NASA selects near-space providers

[docmordrid]

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=34303

NASA Selects Seven Firms To Provide Near-Space Flight Services

NASA has selected seven companies to integrate and fly technology payloads on commercial suborbital reusable platforms that carry payloads near the boundary of space.

As part of NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, each successful vendor will receive an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. These two-year contracts, worth a combined total of $10 million, will allow NASA to draw from a pool of commercial space companies to deliver payload integration and flight services. The flights will carry a variety of payloads to help meet the agency's research and technology needs.

"Through this catalog approach, NASA is moving toward the goal of making frequent, low-cost access to near-space available to a wide range of engineers, scientists and technologists," said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The government's ability to open the suborbital research frontier to a broad community of innovators will enable maturation of the new technologies and capabilities needed for NASA's future missions in space."

The selected companies are:

-- Armadillo Aerospace, Heath, Texas
-- Near Space Corp., Tillamook, Ore.
-- Masten Space Systems, Mojave, Calif.
-- Up Aerospace Inc., Highlands Ranch, Colo.
-- Virgin Galactic, Mojave, Calif.
-- Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, Camarillo, Calif.
-- XCOR, Mojave, Calif.

NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist is charged with maturing crosscutting technologies to flight readiness status for future space missions. Through these indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, NASA intends to provide frequent flight opportunities for payloads on suborbital platforms.

The Flight Opportunities Program is managed at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. For more information on the program, visit:
http://flightopportunities.nasa.gov

For more information about NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/oct

[Danderman]

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19356.msg791414#msg791414

Virgin Galactic announcement


 

[tigerade]

I suppose this is good news.  However, I'm not sure what kind of payloads/experiments they would carry.  What kind of payloads could we see that would be scientifically valuable?  They are only going to be in zero G for a few mins, at best.

[Lars_J]

Intesting... John Carmack stated recently in a Q&A that Armadillo would not pursue further NASA contracts (due to concentrating more on their original purpose - manned suborbital flight) - but I suppose this might be different since this is not a vehicle/tehnology development contract, instead a integration/payload one.

[Robotbeat]

I suppose this is good news.  However, I'm not sure what kind of payloads/experiments they would carry.  What kind of payloads could we see that would be scientifically valuable?  They are only going to be in zero G for a few mins, at best.

Near-space is not terribly well-understood. There are plenty of experiments to do, there. There are also low-cost astronomical experiments that can be done with suborbital work like this.

Also, don't underestimate the benefit of being able to do engineering tests on suborbital flights like this. Trying to get useful data from short, 20 second parabolic flights is a lot harder than an order of magnitude more time, and the cost isn't that high. Also, these give access to the real space environment, too, so you can see how well your spacecraft mechanism works in microgravity, vacuum, and the radiation environment of space. That is a heck of a lot cheaper and faster than doing a dedicated orbital launch for the mechanism.

Even a few seconds of microgravity is useful (i.e. drop-towers), so think of how much better a few minutes would be! If suborbital flight becomes truly routine, you could test it the same day, or at least the same week. Try years for an orbital flight. Watching Altius Space Machines' parabolic flights showed just how important even a full minute of microgravity can be versus just seconds, especially when human-tended.

And the price is far less than orbital and (at least eventually) can easily fit in the budget of even a "Powerpoint" study.

[grr]

Odd.
Did blue origin not apply? They are supposed to have a sub-orbital in the next year.

However, congrats to the winner.
I am pretty happy to see up in there