Recently in Commercial human spaceflight Category

credit: Virgin Galactic / caption: could SpaceShipTwo use a liquid propulsion system?

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo could be a single stage to suborbit vehicle using liquid chemical propulsion according to independent research carried out by a company that has been contracted by the European Space Agency for suborbital and hypersonic transport studies

UK company Gas Dynamics has concluded, after its own internal study, using all the publicly available material it could obtain about SS2, that the spacecraft does not need its carrier aircraft WhiteKnight Two if it is fitted with a liquid chemical propulsion system

credit: Dassault Aviation / caption: this is the VSH, Dassault's space tourism spin off from VEHRA 

French aerospace company Dassault Aviation's In the Air newsletter issue 14 has provided an update on its spaceflight related activities and teased us with the prospect of an imminent report outlining a possible future for the European suborbital vehicle VSH, or is that K:1000?

In its report "Suborbital Aviation: on the very edge of space" it says:

The study of suborbital vessels, both manned and unmanned, constitutes the natural extension of the activities of Dassault Aviation with regard to the aircraft of the future.
The suborbital activity began with the VEHRA (air-launched reusable hypersonic vehicle) project. This constituted an "evolution" of the X-38 experimental lifting body from NASA, for which Dassault Aviation had defined the shape. It comprises a family of vehicles that comes in three versions:
− 10 t demonstrator;
− 30 t vehicle for launching small (300 kg) satellites;
− heavy vehicle (200 t) for placing a 7 t payload in low orbit.

The newsletter goes on to say:

Air-launching from a commercial transport aircraft does away with the take-off constraints of classic launchers. In terms of flexibility, this type of launch requires a much more slim line ground infrastructure, and offers the possibility of aborting the mission and recovering the vehicles and their payloads in the majority of cases. The VEHRA project has generated repeat works (configuration, systems, propulsion, etc.) for the engineering division (DGT). Interns from the major engineering colleges have also been associated over the years with these futuristic vehicle projects.

NASA's new human spaceflight standards may not be as rigorous as those it already demands for high profile launches such as James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or Cassini

In an emailed answer to Hyperbola's question about NASA Launch Services (NLS) vehicle certification requirements and crew transport the US space agency says: "NLS is only applicable to NASA payloads, not crew. You should not infer any relationship between NLS and commercial crew."

Yet for high profile "class A" missions, such as JWST, to be launched on a "category three" low risk launch vehicle NASA's certification requirements ask for a 14 consecutive successful flight history - go here for related launch policy directive documentation

United Launch Alliances' Delta IV doesn't have that, Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) Falcon 9 won't have that until 2013 at least, Orbital Sciences' Taurus II never will because it only has eight commercial resupply missions manifested and so only the ULA Atlas V has an adequate launch history - is this what the final report of the Review of US human space flight plans was referring too with its mystery booster?

Sorry, I hear you say, but that is for payloads, not crew. So are you saying that crews will ride on rockets with a lesser launch history than payloads? And if it is greater, well at least you have until 2016 for those commercial crew programme vehicles but NASA administrator Charles Bolden's hopes of something sooner seem a bit dashed

Is this situation what Bolden was referring to yesterday in the Senate hearing when he said that SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft was a cheaper longer term option and that instead Orion was the choice for an International Space Station escape capsule three year's hence?

credit: spacepolicyonline.com / caption: the schedule slide that will come to haunt Obama's flexible path

In a president George W. Bush-like moment NASA administrator Charles Bolden is reported to have said: "it is the uneasiest thing we could do". Uneasiest? Don't you mean it is one of the hardest things you could do?

And Bolden might not want to admit it but his allegedly executable non-Constellation programme is ultimately, in capabilities terms, just as challenging and probably unexecutable as Bush's Constellation in technology and funding 

Why? We now know that president Barack Obama's plan for NASA is to work towards a 2025 asteroid rendezvous and a mid-2030s Mars mission that would not land. Constellation had Mars as an aspiration but its goal was to begin Moon missions from 2018 with a landing soon after and the slow build up of a permanent lunar base from the early 2020s

Surely they are very different? Look again

Despite the grandiose visit to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) president Barack Obama's space plan is still being divisive even with the announcements of a 2025 asteroid goal and a 2035 mission to orbit, but not land on, Mars



In the video above Buzz Aldrin says he wish he could have spoken to his ex-Apollo astronaut colleagues before they sent a letter condemning Obama's plan

Florida Today lists a series of reactions from notable people here, as does NASAWatch with its report here; qouting media organisations including Time magazine and Fox News. Below SpaceX's founder Elon Musk tells Bloomberg tv NASA's Constellation programme was uneconomic. Here the Orlando Sentinel reports that Musk spoke to Obama during his KSC visit. You can find here Musk's long statement endorsing Obama's plan 



While Utah Senator Orrin Hatch continues to take issue with the Obama plan. Hatch met with NASA administrator Charles Bolden and was not at all happy with the outcome

One has to wonder what on Earth (pun intended) president Barack Obama, his administration and the NASA management team think will be accomplished with a 1h 55min chin wag between "senior officials, space leaders, academic experts, industry leaders and others" about the future of US space exploration

Public relations disaster is one accomplishment that this blogger can envisage. If everyone comes out of the conference (see timing below - all times in Eastern Daylight Time) declaring the Obama plan a fantastic vision the event will be criticised as a White House whitewash and if a single individual speaks out against it, the reports will be of a divided conference

Hyperbola suspects the outcome will be far far worse

We are told Obama will have some "private time" with politicians attending the event. Anything other than the president's ageement to a wish list of space transportation projects is going to see those politicians attack the new space plan. And it won't stop there, academics will likely go on the record to say they don't agree with all or parts of the plan while industry will simply brief journalists, off the record, about why the plan doesn't make sense 

It is not obvious at what point the media get to question the president and, or his conference participants but I would imagine that certain politicians and corporations are already on the phone to Florida based and national media. Is it a conference or is it Obama's last space stand?

The afternoon to save exploration in full

13:30h NASA tv begins President Barack Obama KSC visit coverage
14:25h President Obama speech in Operations & Checkout building
15:45h Conference overview
           with NASA admininstrator Charles Bolden, Norman Augustine, John Holdren
16:25h Conference breakout sessions
           - increasing access to and utilization of the International Space Station
           - jumpstarting the new technologies to take us beyond
           - expanding our reach into the Solar System
           - harnessing space to expand economic opportunity
17:40h Conference wrap-up with Bolden and breakout session moderators

The 15:45h conference overview and 16:25h breakout sessions will all take place in the Operations & Checkout building

Virgin Galactic's commercial director Stephen Attenborough talks about the future of space tourism from an Irish science and engineering education organisation's event held in 2008 but the video was not posted until end of 2009. Go through to the extended portion of this blog post to see parts two and three

Is it just this blog or is there just not much going on out there at the moment? Maybe it is the Christian festival of Easter that is slowing things down with all that related time off work?

But for those of you that are looking forward to the imminent 2 April Soyuz TMA-18 launch there are pre-flight interviews with the crew at the news webpage of Russia's Federal Space Agency aka Roscosmos

Russian news website RIA Novosti is reporting that the UK and Russia could become high tech partners - is this because of the creation of the UK Space Agency? One doubts any help will be forthcoming on the scale that Russia provided China with for its manned spaceflight programme - click on the hypertext for a 38-slide presentation about the middle kingdom's ambitions, happy Easter!

Here is a 9min 41s clip from NASA administrator Charles Bolden's 23 March appearence at the House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriatons' subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing on NASA. Other Youtube clips of this hearing can be found here care of someone called ISSmania6

For the 24 March NASA hearing for the space and aeronautics subcommittee of the House of Representatives' science and technology committee click here to launch the archived webcast

credit: spacepolicyonline.com / caption: Garver's presentation click on it for a large version in this browser window

So according to NASA administrator Charles Bolden in the Congressional hearing yesterday the US will get back to the Moon before the Chinese - but will they?

As the Constellation programme progressed it was always interesting to dig around for the latest multi-program integrated milestone schedule that would occasionally be available officially or unofficially on the web somewhere. That helpful document showed graphically, in every sense, the inevitable slips of an under funded Moon return programme

Earlier this month NASA deputy administrator Lori Beth Garver gave us a new milestone schedule to scrutinise - even if it has the word notional across it - when she gave a presentation at the American Astronautical Society's Goddard Memorial Symposium (held 9-11 March)

Garver's powerpoint (one assumes) slides - shown in this blog care of a new website called spacepolicyonline.com - show an Obama space plan timeline and a version of the Constellation programme schedule

Looking at the slide above (and Garver's second slide - see extended blog portion - that shows a Constellation timeline) the question that comes to Hyperbola's mind is, if Constellation was an exploration programme that was unexecutable with the available budget why is the Obama plan any more executable?