From the creators of the world's first privately developed spaceship comes its commercial cousin, Eve. During an unveiling ceremony at Scaled Composites' Mojave, Calif., base, Burt Rutan, who designs cutting edge aircraft -- and spacecraft -- with an artist's eye, and his newest best friend, the daring and dashing Richard Branson, of Virgin fame and fortune, showed off the launch vehicle for their new venture.
Branson started a new business, Virgin Galactic, after watching Rutan's prototype SpaceShipOne make three flights in 2004 to clinch a $10 million purse put out by the X Prize Foundation.
Like its predecessor, SpaceShipTwo will travel into suborbital space after being toted off the ground by a jet carrier, aka: Eve, named for Branson’s mother. Eve is to SpaceShipTwo what the White Knight was for SpaceShipOne. You can read the full press release here.
The rollout comes a year and two days after an accident claimed the lives of three Scaled employees working on the new spaceship's rocket engine. Scaled is appealing a $25,870 fine levied by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which cited inadequate training and unsafe conditions as contributors to the accident.
Though the accident and investigation delayed plans for the start of Virgin’s space tourism business, it didn’t seem to stem enthusiasm and support for the venture. The company, which is charging $200,000 for a ride, has already collected full fares from 100 armchair astronauts ready to leave -- albeit briefly -- the home planet.
Well not “steal” it exactly, just do what Japan has done to our automobile industry, China to textiles and India to tech support. Import it, then re-label ‘Made in America.’ It’d be a neat way around the prohibition against buying Soyuz from the Russians, who are being punished -- not really -- for providing technology and dangerous ideas widely available on the internet to Iran, which is next door to Iraq and probably what the Bush Administration was really aiming for when they got us embroiled in the bruhaha over there.
And the U.S. really needs a spaceship because we can’t afford to fly the shuttles and simultaneously develop safer ships that can transport people to the space station as well as beyond low-Earth orbit, which we’ve been going ‘round and ‘round in since 1972, the last moon landing.
Unfortunately it took a national tragedy to buck up to the fact that the shuttles are too expensive and risky to fly forever, wonderful machines that they are. Problem is, it’s going to take five or six years to get the new crafts flying after the shuttles are retired. NASA has taken to calling this period “the gap.”
Leaving aside the fact that right now NASA is banned from purchasing Soyuz after its current exemption expires in 2011, the United State’s plan for staffing the space station during the gap is to get another exemption to buy more Soyuz. We’ll need twice as many as before, in fact because next year the size of the space station’s crew doubles to six. The Soyuz can hold three people.
Now comes the news today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has plunked down $5 million for his own Soyuz so that he and another tourist can go visit space. (Apparently the Congressional ban doesn’t apply to private companies.) The firm arranging the jaunt will even hire a full-fledged Russian cosmonaut to pilot the rocketeers.
Which brings me to this: Why not import the Soyuz or get a license to manufacture them here? Florida, which just lost out to Virginia to be the launch site for a proposed commercially developed station cargo hauler, would be game. Might even get our Congressional delegation focused on an issue they need to be concerned with, like trade, economics and foreign affairs, rather than deciding if an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer dark matter device should fly on the shuttle or not.
If $30 million from Google wasn’t enough to get you motivated to put your genius to work designing a moon rover, the state of Florida has a little extra incentive: a cool $2 million extra if your little robot makes its great lunar leap from the sandy shores of the Sunshine State.
The state’s space development agency said it will pony up the bonus for any winning contestant of the X Prize's latest attempt to commercialize space. The non-profit made history in 2004 when it paid out $10 million for a pair of private suborbital spaceflights which prompted Virgin founder Richard Branson to order up a couple of ships for a new tourism venture. While spaceship builder Burt Rutan toils away, the X Prize Foundation is moving on to the moon.
So far, 10 teams have registered to compete for the prize. They are:
Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA): Based in Valcea, Romania and led by Dumitru Popescu, ARCA registered but never flew for the private spaceflight X Prize. Two of ARCA’s most innovative projects to date have been the Demonstrator 2B rocket and Stabilo, a two-stage manned suborbital air-launched vehicle. The craft the team plans to enter in the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be called the European Lunar Explorer.
Astrobotic: Team Astrobotic, led by William “Red” Whittaker, was formed to coordinate the efforts of Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Co., and partners. Carnegie Mellon’s expertise includes autonomous navigation which enables robots to automatically avoid obstacles and select their own route across unmapped terrain. Astrobotic will compete for the prize using their Artemis Lander and Red Rover.
Chandah: Chandah, meaning “moon” in Sanskrit, was founded by Adil Jafry, an energy industry entrepreneur. He now heads Tara, the largest independent retail electricity provider in Texas. Jafry says his goal is to catalyze commercialization of space, and bring advances in space travel, tourism, sciences and technology to the general public at large. The team’s spacecraft will be named Shehrezade.
FREDNET: Headed by Fred Bourgeois this multi-national team of systems, software and hardware engineers intends to bring the same successful approach used in developing open system software (such as the internet, and Linux) to pioneer space exploration.
LunaTrex: Led by Pete Bitar, LunaTrex is a mixed group of individuals, companies and universities from all over the United States that hopes to parlay its experience in the Ansari X Prize competition and other technical endeavors into a moon rover called Tumbleweed.
Micro-Space: Colorado firm headed by Richard Speck has been churning out innovative high-tech products for 31 years, including liquid-fuel rockets, near-hover rockets and an assortment of life-support systems. A competitor in the Ansari X PRIZE as well as the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Micro-Space’s moon offering will be the Human Lunar Lander.
Odyssey Moon: This private commercial lunar enterprise, founded by Robert Richards and located in the Isle of Man, is developing a series of missions to the moon in support of science, exploration and commerce. Its craft is called MoonOne (M-1).
Quantum3: Led by aerospace executive Paul Carliner, Quantum3 plans to soft-land its Moondancer craft where Apollo 13 settled down in the Sea of Tranquility.
Southern California Selene Group: Led by Harold Rosen, this Santa Monica-based group’s craft, Spirit of Southern California, pairs control and communication systems used in some of the earliest communications satellites with modern electronic and sensor technology.
Team Italia: Based in Italy and led byAmalia Ercoli-Finzi, Team Italia is a collaborative effort by several universities that already is running a prototype. To be determined is whether to build a single big rover or a colony of little probes that could quickly disperse on the lunar surface with cameras and sensors.
For 40 years, NASA has been flying airplanes that simulate the weightlessness of space to train its astronauts and prepare experiments to fly in orbit. This week, the agency announced it would pay more than $25 million over the next five years for the privately owned and operated Zero Gravity Corp., to take on the work.
For the past three years, Zero Gravity has been offering rides to the fare-paying public aboard a specially outfitted cargo jet it leases for the weekends. Last year, the company flew British physicist Stephen Hawking, who normally spends his days confined in a wheelchair due to Lou Gehrig’s disease.
I’ve spent the last 90 minutes combing through budget documents trying to find out how much NASA has been spending on what it calls its Reduced Gravity Program. I’m curious how much less it will cost for the agency to fly commercial.
I never did come up with a figure, but I did score a 29-page User’s Guide, intended to serve researchers and students who obtain NASA’s approval to fly. My favorite parts are the Federal Aviation Administration Third Class Aviation Physical requirement (sorry Prof. Hawking!) and the JSC Form 473A to access the Johnson Space Center requirement, due, along with all supporting paperwork, at least eight weeks prior to the flight. There’s a chart with 14 acronyms, a 51-item index and a long discussion of what to do if you’re a foreign national (suffice it to say, you become a Headquarters issue.)
Zero Gravity, which normally operates out of Florida and Las Vegas, will be bringing its plane to the Johnson Space Center in Texas and to the Glenn Research Center in Ohio to fulfill its NASA contract. The space agency is seeking the flight opportunities for aeronautical research, fluid physics, combustion, material sciences and life science experiments -- and to train its crews. It’s one small step for NASA to put its astronauts into private sector hands, one giant leap for private enterprise.
At a restorative yoga workshop yesterday, I was struck by how often the teacher spoke about the effects of gravity. We round our spines, we stand and walk hunched over, our shoulders cave inward. “This is what gravity and maturity do to us,” he said, transforming his lithe, poised body into the stereotype of an old, crouched man.
Rather than emptying my mind, I found it filled with visions of astronauts floating in zero gravity. I have to admit that my own desires to visit space have little to do with experiencing weightlessness and everything to do with seeing the planet in a new and larger context. I know the forest-and-the-trees perspective is metaphorical, but I do believe the physical has a profound and lasting effect. (Which is why, explains the yoga teacher, that living in our bodies past a certain age requires a conscious practice and diligence.)
So, I’m rethinking the whole zero-gravity issue again, wondering if NASA will ever underwrite some research on the emotional and physical high, no pun intended, that astronauts report experiencing in orbit. Course, the yoga teacher would say you don’t have to go to space to get that.
Discovery News space correspondent Irene Klotz chronicles humanity's efforts to leave the planet. One day, she wants to see for herself what all the fuss is about.
From the creators of the world's first privately developed spaceship comes its commercial cousin, Eve. During an unveiling ceremony at Scaled Composites' Mojave, Calif., base, Burt Rutan, who designs cutting edge aircraft -- and spacecraft -- with an artist's eye, and his newest best friend, the daring and dashing Richard Branson, of Virgin fame and fortune, showed off the launch vehicle for their new venture.
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