First blogger in space

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft lifted off early this morning carrying Anousheh Ansari, who helped to fund the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for the first commercial spaceship.

Not only is Ansari the first woman to pay her own way into space, she's also the first blogger. The blog is presided over by X PRIZE founder and chair Peter Diamandis. Diamandis will post emails and photos from Ansari during Ansari's eight-day visit to the International Space Station via a $250,000 data link paid for by the foundation. Diamandis's own commentary is a also a rare treat and not to be missed.

Ansari says space fans will get a chance to chat with her in person at this year's X PRIZE Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico late next month.

Flying my stuff

Check out the spiffy new banner above, from Bigelow Aerospace's "Fly Your Stuff" program. Bigelow's next space launch, currently scheduled for January 2007, will carry the cover of my book about commercial spaceflight. The book is due out next year from Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins. More news on that soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to fly an image or a small object to be photographed in space and displayed on Bigelow's website, now's the time to do it. Yesterday, Bigelow released the reservations that hadn't been claimed by then. Means a bunch more slots are available now. Get one for $295 until November 1 or until they're all gone, whichever comes first.

No, I didn't get my slot free, and Bigelow isn't paying me for the banner. Like it says, I'm just thrilled to be on board. And, well, hell, how could I resist doing the first book promo in space?

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.