NASA Offers Grants for New-Space Research Concepts

Students interested in space research have a great new opportunity to apply for grants from NASA.

The space agency has taken note of the fact that a whole new generation of privately-funded spacecraft are poised to begin commercial operations over the next couple of years, and that (as I've mentioned before) these have great potential to enable a wide variety of research projects by students and academic researchers, as well as commercial projects.

Most of what has been written about this new generation of rockets has focused on their application for tourist flights, and that is the application that most of the companies themselves have stressed in their publicity -- especially the leader of the pack, Virgin Galactic, a partnership between the X-Prize winning Burt Rutan and the founder of Virgin Atlantic airline and a host of other Virgin brand companies, Sir Richard Branson. Among the other contenders are Blue Origin, run by  Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Armadillo Aerospace, Xcor Aerospace, and SpaceX, founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk.

But all of these vehicles also offer enormous potential for research, on everything from astronomy to atmospheric science to Earth-monitoring to engineering. Even for payloads that need the long-duration of orbital flight for their actual operations, the new mostly-suborbital craft, even with just a few minutes above the atmosphere and in microgravity conditions still offer the best testbed yet for testing equipment, rather than having to gamble on having a device work just right on the very first try in space.

NASA is accepting proposals for conceptual studies on how some of these new craft could be used for research, and the proposals are due by Oct. 8.

In its request for proposals, NASA writes that "Suborbital rocket, balloon flights, and high altitude aircraft have provided important platforms for terrestrial and space research for over 60 years. They offer the opportunity to make astronomical, solar, planetary, and Earth observations at wavelengths and special observing geometries not accessible from the ground. Past accomplishments include in-situ sampling of atmospheric and magnetospheric regions that neither orbital spacecraft nor standard aircraft can reach, examining physical phenomena in microgravity conditions that are unattainable on the ground or only briefly available in drop towers and zero-g aircraft, using instruments too massive for spacecraft to detect cosmic rays that cannot be detected from the ground, and testing scientific instruments before committing to orbital or interplanetary flight."

The new craft offer similar opportunities, potentially at significantly lower cost. But they also offer a whole new wrinkle: The possibility of having the researcher fly alongside the experiment, and be able to control it in real-time. That could open up whole new kinds of research that would never have been practical before.

As NASA describes it, "The imminent emergence of human suborbital flight for commercial purposes offers an opportunity for a new mode of research for the scientific community: human-tended suborbital investigations for cases where having a human in-the-loop would increase the scientific return of flight experiments."

NASA will award about $400,000 for these research proposals, and expects to award about 8 such grants. They will last up to one year. All of the details on the program and how to apply are here.

If NASA gets enough really good ideas proposed, the plan is that in a few years they would provide much more substantial grants to pay for the actual research missions. And that will be a really amazing opportunity for students to actually fly into space along with their research projects --maybe as soon as 2011!

Photos: Top, Lynx suborbital rocket by Xcor Aerospace, artwork courtesy of Xcor Aerospace; Bottom, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, carried aloft by White Knight Two, artwork courtesy of Virgin Galactic

Comments

[forex]

ah..it's so interesting. I like it

[x-ray fluorescence]

Its so interesting and fantastic blog.Thanks!!