Virgin Galactic and Orion Propulsion updates

I've been on the road with my wife Wendy and baby Amelie since last week, first hitting Nashville for the Women in Aviation conference, with a detour to Madison, Alabama for a visit with Orion Propulsion. Now we're settled into Southern California, within striking distance of Mojave. We'll be here through the International Space Development Conference in L.A. in May.

Brian Binnie, one of the test pilots for Scaled Composites who won the X Prize in 2004, gave an entertaining talk at the conference about the fun aspects of space travel. His was a wonderful counterpoint to more staid talks by shuttle astronauts Eileen Collins and Hoot Gibson, with whom he was paired.

Someone recently sent Binnie a video of a dance party that popped up in Mojave the night of Binnie's X Prize winning flight, complete with laser light show. Binnie played that intercut with video from his flight along with some suitably psychotronic music ("Voyages by Chandelier" by Casino Mansion). When SpaceShipOne's engine ("howling like a possessed cat," said Binnie) cut off and the spaceship sailed into the "mystery and menace" of space, as he put it, the music went silent too. It was an inspired presentation and it got a lot of applause from the hundreds of people in the audience.

Over lunch afterwards, Binnie told me and Wendy that SpaceShipTwo is under construction and that the simulator is up and running. He's pleased with the way the new ship handles in the simulator. Design improvements over SpaceShipOne (differently shaped wings, for instance) and the ship's greater weight will make for a smoother piloting experience, he said.

The new design won't be unveiled to press or the public until the new carrier plane is also built. Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn, who had to miss the conference due to an ear infection, told me by email just now that nothing will be shown until late 2007, just before flight testing begins.

Orion Propulsion chief Tim Pickens showed me around his fabrication and development plant just a couple of hours' drive from Nashville, and took me to lunch at the Italian fast food joint where he first sketched out SpaceShipOne's propulsion system on a napkin for Burt Rutan. Soon after that meeting with Rutan, Pickens went to work at Scaled Composites as head of propulsion for SpaceShipOne. Back at the office, he showed me his working papers from Scaled to prove it.

Orion has no investors, and is completely self-sustaining. It got off the ground with a contract from AirLaunch LLC to build rocket engine test stands (ongoing), and now also runs engine tests and builds engines and test stands for a multitude of other companies.

Pickens and Orion chief technical officer John Bossard showed me a proposal for a propulsion system in progress and then treated me to a test firing of an engine built for it. The company constructed the engine to send along with the proposal to one of their potential customers.

I've been sworn to secrecy on what the system is for or who might buy it, but I can tell you it was worth the price of admission alone. These guys aren't just talking about cool stuff, they're actually building it, and at a profit too.

Instead of trying to build full-up spaceships like other entreprenurial space companies, they're building the systems that make those other companies go. Selling shovels to the miners, as Pickens puts it, and staying out of the inevitable polics and in-fighting that arises between government, contractors, and private companies. Very smart.

Advent going for COTS

I spoke yesterday with Advent Launch Services' Jim Akkerman, and he told me that his company has submitted a proposal for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (COTS).

Advent was an X Prize competitor with a methane/liquid oxygen powered vehicle that would launch from the Gulf of Mexico and return to a water landing. FedEx pilot and son of Mercury 7 astronaut Gus Grissom, Scott Grissom, had signed on as the ship's pilot. But a fire during an engine test in 2003 put the brakes on Akkerman's X Prize attempt.

Undaunted, Akkerman went back to work on his initial plan for an orbital vehicle, shown here. Working on his NASA pension with donated supplies and work space, Akkerman completed a 20,000 pound thrust methane/LOX engine for the orbital vehicle. NASA's Stennis Space Center has it now, to test modifications they're making to allow them to test methane-powered engines as well as hydrogen engines.

Akkerman tells me he built that engine for about 1,500 bucks, hand-crafting the parts for it himself. He was a propulsion engineer at NASA for 36 years before retiring, or "graduating," as he puts it, in 1999.

He says that to make the COTS requirements, he'll have to produce an engine that delivers 30,000 pounds of thrust, but he thinks he can boost the pressure on his existing engine to get that.

His connections at NASA have helped him to some degree, as in gaining access to Stennis, though he continues to express the frustration he felt as an engineer there trying to advance cheaper, more efficient designs against bureaucratic inertia. He's excited about COTS, though, feels it represents real change for the better at NASA.

The tests of Akkerman's engine at Stennis could begin as early as June, though Akkerman's not holding his breath, given the glacial pace typical of NASA projects. In the meantime, Akkerman and colleague Glenn Smith, former deputy manager for Space Shuttle Systems Engineering, are at work on their ship's reaction control system for maneuvering in space.

"Riding Rockets"

Anyone who still believes the Space Shuttle isn't an unnecessarily dangerous ride to space should pick up Mike Mullane's recently published Riding Rockets.

Not only is the book a great read, superbly written by an apparent natural at the craft, but it's a body blow to the NASA establishment who insist on pouring good money after bad into a system that should have been scrapped long ago. Not that Mullane would have passed up any chance to fly it. As he so succinctly puts it on page 30, he and his fellow class of 1978 astronauts wanted to fly so badly that "If someone had told us our chances of being selected as an astronaut would improve if we sacrificed our left testicle, we would have grabbed a rusty razor and begun cutting."

But he doesn't let that hold him back on telling it like it is regarding NASA's God-like hubris in designing a spaceship powered by a dangerous solid fuel booster design without a usable escape system and covered by heat shielding so fragile that the machine earned the nickname "glass rocket." As Mullane says on page 34, "While no member of the shuttle design team would have ever made the blasphemous claim, 'We're gods. We can do anything,' the reality was this: The space shuttle itself was such a statement. Mere mortals might not be able to design and safely operate a reusable spacecraft boosted by the world's largest, segmented, uncontrollable solid-fueled rockets, but gods certainly could."

Along with some of the most evocative and poetic descriptions of the Earth as seen from space I've yet read, Mullane recounts the butt-clenching fear he and his colleagues felt while strapped in waiting for liftoff, knowing all too well that every launch of the space shuttle was a game of Russian Roulette. "We were all the same," Mullane says of himself and his crewmates. "Anybody who wasn't terrified getting ready to fly a space shuttle must have chased a couple Valiums with a fifth of vodka."

But the book's purpose isn't to bash NASA; it's a brave, unflinchingly honest account of one astronaut's journey from childhood into space, by turns laugh-out-loud funny and hauntingly sad; I'll never forget Mullane's reconstruction of the Challenger crew's last two and a half minutes.

Mullane was to be Dr. David Livingston's guest tonight on The Space Show, but he's had to reschedule. Mullane and Livingston are now hashing out a new date, and Livingston will let me know as soon as its finalized. I'll pass it on here.

--UPDATE on 3/21/04--
Got the word today from Livingston:

"Mullane is set for The Space Show on Sunday, April 16, 12-1:30PM Pacific Time."

To listen, surf to http://www.thespaceshow.com/ and click the "Listen Live" link, or click the archived show in the Program Archives on that same page to listen after the show airs.

The Entreprenauts (again)

I've been gently reminded that I haven't actually revealed much about my forthcoming book, The Entreprenauts: Visionaries of the New Space Age. Not so terrible, I guess, except that I promised that I would.

I'll give you a rough sketch of it now, fill in more details as my year of writing rolls on. Actually I conceived of this entire blog mainly as a running commentary on the topics covered in the book as I write the book, so stay tuned, please.

First some stats....

Title: The Entreprenauts: Visionaries and Daredevils of the New Space Age
Publisher: Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins
Publication date: Summer 2007
Manuscript due date: Early 2007

I started my professional writing life as a science fiction writer, so my sensibilities lean toward stories that move, even in nonfiction. I like interesting characters in action. I'm not so crazy about long stretches of exposition, "info dumps," in the parlance of sf writers. Can't really avoid those in nonfiction, of course, but I work to keep those at a minimum, and to use them mainly to advance the story; in this case, the story of commercial spaceflight.

That also means I'm focused exclusively on actual people building actual hardware. I've had my fill of NASA-style viewgraphs and promises that turn out to be empty. This book will tell the story of commercial spaceflight through the words and deeds of engineers, machinists, business leaders, and pilots building and flying real hardware designed to send real people into outer space.

It's a good story, even a great one, on a par with anything from the typewriters of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and all the other sf greats who inspired me to become a writer. I don't pretend to be at the level of those guys at their peak, but I do have a huge advantage over them: I don't have to make anything up. I can pick up the phone or hop on a plane to talk to the characters of my book. The people I'm writing about and the machines they're building are much more exciting than anything I could make up, anyway, because they're real.

I also believe in the promise of the commercial space age--that is a future powered by cheap solar energy and other resources from space, and the power of personal spaceflight to change life on this planet for the better.

So those are my biases. I'll get those out of way in an extended introduction showing how the events of October 4, 2004, the day the X Prize was won, changed my own life for the better.

Next up, in chapter one, a draft of which I'm finishing now, I'll have a treatment of the founding of the X Prize, background on Peter Diamandis and some of the other founders, and the day in 1994 when Diamandis and Gregg Maryniak took a Cessna 172 up on an aerial tour of Manhattan and started thinking about the early days of aviation and the prizes that laid the foundations of the modern aviation industry.

Next I'll tell the stories of some of the X Prize competitors, including Brian Feeney of the da Vinci Project, with whom I spent a week in 2003. Then I'll move on to the development of SpaceShipOne and Rutan's brainstorm that led to the building of the world's first privately funded spaceship. I plan to devote a chapter each to the two X Prize winning flights. I want to put readers in the cockpit for those flights, to recreate the actual experience that the book is all about. That gets us to the book's mid-point, the core, which is a treatment of the suborbital tourist business SpaceShipOne launched and the people involved in that effort.

The second half of the book will present detailed portraits of many of the other major players in the field--Elon Musk and SpaceX, Robert Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace, XCOR and the Rocket Racing League.... I can't hit everybody with the kind of detail I want for this book--there's just too much activity in the field at this point, so I'll have to focus on just a few. That's a great problem to have, though, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Finally I'll finish the book with a speculative chapter on what the future might look like 25 years from now, after the industry has found its main markets and has begun to mature. I'm looking forward to really cutting loose in this chapter.

In fact, since it will be the only truly speculative section of the book, I'm considering put it in the form of an annotated science fiction story. What the hell, it's my book, so I can do what I want, right? I have a really cool unpublished piece about a guy whose job it is to repo rockets from businesspeople who can't make their payments. That one might make a good foundation....