Doom Rocket Man Preps for Liftoff

That's the title of my latest story for Wired.com on the upcoming X Prize Cup. It'll run as the top story through the weekend.

In it I mention that X Prize chairman Peter Diamandis is launching a new venture on Monday. I've managed to uncover its name: Rocket Racing Inc.

In this photo from XCOR, you can clearly see the spiffy new Rocket Racing logo. That's an actress in the cockpit of the EZ Rocket, filming a promo that will be released at a press conference Diamandis is holding on Monday in NYC to announce the new venture.

I'll be there, and I'll report on it here immediately afterwards. Stay tuned!

da Vinci Project still racing to space

Just got off the phone with Brian Feeney, head of the GoldenPalace.com Space Program Powered by the da Vinci Project (say that 10 times real fast).

This is an all-volunteer effort out of Toronto to launch Feeney into suborbital space aboard a space capsule and booster rocket combo from the bottom of a high altitude balloon.

For a while last year it looked like Feeney might be Rutan's only competition for the X Prize, with a license from the Canadian government to launch on October 2, just two days before what turned out to be Rutan's final X Prize winning flight. It was not to be, but Feeney got himself a lot of press that way because everyone loves a good race story.

Brian tells me he and two other members of his team will be at the X Prize Cup this October 6-9 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, along with the actual space capsule "in tow," not a mockup. He also pointed out that the da Vinci Project web site has been completely redesigned, and updated with information about the group's orbital space plans.

Feeney and the da Vinci Project were part of discussions earlier this year to help form the New Mexico Spaceport Authority now being formed. More on that exciting project in a later post. Stay tuned...

Carmack says he might reach space next year

Last night I spoke with John Carmack, head of former X Prize contender Armadillo Aerospace. He's also the programming genius behind best selling games by ID Software such as Doom and Quake. He and his crew will be at the X Prize Cup this October 9, flying a ten-foot tall remote controlled rocket. The machine is a demonstrator for a one-person suborbital spaceship the group is building right now. Carmack tells me he may go for an unmanned test flight before the end of this year, with subsequently higher and faster unmanned flights through next year, leading up to a manned flight by the end of 2006.

The manned ship will carry only one person. On its first manned flight will be Armadillo's Russell Blink. Blink won't so much fly the ship as hang on tight for the ride; the gimbal-steered craft will need machine-fast reflexes to guide it, so it'll be mostly computer controlled. Blink will hold a dead man switch which, if released, will trigger the abort mode, a powered landing. It will also have parachutes for an emergency landing in case the rocket motor fails.

The ship will take off and land on its tail like the science fiction rockets of old. After reentry, instead of deploying parachutes or gliding down on wings, it will fire up its rocket engine again. This is the flight profile of the McDonnell Douglas DC-X, or Delta Clipper, which was a test vehicle for a planned single stage to orbit craft.

Carmack tells me he always envisioned a one-person craft, rather than the 3-place ship required to win the Ansari X Prize. Now that Scaled Composites has won the X Prize, Carmack says he's free to revert back to his original plans. He likes much better the idea of flying lots of one-man missions, rather than fewer multi-person missions. He'll entertain offers to pay for rides on his vehicle, and he's planning to pursue government contracts for his company. "We're really on the cusp of having significant capabilities here," he told me last night.

My PopSci cover story now on the Web

My October cover story for Popular Science on t/Space is now up on PopSci.com. Full text and all images from the print version. Enjoy!

Also I've just landed an assignment to blog from the X Prize Cup for PopSci.com. It's an exclusive they have, so I won't be blogging the event here. I'll post a link here when the time comes, though.

Just received a digital SLR camera and I now have two weeks to learn how to use it. Also starting an online photojournalism course. First assignment: photograph the X Prize Cup. Oh, and, incidentally, have the photos posted to the Popular Science Web site. I guess there aren't many beginning photojournalists who get to jump in feet-first like that!

Ex-shuttle pilot to fly rocket plane at X Prize Cup

I'm gathering info in advance of some articles for Wired News on the upcoming X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico October 6-9. This is the first annual space expo put together by X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. The idea is that in future years it will be the Indie 500 of spaceships, with head-to-head competition between rocket builders and pilots to see who can fly the highest and fastest and the greatest number of passengers to orbit.

This year it looks like only one vehicle will be piloted, a rocket-powered Long-EZ airplane developed by XCOR Aerospace and dubbed the EZ Rocket. At the controls will be Rick Searfoss, who was chief judge for the X Prize. He's also an accomplished test pilot and a veteran of three space shuttle missions, one of which, STS-90 in 1998, he commanded.

Searfoss tells me the new commercial space industry is where the action is. Retiring NASA astronauts, he told me just now on the phone, generally have two choices--either to go work for big aerospace companies, or to "descend into management" at NASA. Neither option appealed to him; he wanted to fly in space again, and he feels XCOR gives him a good shot at it.

Flying the EZ Rocket gives a good taste of what's to come; XCOR is planning a suborbital space plane that will take off from a runway under rocket power. Should be a good show on Sunday, October 9. Searfoss is due to blast off at 1:30 and 4:30 p.m.

NASA's new spaceship - updates

UPDATE
Second-to-last question, from a writer from Popular Mechanics: What role with commercial providers (Elon Musk, etc.) play in this new plan? Griffin says he wants to use them if they're available, for servicing of the International Space Station. NASA's ideal job, he says, will be to focus just on expanding human presence outward into space, on exploring. He'd like to leave the routine operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private enterprise, if possible.

UPDATE
Griffin saying now that the new vehicle will "have a ten times higher factor for safety" than the shuttle. Says shuttle has 1 chance in 220 of being destroyed on each mission. New vehicle will have 1 chance on 2,000. Easy to see how he got the shuttle safety record, because it's based on actual performance. Don't know how he can figure the safety record for a vehicle that doesn't exists yet.

UPDATE
"This is not new money. This is about a budget that keeps NASA" constant. Also says they won't take money from science programs. That's just plain not true. Money already being cut from NASA science programs like crazy to support this. "We do not take one thin dime" out of exisiting science programs, we take it from manned space programs.

UPDATE
Porcupines mating: Griffin says that's how they'll develop CEV at the same times continuing to run shuttle. "It's like the old joke: How to porcupines mate? Very carefully. We have a transition path from shuttle to shuttle-derived...."

UPDATE
CEV can carry up to 6 astronauts to International Space Station. So it will replace shuttle for crew transfer to ISS.

UPDATE
New vehicle, called the CEV, to come online in 2012. Shuttle to be retired by 2010. Leaves two-year "gap in manned spaceflight capabitilty is inevitable," Griffin says.

UPDATE
Griffin: Where we go on the moon will be largely driven by science.

UPDATE
NASA not going to ask for more money from Congress. Going to take money from existing budget/programs, i.e., shuttle and space station. There's the rub, as far as I can see; NASA's stretched thin now, so I don't see how they're going to keep all three programs running simultaneously.

UPDATE
Blog not updating properly...trying this in a new post:

Griffin: It's very Apollo-like. Think of it as Apollo on steroids. It's 50% bigger than Apollo.

Cost: Much, much more than I thought. Griffin's in Q&A session now. First question, the most obvious one: how much is this gonna cost: $104 billion dollars for the first moon mission with people, spread out of 13 years. Yow.

NASA's new spaceship is updated Apollo

Griffin: It's very Apollo-like. Think of it as Apollo on steroids. It's 50% bigger than Apollo.

Cost: Much, much bigger than I thought. Griffin's in Q&A session now. First question, the most obvious one: how much is this gonna cost: $104 billion dollars for the first moon mission with people, spread out of 13 years. Yow.

NASA admin Griffin just presneted new spaceship plans. It's essentially Apollo, NASA's original moonship. But this one can fly four people to the moon instead of two. It will land on land, not water. But otherwise looks the same: capsule plus service module, even given the same name: Command and Service module.

NASA's new spaceship - update

Press conference on NASA's post-shuttle plans begins at 11:00 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. Access it on NASA TV, if you get it, or on the Web at:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

I just got off the phone with a NASA press officer, and he tells me supporting documents will also be available online. Should appear on the main NASA press page at:

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/index.html

NASA's next-gen spaceship

Details have been leaking for a while now, led by the Orlando Sentinel's Mike Cabbage last month, but NASA's finally planning an official press briefing next week, possibly Monday, to give us the word on what form its big-budget shuttle-replacement will take.

NASA administrator Mike Griffin briefed the White House on the plan on Wednesday and will brief Congress tomorrow, according to this report from space.com. The space.com story also confirms that the new spaceship will use shuttle-derived technology, ostensibly to make the project easier and the final vehicle safer, but we all know what kind of safety record the space shuttle has. The real reason for using shuttle technology is to keep all of the existing shuttle contractors and the politicians beholden to them in the money.

And what a lot of money it will be. According to the space.com article, NASA wants to spend a total of $10 billion for a new space capsule and launcher. Not sure where they plan to get all that money, since they'll be shoveling billions of dollars into the space shuttle at the same time, but perhaps I'll find out in next week's press briefing.

NASA's secret space plan

Here's the cover for the next issue of PopSci, featuring my story on t/Space. Should be on stands within a week or so.

I love the look of this thing. It's like a pulp magazine of the 1940s. "Cannibalistic spider sex can make you a genius!" Fantastic. There's no denying that this is a popular magazine!

I used to dream of writing for the science fiction pulps like my idols Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and the rest. But except for a handful of small press zines that languish with the poetry mags on the bottom racks, the pulps are dead and gone; science fiction short stories just aren't popular literature any more.

Science fact, however, certainly is, even stuff as speculative as anything run by Astounding Stories back in the day.

Seems I've arrived, just where I've always wanted to be. It's a great feeling.

NASA hurricane damage update

I'm on a conference call right now with Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations, and Bill Parsons, NASA's senior official in charge of the hurricane relief effort, getting an update on the impact of Katrina on NASA.

Here's what I'm getting so far:

Estimates to repair the two NASA facilities hit by the hurricane:

$600 million Stennnis Space Center
$500 million Michoud Assembly Facility

These costs include not only repairing the physical structures, but also housing the hundreds of workers who are now homeless.

The schedule is blown for returning the shuttle to flight. Before the hurricane, estimate was for a March 2006 launch. Now officials refuse to speculate on a date. "We don't have a schedule," says Gerstenmaier.

Special projects

I once knew a guy named Michael Dust. He had these business cards that looked like they were hand-cut from cereal boxes. They were stamped with Dust's name, and the title "President," along with the legend "Special Projects." I haven't seen the guy in years, and I'm sure I wouldn't even recognize him on the street. But I'll never forget his cards.

I guess those cards made such an impression on me because we all have our Special Projects, those wild-haired schemes we dream will make us rich and famous or somehow change the world. Usually we don't tell people about them because we're afraid they'll laugh at us. Not Michael Dust. He stamped them on his homemade business cards. I loved the audacity of that.

In the spirit of Michael Dust, I thought I'd share with you some of my Special Projects in progress. These are stories in the commercial space world I'm actively tracking and which will be the subjects of upcoming magazine and newswire stories of mine (as well as a lot of activity on this blog):

X Prize Cup. This is the first annual spaceship show put together by X Prize founder and president Peter Diamandis. It'll take place October 6-9 this year, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I'm going with Wendy and baby Amelie to make a family vacation out of it as well as a business trip. Some of the folks who competed for the X Prize, along with some new-comers will show their work in progress. As well as writing about the event, I'll shoot photos as the first assignment for a photojournalism course I've sign up for. Look for the photos here on the blog as well.

Virgin Galactic. I met the president of Virgin Galactic last spring at the International Space Development conference in Washington. Very friendly guy, and a very articulate spokesman for the company, which wants to send the first paying tourists into suborbital space within three years. Lots that hasn't been written about them yet, and they've been very busy lately....

Bigelow Aerospace. I wrote a cover story on Robert Bigelow's commercial space station operation for the March issue of Popular Science. Since then Bigelow's made real progress toward a first launch early next year. Bigelow filled me in on some of his latest Special Projects on the phone recently, and I think some updates are in order.

SpaceX. This company looks at long last ready for a first launch before the year is out, possibly even by the end of this month. Unfortunately, that first launch will take place in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific--not exactly easy to reach. Even so, I'll be following it closely since that first launch, if successful, will tremendously boost the company's credibility, put it on the road to profitability, and pave the way for SpaceX chief Elon Musk's Special Project for sending people to Mars.

Stay tuned....