Space: August 2006 Archives

I have to admit I was a little surprised when Rocketplane-Kistler (RpK) won one of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration $200 million-plus space act agreements (SAA).
It's a lot of money but compared to what has to be achieved over the next four years, demonstration of cargo, and possibly crew, transportation to the International Space Station, its peanuts.
Rocketplane is a team of committed people working hard to turn a modified Learjet into a suborbital spacecraft.
They have some excellent engineers but they have always been cash strapped

It's not every day a new industry and market comes along and the potential for space tourism is, if not infinite, then certainly global.
This week the Personal Spaceflight Federation (PSF), comprising of private, public and non-profit organisations working to make commercial human spaceflight a reality, re-launched itself with a new slate of officers and a new chairman.

In journalism cynicism and even paranoia are necessary for the job. So many people want to tell you the product they are pushing is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone seems ready to tell lies, damned lies and stretch statistics as far as they will go.
So when people come along and demonstrably do what they said they would do and in a field as difficult as spaceflight, it's a pleasant change.
Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis I spacecraft is a success that quite frankly has not been covered widely enough in the media. A subscale version of the BA-330 vehicle, envisaged to be a space complex for science, manufacturing or a vacation, is testing out systems necessary for human habitation.
The reason why the wider, mass, media should be covering it is that it is, as far as I know, the first time an inflatable vehicle has been launched. And this one is privately financed, not another state funded project.
There have been inflated re-entry thermal protection systems but never an inflatable vehicle. As silly as it sounds it's a very good engineering solution to the problem of lifting mass out of Earth's gravity well.
To take a technology that NASA abandoned, develop it, build a spacecraft around it and get it launched and then operate it successfully in orbit is something that the world's space agencies would be shouting very very loudly about if they did it.
It's no small thing to place a spacecraft in orbit. With the recent failure of a Dnepr rocket, which Bigelow used to launch its Genesis, they did get lucky. But then the harder you work, the luckier you get; yes?
Talking to the company's founder, Robert Bigelow, last week it was clear that his team had exceeded their expectations with Genesis I. The company had been talking about a series of spacecraft being launched to 2010, followed by an attempt to fly a full scale complex. Now they intend to announce in January that these plans are to be accelerated. I would imagine we will see a full size BA-330 launched in 2008, probably using a US Delta or Atlas launcher. Bigelow does have a contract with Space Exploration Technologies to launch on its proposed Falcon 9 rocket. However it's unlikely this will be ready in time.
I'm rarely one to sing the praises of anyone or anything, just read my blogs. I will leave that to them, whether they are Boeing or the European Space Agency.
But Bigelow Aerospace's achievement is genuine and significant.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced at the 9th International Mars Society Convention in Washington DC on 3 August that his agency would undertake studies of manned Mars missions next year. It won't be the first time NASA has carried out such a study. In 2007 it will be 10 years since the 237 paged "Human Exploration of Mars: The Reference Mission of the NASA Mars Exploration Study Team" was published. And this time we may already know what the new study will say.

To say that rockets are complex things is almost ridiculous, an observation that is so patently obvious that the phrase "rocket scientist" has passed into common cultural usage to mean, someone who works with very complicated things.

Then one wonders why Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) rocket scientists made such a basic mistake with the 570kg (1,254lb) to low Earth orbit (LEO) Falcon 1 launcher that led to its disastrous maiden fight on 31 March this year.