Vehicles

The vehicles that carry teachers into space will be unlike the throwaway rockets that carried astronauts to the Moon or even the Space Shuttle that carries astronauts to the International Space Station.

These new vehicles will be true spacecraft: fully reusable, capable of repeatedly traveling into space and returning to Earth without throwing away expensive hardware, requiring little more than refueling to be ready for the next flight.

Fully reusable vehicles have many advantages and potential applications. A report by the US Department of Commerce says, “Given the potentially significant operational advantages of reusable vehicles... NASA could carry out its research missions at lower cost. The military could be provided with rapid space access for surveillance, high-altitude reconnaissance, or ordnance delivery, and new commercial markets such as space tourism, fast package delivery, or microgravity processing could be developed.”

Such vehicles are being developed by private companies right now. The first commercial test vehicle, SpaceShip One, flew in 2004, becoming the first private spacecraft to carry humans into space and winning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize by flying into space twice within a period of less than two weeks. 

SpaceShip One was a proof of concept, which sparked a race to build follow-on vehicles for paying customers. Scaled Composites is now building a larger version, called SpaceShip Two, that will be operated by Virgin Galactic, a new division of billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group. Other companies are developing their own designs; competitors include Armadillo Aerospace,  Blue Origins, Masten Space Systems, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Ltd.,  SpaceDev/Benson Aerospace, and XCOR Aerospace. There is even international activity, with the Russian Myasischev Design Bureau and European aerospace firm EADS Astrium working on vehicles.

These spacecraft are suborbital vehicles. They do not travel fast enough to reach orbit but travel to the edge of space, experience a few minutes of weightlessness and exoatmospheric flight, then return to Earth. Because of their lower energy requirements, suborbital vehicles can be smaller and easier to develop.

Suborbital vehicles do not require new technology. The United States Air Force built and flew a suborbital vehicle called the X-15 in the 1960's, but government policy at the time said that manned spaceflight was the exclusive province of NASA so the Air Force was not allowed to pursue further developments.

Suborbital spacecraft are to orbital vehicles as microcomputers are to mainframe computers. By dramatically reducing costs, they will revolutionize space travel and open the space frontier to the American people, just as microcomputers opened computing to the American people.

Like microcomputers, suborbital vehicles are expected to grow in capability, eventually leading to the development of reusable vehicles for orbital and deep-space applications. The Department of Commerce report Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicles and Applicable Markets says, “In much the same way as the Wright Flyer of 1903 led to incremental follow-on aircraft such as the World War II Spitfire, DC-3, F-86, and F-15, the vehicle that wins the X-Prize will provide a technology stepping stone towards orbital reusable launch vehicle development.”

Teachers in Space is working with many of the companies developing these new suborbital vehicles. Armadillo Aerospace,  Masten Space Systems, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Ltd., and XCOR Aerospace have donated flights to the Teachers in Space project. We may work with additional companies in the future. Our goal is to raise tens of millions of dollars to allow hundreds of teachers to fly each year.

Safety

Safety is a prime concern whenever human spaceflight is discussed. When we discuss Teachers in Space, people want to know, “How safe will suborbital vehicles be?”

There are many reasons to believe that suborbital vehicles will be safer than the expendable or quasi-reusable space vehicles of the past. The Department of Commerce report Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicles and Applicable Markets states, “Suborbital reusable launch vehicles can have greater margin (the amount of allowable increase in mass, volume, etc.) than orbital vehicles. This means that weight growth during the development period has much less impact on payload performance. In addition, these higher design margins allow off-the-shelf hardware (which is usually heavier) to be used, as well as allowing component redundancy to mitigate failures.

Suborbital vehicles are regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration's Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportations (FAA-AST). Because spacecraft are in an early, pioneering stage of development, similar to aircraft in the first years of the 20th Century, the FAA does not attempt to certify the safety of spacecraft design the way it does with modern aircraft. Instead, FAA-AST plans to regulate passenger-carrying vehicles based on informed consent. It will also require sub-orbital vehicles to conduct a large number of flight tests to demonstrate reliability prior to carrying passengers for hire. 

We recognize that space flight is an inherently hazardous activity and this acknowledgement of potential risk may prevent some teachers from applying to Teachers in Space, but not all. Many teachers already participate in dangerous activities such as mountain climbing, scuba, and skydiving. Thousands of teachers applied to NASA's Educator Astronaut program, and suborbital vehicles are expected to be far safer than the Space Shuttle. We expect to receive a large number of applications from teachers with the “right stuff” to go into space.

Burt Rutan's Vision

 

Teachers in Space advisor Burt Rutan is the aerospace engineer who founded Scaled Composites. During his career, he has produced more than 40 innovative aircraft designs, as well as the design of SpaceShip One. Click on the video below to hear Burt talk about the important role that suborbital vehicles will play in the future.