Posted: Apr 10, 2011 10:32 pm EDT
(By Tina Sjogren) In exploration, everything we do makes possible something else. A paraglide in the thin air of Everest is useful when engineering a lander for Mars. The tight sleds used for unsupported polar expeditions show how little man can get by on. Columbus pitch to the Queen for America is a blueprint how to sell the dream of Space.

Himalaya climbing season not yet full throttle but a National Space Foundation symposium coming up: in this series we will wrap the status of our next frontier.

Previously at ExplorersWeb

Mid April last year we left off the Space section with the "Deer in headlights: ExWeb Space Symposium report."

New Presidential directives had re-shuffled the space flight budget to mostly private players while NASA was pointed towards unspecified "science". Lori Garver, NASA's new second in command, was frustrated at the space execs behaving "as deer in headlights" she said. NASA had their chance. Now, the ball was passed into the private corner.

With a new Space symposium coming up in Colorado Springs this Monday, let's check how the private initiatives have fared. Guided on the dim path of truth by the bright light of money, let's linger in suborb first.

Part 1: The (suborb) Tourist

2004 was a big year for Burt Rutan and the X Prize. SpaceShipOne bagged $10 million in a somewhat scary, but very first manned private spaceflight.

Along with the prize money came Virgin's PR mega-machine and the wheel started spinning at once. A space flight company was set up, clients were recruited among Hollywood movie stars, and Branson became staple on the cover of adventure mags. Spaceports were negotiated in New Mexico, the Arab Emirates and as far as northern Sweden; complete with Absolute vodka and an ice hotel.

Tailored to a new generation doomed for the first time to be dumber and live shorter than the previous: in a 360 turnaround from Kennedy's speech this time we'd go not because it's hard but because it's fun.

Fast forward 7 years.

Are we there yet?

An important part of Virgin's marketing victory was Richard Branson's right hand man of 20 years, Virgin Galactic CEO Will Whitehorn. Recently though, the guru of hype left the mothership and returned to his successful PR agencies working with companies such as Facebook and Salesforce.

Beware of Big Bad Wolf now climbing into the private corner: new CEO for VG is George Whitesides, former chief of staff to NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

SpaceShipOne was sold to Northrop and SpaceShipTwo came on the table. So are we there yet?

Following a successful drop test last year for SpaceShipTwo (the space plane left the rocket and landed on its own) up next are a glide test, rocket test and spaceflight test.



As in former years, Branson estimates that Virgin Galactic could be in business next year. Whitesides would not commit to a date except for an estimate that daily suborbital flights will take place by 2020.

XCOR

Remember XCOR, sharing test pilots and Mojave grounds with Rutan's Scaled Composites? They already built and flew a rocket-powered plane which drove costs to only $900 per flight and worked on a new fuel pump expected to greatly reduce even this expense.

XCOR's new two-seat Lynx suborbital rocketship would be capable of flying several times each day with a turnaround time of only 8 minutes and max altitude of 64 miles (equal to SpaceShipTwo/Virgin). An ExWeb favorite because it could become the first truly private space plane, Lynx would allow you to park your own satellites as long as you could withstand 4G and extend your runway about 30 ft.

Unfortunately, the original deadline of 2010 came and went with Lynx still under development, and the first test flights not yet scheduled. While waiting, heres a simulation of a Lynx flight:



Space Adventures

Veteran in the space tourism game, Eric Anderson of Space Adventures is in fact the only yet who has got private astronauts to space.

The shuttle program winding down the Russians have become fully booked with NASA astronauts though, and word is that private folks won't get seats again until earliest 2013, when a 20% increase in manned Soyuz launches is expected. On the other hand the Russians have also increased the price for US Astronauts from $50 million to $60 million plus per seat starting in 2014.

Their only provider of transportation gone, SpaceAdventures had to look for other opportunities. They found Texas based Armadillo Aerospace.

Armadillo, Masten and Blue Origin

Before he founded Armadillo, John Carmack built the legendary games Doom and Quake. Last year Eric and John shook hands: at $102,000 (undercutting Virgin) they plan to sell seats on suborb vertical-launch rocket ships to be developed by Armadillo, now seven full time employees.

While Carmack seems mostly back at id Software programming video games in 3D these days, Armadillo has got Ben Brockert from Masten Space Systems, who joined last year.

And here's how it all finally implodes in the California desert: SpaceDev - who built the engines for White Knight - plan to build Dream chaser, a miniature shuttle that would launch horizontally on the nose of an Atlas rocket. Marketed by Virgin Galactic, SpaceDev will use Branson's Mothership for Dream Chaser drop trials in 2012.

Ben Brockert's former employer Masten is also based in Mojave next door to Scaled Composites, XCOR and SpaceDev. In hard competition with each other for the Lunar Lander Challenge (Masten won), both Armadillo and Masten specialize in vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL), also favored by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin.

The concept stems from the early 90s McDonnell Douglas DC-X. Scaled Composites made the shell but all else was off the shelf and several DC-X engineers have since been hired by Blue Origin.

This project alas, is interesting to ExplorersWeb, whose founders (including this writer) plan to go to Mars. Vertical-landing, vertical-takeoff could provide an optimal solution for the weaker gravity of the red planet.

Here's the latest test flight of Armadillo's "Mod"



Next: The Big S

Private space astronauts so far:

Dennis Tito (Italian American former JPL scientist engineer, multimillionaire and the first to pay for his own ticket to space);
Mark Richard Shuttleworth (South African computer entreprenour);
Richard Garriott (British-American Ultima game developer and son to a NASA astronaut);
Anousheh Ansari (Iranian-American engineer, IT entreprenour and XPrize financier);
Charles Simonyi who went up twice (Hungarian-American computer software executive formerly of Microsoft);
Greg Olsen (American scientist and entrepreneur with NASA as major customer for his high-sensitivity cameras);
Guy Laliberte(Canadian founder of Cirque du Soleil).







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