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Spinoffs expected from suborbital vehicle work
Safe, affordable and reliable access to space is key, say entrepreneurs
LAS CRUCES, N.M. - The development of commercial suborbital space vehicles should lead eventually to businesses such as commercial hypersonic point-to-point air travel and low-cost launches to low Earth orbit, according to spaceship builders, venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who gathered here October 22-23 to take part in the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight.
The key to making those businesses profitable will be achieving safe, affordable and reliable access to space, Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., said at the conference, which was hosted by the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium. The private suborbital flight enterprise "builds up the infrastructure we need to go do the bigger and better things," he added.
Space for decades has been so expensive, so unreliable, so unsafe, making it extremely difficult to do any reliable planning, Greason suggested. "And we've known for decades and decades and decades that the solution is you have to have vehicles that can get you up and down into space with, perhaps not with the reliability of current airplanes, but maybe more like the reliability of high-performance military aircraft."
The suborbital market is critical, Greason continued, because it will whet the appetite for competitive vehicles "to get bigger, better, higher and faster," which will lead to orbital spacecraft.
"The only way we're going to figure out how to do this stuff is to do it," Greason said. XCOR has started building a two-seat suborbital spaceship — dubbed Lynx — that will carry people or payloads.
Regarding the ability of start-up space organizations that can be fleet-of-foot, contrasted to the sluggish and bureaucratic nature of traditional aerospace companies, Greason said: "I see in a few people I know in the larger companies a dawning recognition that, maybe instead of the dinosaurs buying the mammals and stomping on them, they should work with them. We can conquer whole new territories together."
Hypersonic point-to-point
Kevin Bowcutt, chief scientist of hypersonics for the Boeing Company, took a longer view at affordable, routine and rapid point-to-point travel. "It's a quantum jump from Mach 3 suborbital flight ... to getting a third of the way around the world," he said. Work now is under way on suborbital vehicles that will help validate markets, Bowcutt noted, and also get money and technology flowing to enable viable hypersonic vehicles in the future.
Bowcutt spotlighted a number of hypersonic vehicle projects, including Boeing's technical participation in the Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation program — a collaborative project involving Boeing, several Australian entities, as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Constructing an ocean-hopping hypersonic craft is going to require an international effort, Bowcutt said. "There is no real easy shortcut. It's about 10 years and maybe $10 billion [as an initial research and development effort]. ... There is no one country ... there's no one company ... that can take on the risk and the cost of developing a hypersonic point-to-point vehicle or an orbital system. So we're going to have to share this cost ... share the risk," Bowcutt said, but doing so also would increase the market, he added.
"To get long distances quickly and avoid sonic boom and heating issues - some of that trajectory has to be suborbital and now you're pushing up to Mach 10 and above. There's just no way to get around that from a physics point-of-view," Bowcutt said.
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