I’m attending the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco where more than 10,000 scientists spanning a wide range of fields, from my own planetary science, to hydrology, geology, atmospheric science, heliophysics and more are meeting to present their latest research results. Monday I attended an associated workshop on Human-Tended Suborbital Science. The idea of this program, which has some traction at NASA, is to take advantage of the nascent private-sector suborbital launch industry. That is a boring way of describing the numerous enterprises which hope to sell you a ticket for a ride into space. Soon.
SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize in 2004 by completing two trips into space (for these purposes, technically defined as 100 km in altitude) within two weeks. The $10 million prize was certainly far less than the cost to develop the rocket, but Sir Richard Branson recognized a potential tourist market and now Virgin Galactic is nearing completion of the SpaceShipTwo model which will fly 6 paying passengers at a time to suborbital space for about 5 minutes of weightlessness, a view of the curved horizon, and astronaut wings. The name of the first ship is the VSS Enterprise, warming the hearts of all us Trekkies. Branson reportedly offered Shatner a ticket on the first passenger flight, but the former Star Trek actor apparently would like to see a bit more reliability data before he takes his ride.
Monday’s workshop was a dialog between the many companies developing private suborbital launch capabilities and the scientific community that could take advantage of those flights for scientific experiments. I was there to discuss the science that could be accomplished on such flights with experimental studies of the behavior of small colliding particles in microgravity. I have done these experiments on the space shuttle (expensive, limited access) and parabolic flights (short time in reduced gravity, not a very smooth gravity environment), and 5 minutes on a suborbital rocket would certainly open up a broad new parameter space.
One of the striking things to me about the workshop is how many companies are getting close to having rockets flying. In addition to Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is leading the Blue Origin company’s development of a passenger-ferrying rocket, SpaceX is selling unmanned payload space, and others presented plans for smaller rockets. Whether I ever personally perform experiments on such a rocket, it will certainly be exciting to watch these projects roll out over the next couple of years, and I felt it was only appropriate for me to wear my Star Trek tie to the meeting.