How one company is making space pay

MSNBC: Will you be going after the $50 million orbital prize with your Dream Chaser orbital spaceship?

Benson: The Dream Chaser would not qualify if it gets federal funding. There may be a way. ... As a publicly funded company, SpaceDev has more options available for raising money than smaller, privately owned companies do.

Our original concept for Dream Chaser was designed around an existing NASA technology vehicle, the X-34, which was designed to fly at Mach 6 to 7 and test thermal systems. It would have been a great suborbital vehicle, because that's what it was designed for. That was the good news. The bad news was that it wasn’t designed for people. So we would have had to re-engineer it internally.

But what we were interested in was what's called the outer mold line. It's expensive to come up with that, through all of the modeling and wind-tunnel testing and computational fluid dynamics, so that you have a shape that can withstand the hypersonic speeds and the levels of heat that are generated.

When our focus was on suborbital spaceflight, the X-34 made sense. But then we received from funding from NASA's Ames Research Center, and we were able to go into our concept more deeply and use the great analytical tools that they have at NASA Ames. And when we did re-entry simulations on the X-34, the leading edges and nose were too sharp, and the heating would be right at the ragged edge of what thermal protection systems could withstand.

So then we looked around for another existing designed vehicle with the right shape. We haven't announced which one or ones fit those criteria, but we did find something. We came up with what we think is a very simple and practical approach that requires no new technologies whatsoever. And that’s a big problem with most of these systems, is that they do require new technology. That becomes very expensive and very risky. Schedules tend to slip when you’re developing a new technology for a specific application. So we were very careful to design SpaceDev Dream Chaser around existing technology, and we simply scaled up our rocket motors to a larger size.

MSNBC: So I take it the current artist's conceptions of the Dream Chaser are out of date?

Benson: That design has been superseded. But we haven't publicly identified what our approach is, because this is a competitive arena.

There are upcoming solicitations from NASA that could provide partial funding for the development of new capabilities. It's unlikely that NASA is going to fund any small company for human spaceflight, because of the perceived risk and liability.

MSNBC: The message from NASA Administrator Mike Griffin seemed to be that the agency wouldn't commission a company to come up with a spacecraft just for NASA, but if there was something a company had that NASA could use, he wouldn't rule out buying a ride on that spacecraft.

Benson: Exactly. That's good news. But then the bad news is, so what? Where does the money come from to do the development? Well, it may be that an upcoming NASA solicitation may provide some development money for unmanned cargo capabilities. If a small company like SpaceDev won a fairly large development contract for cargo delivery, then that would take the burden off developing the manned part of the project. Maybe that could be financed outside the government. Then you'd wind up with a system that might qualify for the America’s Space Prize.

So that's all one topic. That probably is an immediate killer application. I think all that is necessary, but I don’t think it's sufficient to get humanity bootstrapped off the planet and into self-sustaining settlements elsewhere.

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