October PopSci out with two stories by me

You should be able to find the October issue of Popular Science on stands starting around now. I have a one-pager about Bigelow Aerospace's Fly Your Stuff program on page 48 and a three-pager about the Lunar Lander Challenge beginning on page 38. Sorry, no links available to the articles yet.

I mention the Bigelow piece first because I'm most proud of it. Robert Bigelow is running an honest-to-God space program, with actual hardware now in orbit, and for all the right reasons.

He wants to turn a profit, sure, by building orbiting space complexes for lease to anyone who can afford it. But he also wants to inspire as many people as he can to look up, as in beyond our current political and environmental problems, to consider, even for a moment, that we human beings are capable of fantastic things, if only we put our differences aside and work together.

In one little step along the way, he's opened the cargo manifest of his next orbiting test vehicle, currently slated for a January launch, to anyone with a spare $295. That price gets you a photograph or golf ball-sized object floating around on camera in the Genesis II, which is a 1/3-scale model of the habitable modules that Bigelow plans to launch by 2012. Your money back if you don't see yourself or your keepsake in space via Bigelow's website within 90 days of launch.

I think that's very cool, for two reasons. One, for a relatively small amount you can help support the emerging commercial space industry by buying a real service, and two, it'll give ordinary people a legitimate sense of ownership in a successful space venture.

Lockheed Martin gets Apollo 2.0

...and the crowd yawns. "I doubt that in the coming months and years I will be commenting much on Orion or the other shiny, precious projects in Mr. Griffin's Constellation," says Clark S. Lindsey, one of my favorite bloggers. I'm absolutely with him on that. Three point nine billion in NASA funny money through 2013, an additional $3.5 billion from 2009 to 2019, and hundreds of millions more for incidentals, according to the New York Times. And they won't stick to that budget, because as Warren E. Leary and Leslie Wayne point out in their Times article, "there is little incentive to stay within budget once a contract has been awarded."

All this for a manned lunar landing that will accomplish little more than was done by project Apollo almost 40 years ago. Orion, as NASA administrator Mike Griffin himself admits, is just "Apollo on steroids." It's still a throw-away capsule design to be built without consideration for cost or sustainability. NASA will throw these rockets at the moon, plant more flags, maybe pull up a few Chinese ones, and go back home. There's some lip service being paid to having Apollo 2.0 act as a stepping stone to Mars, but I don't think that idea is being taken very seriously by anyone. Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

No, this looks to me mainly like a giant corporate welfare project designed to keep Big Aerospace and certain congressional districts happy.

Orion will plod along racking up cost overrun after cost overrun, while the entrepreneurial space community will surge ahead. You want to see some real action in space, check out Space Adventures, with its planned commercial lunar flyby mission. Odds are it'll handily beat Apollo 2.0 back to the moon, and for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Funny, Leary and Wayne don't even mention NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, ostensibly designed to give the burgeoning entrepreneurial space community a leg up in supplying NASA with commercial orbital spaceflights. Is that because with a measly $500 million spread out over five years and two competing companies it's too insignificant for serious consideration?

My own sneaking suspicion is that now that NASA has carefully selected the best of the commercial orbital space programs it will transform that miserly carrot into a stick as soon as it looks like either SpaceX or Rocketplane Kistler is in danger of leaving Lockheed Martin in the dust.

Book update

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm writing a book for Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins on commercial spaceflight. It's called The Entreprenauts: Visionaries and Daredevils of the New Space Age, and it's due on shelves next summer. That means I have through this year to write it. Since we're more than halfway through the year, it's a good time to take stock and see how well I'm holding to schedule.

As it turns out, I need to step up the pace. Actually, I need to hit the afterburners. I'll make it, but I have to cut back on non-essential activities. Like, unfortunately, blogging.

Much as I hate to do it, I'll need to tune into current events in the commercial space arena quite a bit less, and focus mainly on each chapter of the book as I write it. Means I'll be more of a spectator and a cheerleader for companies and people I happen not to be writing about in the book at the moment, and less of a reporter.

I'm still holding out for one last big spectacular trip I might possibly take before I have to turn in the book, but from here out I'll be traveling a lot less and writing the book a lot more until that sucker's done.

The field is moving way too fast now to keep track of all of it for the book, and I have to face it, there's no way this book can be up-to-the-minute. Best I can do is give a good treatment of the launch of the new space age, show some of what's been happening up to a certain, largely arbitrary cut-off, and use that to extrapolate where I think it's all heading. The result, I believe, will be an enduring, and entertaining, record of a truly important historical movement.

Meanwhile, tune into this blog every other week or so for my occasional posts on what's happening with the book and for glimpses of the people and machines I'm writing about--not necessarily breaking news, but stuff I think you'll find interesting.

August PopSci out now

...at least in digital form. Hit www.popsci.com, then click the "Digital Edition" link on the left side of the page to subscribe. For 10 bucks a year; it's hard to go wrong.

My Rocketplane feature isn't the cover story, as I (mistakenly) reported earlier, but it does get mention on the cover. Comments welcome, especially from Rocketplane folks; I haven't heard from them yet.

I'm just back from Mojave, where I got a chance to meet the Masten Space Systems folks and sit in on a test of the 500-pound-thrust, lox/alcohol fueled engine that will power their Lunar Lander Challenge vehicle this October at the X Prize Cup. Dave Masten and his people are still setting up their shop and test area, and like all the other engineers and other new hires flooding into the area, searching for housing.

I also dropped in on XCOR to check on the progress of the X-Racer (still on track for a debut at the X Prize Cup). XCOR is working on two other major projects besides the X-Racer: the Xerus suborbital spaceship, and a methane powered rocket engine for NASA, suitable for use on the space agency's planned Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV).

Build a lot, test a lot

That's the philosophy of John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas, Texas, where last night I was treated to a test firing of the group's newest ethanol-and-liquid-oxygen powered rocket engine.

The photo above is from a test a couple of months ago, from Carmack's blog, taken by team archivist Matt Ross. It gives you a good sense of the setup for static tests.

After they finish filling the lox tank at right, the team retreats into the building and lowers a pair of steel garage doors. Call them blast doors. Carmack sits at a folding table just inside, where he fires the engine with a video gamer's joystick and monitors it on a laptop computer.

The beast roaring outside for a few seconds made the trip worthwhile for me all on its own. The lower panel of the blast door just above the engine shook and rattled and on a TV monitor a gorgeous jet of bright blue flame shot through with shock diamonds stabbed the air.

Here's some video of a test from the Armadillo website.

Carmack and his crew are at the point now where they're milling new ignition plates and building other components almost as fast as they can burn them up in static fire tests.

They're hard at work prepping for the Lunar Lander Challenge set for this October in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their 600 pound Quad Vehicle, pictured below in another grab from the Armadillo website, will balance on the flame of the 5,000 pound thrust engine I saw being tested.


Carmack's getting serious about turning Armadillo from a band of dedicated amateurs into a profit-making company, and he's already lining up some business deals that could mark a real turning point for the company, even apart from a win at the Lunar Lander Challenge.

And as his team gains proficiency at building engines and flying unmanned craft, his ambitions are soaring; 64 of those 5,000 pound thrust engines, he told me, could send a payload into orbit.

Off to L.A. today for a visit to Mojave Spaceport tomorrow. Stay tuned.

SpaceShipOne, model airplane

Jeff Foust has some excellent commentary on yesterday's second anniversary of SpaceShipOne's first commercial spaceflight.

Meanwhile, I've been learning about the world's first homebuilt spaceship's roots in model airplanes. Burt Rutan, the ship's designer, has spoken of finding his best workers for SpaceShipTwo from among the ranks of model airplane builders rather from the traditional aerospace industry, and no wonder.

SpaceShipOne can trace a direct line of ancestry from the model airplanes Rutan built as a grade-schooler in the 1950s. In fact the very name of Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, comes from the concept of building scale models of bigger airplanes out of composites made of fiberglass and other high-strength cloth and glue--materials dedicated amateurs used to build Rutan's first airplane designs in their garages.

No, as Jeff sadly points out in his commentary, you still can't fly an X Prize class ship into space. But you can fly its tiny cousins, and a hell of a lot more cheaply.

Check out Dan Kreigh's WildRC.com for some eye-popping videos of these little machines whirling around in the Scaled hangar in Mojave California, and then if you're inspired, pick one up for just a couple hundred bucks.

Kreigh is a structural analyst at Scaled. Along with other work on SpaceShipOne, he designed and applied the spray-of-stars pattern on the spaceship's nose. And he builds and sells radio controlled model airplanes of the same carbon fiber construction as the spaceship itself. Kreigh reports, however, that the one-of-a-kind model of SpaceShipOne pictured above is not for sale.

Bigelow on COTS

Receiving money from NASA's new Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program will disqualify a company from winning Robert Bigelow's America's Space Prize, Bigelow confirmed for me yesterday.

Under COTS, NASA has allocated $500 million to be spent over five years to help entrepreneurial space companies develop spaceships that can send crew and/or cargo to the International Space Station. The space agency is expected to select companies to receive the first installment of this money by summer's end.

Robert Bigelow also has a vested interest in helping private enterprise reach orbit; he expects to launch the first commercial space station, now under development in North Las Vegas, by 2012.

But he doesn't have a way to get people and supplies there, which is why he launched his $50 million America's Space Prize in 2004 for the first private spaceship capable of docking with an orbital outpost.

America's Space Prize is not compatible with COTS, however. "One of the conditions of that was that federal money would not be allowed into that program," Bigelow told me of his prize. And that includes COTS money. "I still think that rule helps to level the playing field."