A bad day at Scaled Composites

An explosion during a test of rocket engine compenents by SpaceShipTwo builder Scaled Composites claimed the lives of three Scaled employees and seriously injured three others yesterday, according to various reports.

This is sure to set back the SpaceShipTwo program, and casts a pall on the entire industry.

Those of us in and around the commercial space industry have known from day one that deaths were inevitable during the opening of the final frontier, but that doesn't make it any easier to take.

My heart goes out to the good people at Scaled Composites and their families. I pray for a speedy recovery for those injured, and I offer that those who who died did not do so in vain. They were working to uplift all of humanity, and I very deeply appreciate their sacrifice. They are my heroes.

--Update at 2:12 p.m. ET--
We're doing updates on the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com as more information becomes available.

Book signings, podcasts, and a review

Back from Washington, where I launched my book Rocketeers at the National Air & Space Museum and the NewSpace 2007 conference. There's me signing books at the museum's Udvar-Hazy center at Dulles Airport. Larry Lowe, writer for Air & Space Smithsonian, took the picture.

C-SPAN taped the talk I gave at the museum's National Mall location before my signing there on Friday. Should be on C-SPAN2's Book TV in a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, HarperCollins has posted some podcasts I recorded about the book, including a complete synopsis told in six minutes.

And the August Wired has a review of the book giving it eight out of ten stars.

On C-SPAN at National Air & Space Museum

Just heard that C-SPAN will tape my upcoming talk and reading at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum for Book TV on S-SPAN2. The show bills itself as "Top Nonfiction Authors Every Weekend." Hey! That must be me!

If you're going be in Washington, DC for the NewSpace 2007 conference this week, or if you're there anyway, come on over to the museum this Friday, July 20, at 3:00 p.m.

That's the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What a great way to celebrate--among some of the most historically important air- and spacecraft in the world, including the Apollo 11 command module and SpaceShipOne, which started the personal spaceflight revolution chronicled by my book Rocketeers.

The book isn't officially published until July 31, but the museum gift shop will sell copies in advance for me to sign in honor of Apollo 11 and the space conference.

I was originally slated to read in the gift shop, but since the TV crew is coming, the museum is going to rope off a gallery for me and whoever wants to check it out.

I'll be at the museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport to talk and sign again on Sunday, July 22 at 1:00 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Responder

Back from Huntsville and a visit with Orion Propulsion, led by Tim Pickens. Some highlights:

--Barbeque at the Pickens residence. The Pickens clan gathered for burgers and hot dogs (I brought the veggie burgers), Volkswagen-tinkering, rocket truck tours, and hybrid suitcase rocket demos.

--Orion's a profitable, $2-million company owned by its main engineers, with no investors. It's poised to expand significantly. If NASA selects Boeing to build the Ares 1 upper stage, Orion will build maneuvering and roll control thrusters for the system. NASA expects to choose between the Boeing team and one led by Alliant Techsystems next month.

--Last month, Orion was awarded a contract from the Army to build a rocket called Responder: 22 pounds to low Earth orbit that can be launched for under $1 million on a moment's notice from a portable pad. Pickens envisions hundreds of pop-up satellites transforming the satellite launch industry.

--Speaking of vision, Pickens moved me and filmmaker Mark Greene to tears as we taped an interview with him at Orion. He spoke of his and his 15-year-old daughter's dream to fly to space, and he told us how he started Orion by selling rocket parts on eBay. If I can do this, you can too, he said. Pickens is at once disarmingly down-home in his presentation and powerfully eloquent, a winning combination.

Mark and I hope to have video to post in the next couple of weeks.

---
Correction on 7/16/07 at 2:14 PM ET

Tim Pickens phoned me just now to clarify that his contract for Responder is just for a study by way of Colsa Corporation, not direct from the Army, and not for actually building the system.

Towering inferno

Here I am at the Saturn test stand at Marshall Space Flight Center. This stand was built to test the cluster of five 1.5 million-pound-thrust F-1 engines that powered the moon rocket.

It's 310 feet to the top. From up there you can see all of Huntsville. Rocketeer Tim Pickens pointed out the mountain ridge 10 miles away where his family home shook on its foundations when a test-fire was in progress.

The stand saw duty testing Space Shuttle Main Engines and then Atlas rockets before falling silent in the late 1990s. Engineers are refurbishing it for NASA's new moon shot.

This place is holy ground for rocketeers. Wernher von Braun, architect of project Apollo, rode the very elevator that took us to the top, walked these scaffolds. Pickens says he still gets a buzz off the energy of the place.

Booming with Orion Propulsion

Greetings from Rocket City, Huntsville, Alabama. I'm here with filmmaker Mark Greene shooting video at Tim Pickens' company Orion Propulsion.

After watching a tank burst test Orion did for NASA, we headed out to a cotton field near the airport to see the crew light up the 2,700-pound-thrust hybrid rocket engine Pickens built for his pickup truck.

That test was for Miltec, which wanted to test their engine health sensors in, er, field conditions. Why'd you pick Orion for this, I asked one of the Miltec guys. "They do about the fastest turn-around in the business," without cutting corners, he said.

Today it's off to Marshall Space Flight Center for a look at the historic test stands and then more interviews at Orion.

Rocketplane in freefall?

From the OKG News on Friday: "Rocketplane's XP, a suborbital tourism vehicle meant to take off from the Oklahoma Spaceport in Burns Flat, is in a funding free fall, according to the project's former chief engineer."

That's David Urie, who left Rocketplane Kistler in May. According to the article, he says the company diverted its resources to its Kistler division to support NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

I'm waiting for word from the Rocketplane folks on their side of the story.

Personally, I'd like to see companies like Rocketplane Kistler tell NASA "Thanks but no thanks," and focus on true entrepreneurial spaceflight without government interference. But with the space agency throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at small companies like this the temptation to take it is just too great.

Problem is, whoever pays the bills makes the rules, and NASA's commitment is clearly to the big, mainline aerospace contractors building the next moon ship. Something like $100 billion over the life of that program, as opposed to a mere half a billion for COTS.

While I'd like to remain optimistic, $100 billion talks a lot louder than 0.5% of that. Yes, COTS and Project Constellation will perform two different missions, but both are to send people to orbit, and as Robert Heinlein famously pointed out, that's half the battle for any space mission. If successful, COTS would render at least half of Constellation redundant at a tiny fraction of the price. Is Big Aerospace really going to allow that?

Rocketeers TV

On Tuesday I'm heading to Rocket City USA, Huntsville, Alabama, with filmmaker Mark Greene to shoot video with rocketeer Tim Pickens. Tim plans to test fire a hybrid rocket engine and then we'll get a tour of his rocket shop and visit the historic test stands at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

The stuff at Marshall is closed to the public, so I'm looking forward to getting a look at (and filming) locations that rarely get attention. Tim tells me there's a Saturn 1-B booster lying on the ground next to the test stand, just where engineers left it after a test-fire forty-some years ago. Amazing.

Mark got so excited about my book Rocketeers early on that he wants to pitch it as a TV show to cable networks. To do that properly, we'll need to put together a pilot, which is where Tim comes in. Whether or not the full 13-episode series comes to be, we'll have some great footage to post here, on my site, and elsewhere.

I'll blog on location. Stay tuned.

More pics from Bigelow's Genesis II

That's Robert Bigelow's granddaughter's name on the outside of the ship. An out-of-this-world present to her, according to Leonard David.


In this interior shot, you can just make out some snapshots floating around in the background. Presumably this is a test of the Fly Your Stuff program, in which members of the public, including yours truly, submitted images and small objects to be flown on the ship.

Genesis II is a sub-scale test version of the full-up space station modules Bigelow Aerospace is building as part of the first commercial space station program. The ship joined Genesis I in orbit on June 28.

Signed copies of Rocketeers on my website

I've just put up a shopping cart at michaelbelfiore.com. You can order signed copies my forthcoming book Rocketeers there for no extra charge. I'll ship advance orders on publication day, July 31.

On The Space Show

Tune in tomorrow, July 2 to hear me talk about my forthcoming book Rocketeers on Dr. David Livingston's The Space Show at www.thespaceshow.com, 2-3:30 Pacific Time. If you're in the Seattle area, tune in to KKNW, 1150 AM.

Dr. Livingston is the radio show host for the NewSpace community, exceptionally well-informed and extremely thoughtful in his questions (as are his listeners). He's been reading a prepublication galley of my book, so we'll have a lot to talk about.