITV. By the time the flight occurred in 1991, the Russian government had taken a larger role than expected due to the consortium’s failure to raise the full amount of money that was anticipated.
One vestige of the old government paradigm can be seen in the way the astronaut candidates were treated: e.g., being involuntarily sequestered in a Russian hospital for two weeks while redundant medical tests were performed. Space medicine is an indispensable discipline which plays a necessary role in ensuring the safety of human spaceflight, but the amount of power given to flight surgeons in government space programs has been a frequent source of conflict.
Sharman and her backup, British Army Major Timothy Mace, were required to spend 18 months in Russia training for the spaceflight. This was later reduced to six months for clients of Space Adventures, which has sent citizen explorers to the International Space Station eight times since 2001.
Space Adventures has managed to wring more concessions out of the Russian Space Agency than the Juno consortium did, but those are still half measures. Truly commercial spaceflight depends on the development of commercial vehicles, which is still in progress.
Another portion of the interview worth noting is Dr. Sharman’s description of the landing incident. Such incidents have been fairly common in the Soyuz program; they are one of several data points which disprove the myth that Soyuz, unlike Shuttle, has had a 100% safety record.
This commercial is deliberately over the top, in a hilarious sort of way. Nevertheless, its tag line is a message NASA (and its political masters) ought to keep in mind.
NASA has been quietly downsizing the astronaut office, and actual flight opportunities have been downsized greatly. The expensive Orion capsule and Space Launch System won’t help the flight rate any. If this trend continues, it will become a problem for NASA. At some point, taxpayers will start to ask why they are spending so much money on a space agency that’s sending almost no one into space.
Whenever these facts are mentioned, NASA responds by pointing out how much progress is being made in the unmanned space-science side. (The Curiosity rover is the current poster boy for this.)
It’s true that NASA’s unmanned programs have been doing better, but robots don’t vote and robots don’t pay taxes. The people who do want (and deserve) more than that.
As Scott Glenn, playing Alan Shepard, said in The Right Stuff, “You see those people out there? They all want to see Buck Rogers, and that’s us.”
Nobody throws a ticker-tape parade for robots.
And nothing beats an astronaut.
There’s a petition on the White House website calling for the United States to rapidly develop a nuclear thermal rocket engine.
Technically, nuclear thermal rockets are a promising technology, but unless NASA develops a deep-space ship to put it on (like the Copernicus MTV, shown here, or the Nautilus X), a nuclear rocket engine would be wasted.
There is little chance of a commercial outfit working through all the red tape needed to launch a nuclear rocket engine into orbit. (It’s questionable whether the government could do that itself.)
We’ve discussed this problem with engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and all of us came to the same conclusion: the best hope for nuclear rocket engines is finding uranium or thorium on the Moon. That would solve the political/environmental problem by allowing nuclear reactors to be launched from Earth unfueled. It would also jump start the development of lunar industry.
Mining nuclear fuel on the Moon has an advantage over other lunar mining schemes, such as platinum group metal (PGM) mining. Those proposals work only if mining on the Moon is cheaper than mining on Earth. That is possible but not yet proven. The bar for mining nuclear material on the Moon is much lower, if environmental politics does not allow us to launch it from Earth.
AXE plans to do training for its citizen astronauts in Orlando, Florida. They’ve started running this commercial to give contest applicants a taste of what’s in store.
It appears that AXE’s advertising department needs a good technical editor, though. The L-39 Albatros is strictly a subsonic airplane.
The space camp, called the Axe Apollo Space Academy, will take place in December of 2013, according to a press release from XCOR Aerospace. 100 finalists will take part, competing for a chance to win one of 21 flights. (The 22nd flight will be awarded early this year, in a drawing to take place after the Super Bowl on February 3.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin joined AXE, a personal-grooming brand of Unilever, to announce one of the largest spaceflight contests ever. The Apollo Space Sweepstakes, also known as the AXE Apollo Space Academy, is a worldwide contest that will select 22 citizen astronauts to fly into space on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft.
“Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience,” said Aldrin, lunar-module pilot for the historic Apollo 11 mission. “I’m thrilled that AXE is giving the young people of today such an extraordinary opportunity to experience some of what I’ve encountered in space.”
AXE, which is known as LYNX in some parts of the world, secured 22 seats aboard the namesake spacecraft through Space Expedition Corporation.
AXE global vice president Tomas Marcenaro said, “The AXE Apollo launch is the biggest and most ambitious in the AXE brand’s 30 year history. For the first time, we’re simultaneously launching one global competition in over 60 countries offering millions of people the opportunity to win the most epic prize on earth: a trip to space Yes, actual space.”
“There’s no bigger hero than an astronaut,” AXE said, “so AXE is giving fans a chance to experience an adventure unlike any other.”
Astronaut candidates can sign up between now and February 3 at AXEApollo.com. Contest rules and terms vary from country to country.
NASA recently revealed details of the recovery concept for its Orion space capsule. The concept shows how much has changed, and not changed, since the 1960′s.
A NASA artist’s conception shows the Orion capsule being recovered by a US Navy Landing Platform Dock (LPD) ship. This shows the diminished importance of NASA’s exploration program to overall US strategic policy. In the 1960′s, the United States Navy detailed an entire carrier battle group to recover an Apollo capsule, but now all it can spare is an LPD.
Not that an LPD is exactly cheap, but Orion is not designed to be cheap. The annual development cost for Orion is more than the expected total development cost for the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which will provide similar capabilities (including the ability the conduct lunar and Mars missions, according to Space). Of course, this isn’t NASA’s fault — the US Congress insisted that NASA continue development of the pointlessly redundant Orion capsule, which has consumed scarce resources that could have been used to jump-start development of deep-space exploration systems such as Johnson Space Center’s Nautilus X.
Any Navy veteran will tell you that search, rescue, and recovery operations at sea are never easy, or cheap. SpaceX is currently recovering its Dragon capsules at sea but is developing plans for land recovery in the future. Meanwhile, companies like Sierra Nevada, XCOR Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic are developing vehicles that can touch down on a runway like conventional aircraft. In the future, astronauts will not be rescued from outer space, they will fly back in style — but not, apparently, if the United States Congress has anything to say about it.
Still, NASA PR writer Bob Granath is spinning this archaic recovery mode as a technological breakthrough:
Read the rest of this entry »
The Golden Spike Company has announced that Northrop Grumman will conduct a lunar-lander design study as part of Golden Spike’s “head start” commercial lunar architecture.
During the study, Northrop Grumman will explore a variety of lunar-lander options including staging options, propellants, engines, reusability, autonomy, exploration-system capabilities, and landing sites.
Golden Spike engineering chief James French said the study is one of a number of initial studies which Golden Spike will undertake to begin creating design requirements and specifications for a lunar-lander contract competition.
Golden Spike previously announced United Launch Alliance, Armadillo Aerospace, and Masten Space Systems as members of its lunar-lander team. Northrop Grumman brings additional resources to the table.
Golden Spike chairman Gerry Griffin said, “Northrop Grumman brings a unique body of knowledge and skills as the only company to ever build a successful human-rated lunar lander, the Apollo Lunar Module.” Golden Spike president Dr. Alan Stern said, “We’re very proud to be working with Northrop Grumman, which has the most experience and successful performance record for human lunar lander designs in the world.”
From a technical perspective, the significance of Northrop Grumman’s Apollo lunar-module experience is limited. There are few, if any, members of the Grumman lunar-module team who are still active. From a marketing perspective, however, it still has power.
Northrop Grumman kept its association with lunar landers alive in the public eye when it became the name sponsor for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge in 2007 — in retrospect, a smart marketing move. We hope that other large aerospace companies will take notice and decide to sponsor similar prize competitions in the future.
In the near future, a trip into space may be comparable in cost to a high-end hunting trip. Big-game hunters now spend up to $125,000 to bag a single male lion in Africa.
That compares to the $97,000-$200,000 which companies like XCOR and Virgin Galactic plan to charge for a suborbital flight.
The Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s largest collection of museums, says Americans should stay home. They do not need to travel to Washington, DC and should not plan to visit any of the Smithsonian’s museums.
Okay, they didn’t really say that — but that’s what they would say if they were intellectually consistent.
A recent post on the Smithsonian’s blog makes a Politically Correct argument that Americans should not travel into space:
But why must our species continue to advance? Do we really want to keep growing? I believe that the physical limitations and boundaries of our planet, if not insurmountable by our technology, might be worth respecting. I also believe we should employ our brilliance as a species in figuring out how to live sustainably on this planet, and I would argue that it’s not our business to plunder the natural resources of any other worlds unless we can at least learn to manage and preserve our own—a challenge at which we are failing.
If the Smithsonian wants to stop our species from advancing, putting an end to space travel is a start, but the Smithsonian can do more than that. It should recommend that Americans avoid visiting educational institutions like the Smithsonian. The physical limitations and boundaries of their home states, if not insurmountable by technology, might be worth respecting. Instead of “plundering” the resources of any other states, shouldn’t Americans stay home and use their brilliance to live sustainably in their own towns and villages?
Burt Rutan recently gave a talk at the UP Experience, a one-day creative conference in Houston, during which he offered some useful insights into suborbital spaceflight as an enabler.
In the next few years, citizen space explorers will start to fly in large numbers. When they do, many of them will want to take pictures during their flights. Those who do might want to heed this advice from photo buff and NASA astronaut Don Petit.