29 May 2009
U.S. Agencies, Companies Work to Commercialize Space Travel
Business growing for spaceports, commercial launches, space station flights
This is the first in a series of articles about the commercialization of space.
Washington — Citizens of Earth are a long way from the sort of interplanetary travel that is routine in science-fiction worlds, but in the United States, federal agencies and pioneering companies are taking the first small steps critical to making space accessible and affordable to more people for work and play.
Today, activity is increasing at private spaceports worldwide. Commercial launch vehicles carry communications, remote-sensing or scientific satellites to orbit. And private citizens can pay $20 million or more to spend 10 days at the International Space Station or $5,000 to fly in a modified Boeing 727 that lets them experience weightlessness by doing aerobatic maneuvers.
In the United States, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are two of the main federal agencies involved in helping establish a commercial space transportation enterprise.
The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation licenses commercial launch operators and spaceports and issues commercial astronaut wings.
NASA is spending billions of dollars to support selected companies in building and flying their own cargo-carrying spacecraft to the International Space Station — a capability that only the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency would have when NASA retires the space shuttle in 2010.
“NASA needs to spend its resources on cutting-edge technology,” Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the Commercial Crew & Cargo Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, told America.gov. “We need to focus on the tough stuff of getting humans back into space and exploring the moon and Mars and beyond. Once the technology is demonstrated, we should turn it over to industry so that they can operate these systems in a more efficient manner.”
SPACE TRANSPORTATION
NASA has had a mandate to promote commercial space activities since the National Aeronautics and Space Act created the agency in 1958. In 2005, under then-administrator Michael Griffin and with approval from the White House and Congress, the agency authorized $500 million over five years (2006-2010) to support the growth of a commercial space transportation industry and create a competitive market for supply flights to the space station.
Under the Commercial Crew/Cargo Program, NASA created Commercial Orbital Transportation Services partnerships and challenged industry to demonstrate any of four capabilities: transport unpressurized cargo, transport pressurized cargo, transport and return cargo, and transport crew.
NASA received 21 proposals and chose two — from Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of California (which was awarded $278 million) and Rocketplane-Kistler of Oklahoma (awarded $208 million) — to develop and demonstrate vehicles, systems and operations needed to support a human facility like the space station. Each company was required to meet a series of financial and technical milestones as work proceeded.
NASA “disengaged from the agreement” with Kistler in October 2007, Lindenmoyer said, when the company failed to meet some of the milestones. After another competition and 13 proposals, NASA chose Orbital Sciences Corporation of Virginia ($170 million) to participate in the partnership.
Orbital is set to demonstrate a pressurized transportation capability in a March 2011 flight to the space station. SpaceX plans three flights; the first will be a launch of its Falcon 9 two-stage launch vehicle and Dragon capsule by the end of 2009. Dragon will make several Earth orbits, re-enter the atmosphere and splash down off the coast of Southern California.
The second SpaceX flight, scheduled for 2010, will be a close pass of the space station, Lindenmoyer said, and the third by the end of 2010 will dock with the space station.
In December 2008, NASA awarded contracts to Orbital Sciences and SpaceX to provide cargo services to the space station, ordering eight flights valued at about $1.9 billion from Orbital and 12 flights valued at about $1.6 billion from SpaceX. The contracts, which began in January and are effective through 2016, each call for delivery of a minimum of 20 metric tons of cargo to the space station.
“Access to space has to become more available, cheaper and more routine,” Lindenmoyer said, “and this is our shot at helping make that happen.”
SAFETY FIRST
The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has a two-part mission: to ensure public safety during commercial launch and re-entry activities and to encourage, facilitate and promote commercial space transportation.
One of the most important public safety tools is a launch license, George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, told America.gov. Any U.S. citizen or company that wants to conduct a launch anywhere in the world must have a license from AST.
“Over the years, there have been 196 licenses for launches and all have been completed without fatalities, serious injuries or significant property damage that involve the public,” Nield said. “That is a safety record that we are very proud of and we hope to continue going forward.”
AST also licenses launch and re-entry sites, called spaceports. Licensed sites include SpaceFlorida at Cape Canaveral; the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia; the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska; the Mojave Air and Space Port in California; the Oklahoma Space Port in Burns Flat; and, licensed in December 2008, Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Each spaceport has to go through a policy review (by other U.S. government agencies), a payload review, a safety review, an environmental review and a financial responsibility review.
“We have another few [potential spaceport operators] that we’re working with right now,” Nield said, “so there’s a lot more interest and a lot of activity that we expect in the next few years.”
Outside the United States, Scotland, Sweden, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates have announced plans to build spaceports in their countries, Nield said, “primarily designed to host suborbital space tourism flights that have been proposed by Virgin Galactic and other companies.”
AST awarded commercial astronaut wings to Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, who flew missions in SpaceShipOne, a spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites that completed the first privately funded human space flight in 2004. (See “U.S. Agency Proposes Rules for Commercial Human Space Flights.”)
Nield said AST will continue to award wings to future commercial astronauts.
More information about the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation and NASA’s Commercial Crew/Cargo Program is available at the agency Web sites.
