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It’s been a busy day for alt.space (it’s going to be a busy week, overall)…on top of the Branson announcement comes a twofer from Robert Bigelow: a space hotel and a new space prize.
While much public attention is focused on the massive International Space Station (ISS), Bigelow has quietly become a mini-Skunk Works for the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC).
Ongoing technical assistance to Bigelow from JSC is focused on helping the company spawn development of orbiting commercial inflatable modules by the end of the decade, with the possibility of JSC later using the Bigelow technology for inflatable modules on the Moon or Mars.
While this isn’t really news, the article does provide a bit of additional detail on Bigelow’s schedule for technology demonstration flights and initial operating capability:
With 330 cu. meters of volume, each Nautilus has 2.75 times the volume of individual ISS modules, Bigelow says.
Initial Nautilus unmanned operations are possible by 2008 with the first manned flights to dock with the previously unmanned Nautilus possible by 2010, according to Bigelow. The Nautilus would require a Proton-class booster.
Say, isn’t 2008 around the time NASA tentatively plans to possibly have a CEV flyoff, maybe?
Preceding the first full-scale Nautilus will be two “Genesis” one-third scale inflation test modules to be launched in 2005 and 2006–one on a SpaceX Falcon V and the other on a Russian “Dneper” commercial version of the SS-18 ballistic missile.
Following those missions will be two “Guardian” 45% scale inflatable module flights in 2007 carrying critical life-support system demonstration hardware.
A Dneper will also launch the Guardian flights and could be used for the first Genesis if the SpaceX Falcon V is not ready.
Good to see he’s making contingency plans…
All four of these inflatable test spacecraft will be designed to last for several years in orbit.
There is much more in the second half of the article, including descriptions of technology demonstrations conducted and test and simulation hardware built.
The new development here, however, is what Bigelow is calling America’s Space Prize:
Company founder and millionaire Robert T. Bigelow told Aviation Week & Space Technology that he will announce as early as this week a new $50-million space launch contest called America’s Space Prize.
The objective is to spur development of a low-cost commercial manned orbital vehicle capable of launching 5-7 astronauts at a time to Bigelow inflatable modules by the end of the decade.
America’s Space Prize will be patterned somewhat after the Ansari X-Prize that will go to the first team to demonstrate back-to-back suborbital flights.
America’s Space Prize, however, is to award five times more money than the $10-million X-Prize. And if successful, the winner of America’s Prize would have developed something different–the first commercial manned orbital spacecraft–which unlike the X-Prize, could be used for something other than just a spectacular ride.
The new contest also presents challenges far greater than the X-Prize by requiring development of a vehicle that could maneuver to dock at well over 100 mi. altitude and survive a 17,500-mph. reentry.
America’s Prize will be set up so the winner can propose launch on an existing (even non-U.S.) booster, depending upon the entrant’s spacecraft configuration.
Bigelow is committing $25 million to the prize, and more than one additional proprietary benefactor is in final discussion with Bigelow for the other half. Potential funding partners include NASA, as a follow-up to the prize-related recommendations by the Aldridge Commission on Exploration.
One wonders who that “additional proprietary benefactor” might be…
It looks like there is truth to the rumors of a “SpaceShipTwo” in the works at Scaled Composites: Branson promises to send tourists into space by 2007
Sir Richard said: “Because space travel has been run by the Government and not by entrepreneurial individuals, it hasn’t really moved forward.
“Billions of dollars have been wasted in grandiose projects that have not achieved a lot. Now private enterprise is getting interested and I think that in my lifetime we may be able to go to the next phase of hotels in space and possibly going to the moon.”
He added: “We’ve already had plenty of calls from people who have heard about this. Most people would love to go to space.”
David Learmount, the operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, said: “This is just the kind of thing Branson absolutely loves, because it gets him maximum publicity. But the technology is there and well tested – it’s plausible.”
As Rand Simberg notes, the giggle factor continues to erode. Why, the next thing you know, someone will be putting up a privately-built space hotel…
Forget that trillion-dollar price tag — Moon-Mars Tab Could Hit $100 Billion.
A hundred billion? Over fifteen years? Assuming those are present-value dollars, that would be an annual average budget of a mere $6.7 billion…a bit less than half of NASA’s current budget and a bit more than what the Shuttle program ordinarily runs. The article suggests that the figure already includes a 45% historical average cost overrun, but even at $1445 billion over fifteen years it hardly seems to be a budget-buster, does it?
UPDATE: More coverage here, here, and here.
Was browsing through my copy of Eric Hoffer’s The Ordeal of Change this afternoon, and came across this interesting passage in the essay “The Role of Undesirables”:
Who were the pioneers? Who were the men who left their homes and went into the wilderness? A man rarely leaves a soft spot and goes deliberately in search of hardship and privation. People become attached to the places they live in; they drive roots. A change of habitat is a painful act of uprooting. A man who has made good and has a standing in his community stays put. The successful businessmen, farmers, and workers usually stayed where they were. Who then left for the wilderness and the unknown? Obviously those who had not made good: men who went broke or never amounted to much; men who though possessed of abilities were too impulsive to stand the daily grind; men who were slaves of their appetites — drunkards, gamblers, and women chasers; outcasts — fugitives from justice and ex-jailbirds. There were no doubt some who went in search of health — men suffering with TB, asthma, heart trouble. Finally there was a sprinkling of young and middle-aged in search of adventure.
All these people craved change, some probably actuated by the naive belief that a change in place brings with it a change in luck. Many wanted to go to a place where they were not known and there make a new beginning. Certainly they did not go out deliberately in search of hard work and suffering. If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to. They became men of action on the run. They acquired strength and skill in the inescapable struggle for existence. It was a question of do or die. And once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more.
While Hoffer is referring to the California pioneers who made the deserts bloom, he could just as well be talking about the pioneers of the future: those who will tackle the enormous tasks of settling and developing the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and free space. While some of the particulars will be different (it’s hard to imagine drunkards and lungers as future lunar or martian colonists), his core argument — that it is those who don’t fit into the established socio-economic-political order who end up finding their place as pioneers — may well hold true, specifically in the case of those people with abilities and talents who lack a discipline-imparting environment or motivating cause in which to use them here on Earth.
It’s another facet of the oft–used (and occasionally handwringingly eulogized) “space as frontier” meme, but it points to something often overlooked in discussions from other perspectives: what happens when these “misfits” don’t have a suitable outlet for their abilities and solution to their personal frustrations.
Among the winners of the $3M base/$3M option Project Constellation study contracts awarded last week was a consortium of small space companies, Transformational Space Corporation. Judging from their press release, t/Space is taking a radically different (and more sensible) approach to the undertaking:
Transformational Space Corp. (?t/Space?) was chosen by NASA based on a proposed lunar architecture powered by market-based competition, spurred initially by NASA incentives. In the t/Space scenario, companies will design, build and own the lunar infrastructure (vehicles, habitats, power stations, greenhouses and the like) from which NASA will buy services to support its explorers.
The t/Space team includes Burt Rutan?s Scaled Composites Inc., which made history recently by rocketing the first commercial pilot into suborbital space aboard SpaceShipOne. Another key player is AirLaunch LLC, which is under contract with the Defense Dept. to develop a low-cost responsive launch vehicle. These two companies will collaborate on the design of a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) to carry NASA astronauts to the Moon in the next decade, and eventually to Mars. Their design will demonstrate how the CEV can be developed on an affordable basis by private industry via NASA incentives, saving the government billions of dollars compared to traditional contracting approaches.
Commercially operated CEVs may be the key to opening the space frontier, because passenger travel to orbit is a potentially huge market. Tapping into public demand for travel to space will create economies of scale, transforming the launch business from vehicles that operate three or four times a year into rockets that routinely fly several times a week ? dramatically bringing down the cost of sending people and cargo off-planet. In the t/Space scenario for the future, NASA?s lunar and Mars expeditions will be able to stand on the shoulders of this vibrant Earth-orbit economy to achieve faster schedules and lower overall costs.
[via Mark Whittington]
Rand Simberg tackles the myths of the “old space age” and suggests a new way forward in an excellent essay: The Path Not Taken.
It seems there may be some useful material recovered from Genesis, after all.
Sevilla said experts are “peeling back the layers of the onion,” using a flashlight and a small mirror on a stick to explore inside the fractured, garbage-can-sized capsule. A prime particle-gathering device “appears intact,” he said, and another appears to be “in very good condition.”
But pieces of the fragile collectors are “strewn about the canister,” so scientists are being very methodical about extracting them.
“It is amazing given the amount of breach in the canister just how clean it is inside” Sevilla said. “We’re not talking about great clods of dirt.”
No timetable has been created for moving the science samples from a Utah facility to a NASA center for ultimate study. Sevilla said engineers are still busy collecting tools to do unexpected “sawing and snipping” that will take place over the weekend.
NASA TV last night had a short video segment showing this flashlight-and-mirror inspection of the capsule and the removal of several fragments of the sample wafers from the wreckage.
Meanwhile, Sevilla said three pyrotechnic devices that were supposed to deploy the parachute system failed to trigger as planned. They have been “safed” to allow study of the capsule.
“None had been fired,” he said. “This points to a command and control problem,” not to any failure of the parachutes themselves.
Depending on the degree of similarity between the two probes, this could be good news for Stardust — if the problem was in the control system and not in the hardware, there is some chance it could be located and remotely corrected before Stardust returns in January 2006.
I don’t have a link for it (subscription only) but AvWeek is reporting that the Bush Administration will soon be releasing a new space policy document, replacing the 1994 Clinton space policy which included (among other things) the NASA/Pentagon reusable/expendable launcher responsibility split which gave us X-33, 2GRLV, OSP, and EELV. The new policy will reportedly incorporate the VSE/MM&B, and eliminate the aforementioned launcher split, allowing NASA to pursue man-rating of EELVs for use in the moon-Mars efforts. Development of new heavy-lift capability (Shuttle-derived or a clean-sheet design) is also described as being permitted if required to support the new efforts.
It looks like KSC was spared a major catastrophe, but Frances inflicted damage to the Shuttle facilities that may lead to further damage, if Ivan should follow a similar path.
HoustonChronicle.com – Hurricane spares shuttles, but …
Hurricane Frances spared NASA’s depleted shuttle fleet but ripped away siding from a towering landmark Kennedy Space Center facility, exposing the critical enclosure to the potential wrath of another Atlantic storm, space agency officials said Monday…
A second significant finding was the heavy damage to the shuttle’s tile repair shop. The shop is where the hundreds of soft silica tiles that protect the outside of the shuttle from the searing temperatures of the high-speed descent through the Earth’s atmosphere are repaired or replaced between missions.
The space agency will attempt to resurrect a previous tile shop at Boeing Co. facilities in Palmdale, Calif.
It should be interesting to see what this does to the cost and schedule for return-to-flight. Not only are there the hurricane closure downtime and the cost and delay for facility repairs to consider, but with TPS tiles and blankets on the critical path for RTF, the added time and expense involved in moving their fabrication to Palmdale will only make things worse.
While I can see value in the “ark” idea described, this BBC article is…bizarre:
Speaking exclusively to BBC News at the British Association Science Festival, Dr Bernard Foing said that the ark should be a repository for the DNA of every single species of plant and animal.
Dandy plan, but…how do we obtain samples from every species on Earth, when we haven’t even identified all of them? The article is thin on detail, including how many individual samples of each species should be included so as to permit its later reconstitution with minimal risk of inbreeding. Given the number of known species on Earth, that’s bound to be a fairly big library.
But hey, if it gets us back to the moon permanently…
The article then veers into strangeness:
Dr Foing is head of Europe’s Moon missions, so his thoughts on matters lunar should be taken seriously.
One could scarcely ask for a better textbook example of “appeal to authority“.
He is concerned that if the Earth were destroyed, there would be little or nothing left of the rich diversity of life on the planet. [emphasis added]
If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the latter…
“If there were a catastrophic collision on Earth or a nuclear war you could place some samples of Earth’s biosphere, including humans, [on the Moon],” he said.
“You could repopulate the Earth afterwards like a Noah’s Ark,” he said.
First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacties in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens… Oh, sorry…I digress…
For the time being though, Dr Foing is awaiting the arrival of Europe’s first probe to the Moon…
It is the first of what he hopes will be a fleet of of robotic spacecraft sent to the Moon.
They would be used to build a lunar colony
It looks like we have another moon-race on our hands…or we might, once the Europeans actually, you know, launch humans into space.
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