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.