Human-Tended Suborbital Science Workshop

The Personal Spaceflight Federation and NASA Ames Research Center will sponsor a workshop on the use of the new generation of reusable manned suborbital space vehicles for science applications. Ames Center Director Pete Worden will participate in the event on December 15th. Ames has opened the Suborbital Ex website and here is a page describing the vehicles and their expected capabilities. Below is a description of the workshop:

[The] Human-Tended Suborbital Science Workshop [will] take place at the Westin San Francisco Market Street on Monday, December 15, 2008 from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and is sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association.

NASA has a long-standing commitment to suborbital science. Recently, in an historic first, NASA created a program office at NASA Ames for the use of emerging commercial suborbital vehicles for scientific research, including, but not limited to, /flights to space of researchers /to allow for human-tended experiments/./ The purpose of the workshop is to bring interested researchers from a number of fields together with suborbital vehicle operators to exchange information and discuss the scientific potential of these exciting new capabilities. Emerging commercial suborbital companies that will be participating in the workshop include Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, and XCOR Aerospace.

These new suborbital vehicles could enable otherwise unfeasible scientific discoveries and technology demonstration, lower costs for traditional suborbital science, and create a new way of doing business for NASA and the research community. Researchers from the fields of heliophysics, planetary sciences, earth sciences, and microgravity sciences are expected to attend. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the options offered by a wide range of commercial suborbital service providers and discuss the capabilities, needs, constraints, and opportunities of this program. Equally important, commercial suborbital service providers will have the opportunity to receive input on how their vehicles can be made to best be of service to this important set of potential customers.

Posted 11/21/08 | 07:55:28 by TopSpacer | Filed under: Suborbital Spaceflight

Comments

The Important thing is to bring in People who
are locked out of the Suborbital Science Community.

Existing scientists are locked into processes for
the current flyers, it's the unserved who will
be served.

Posted by anonymous at 11/21/08 09:12:40

Blue Origin is participating? Does that mean they're coming out of hiding?

Posted by Rob Abiera at 11/22/08 06:31:18

This is a good idea, and it's exactly what they should be doing. In fact, when I sat in on a meeting with a representative of the RLV industry months ago, it's exactly what we _told_ him they should be doing. If memory serves, they were talking about a workshop in October or something. The turnaround time was awful, and we told him that they needed to time it to coincide with a major scientific meeting. The reason is that the suborbital community is poor, and there is no way that you are going to get them to spend their scarce grant money to fly to a stand-alone workshop when there is no clear point to doing so (in other words, it does not directly and immediately connect to their research). We said at the time that they should try to hook up with AGU or some other major conference. I don't think we can take any credit for this, however, because it was such an obvious thing to do that I'm sure everybody was telling them to do it that way.

That said, it will be interesting to see what kind of response that they get. The RLV community is aiming for approximately 100 km. The kind of researchers that go to AGU are interested in much higher altitudes. I think the real value of RLVs is more in the micro-gee area, and they don't go to AGU. In fact, that community has largely been wiped out by NASA yanking away their research funds.

Posted by anon at 11/22/08 11:48:49

I didn't see EADS anywhere.

Is this is only for American companies?

Virgin Is listed, but are they classifed as an American company.

COTS was only open to majority owned American companies, as it should be, because the American taxpayer is footing the bill. I assume this will be the same.

My $ 0.02 worth.

Posted by Buck.Bundy at 11/23/08 15:47:48

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