Rockets of the future take center stage

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

LAS CRUCES, N.M. - Thousands of spectators swarmed around Las Cruces' airport on Sunday to watch today's private-sector rockets show their fiery stuff, while both private and public space leaders charted a course for tomorrow's million-dollar ventures.

The rocket show was the climax to the Countdown to the X Prize Cup exposition, presented here by the X Prize Foundation. The event follows up on last year's big finish to a $10 million competition for suborbital spaceflight.

On Sunday, one rocket soared — not just once, but twice. Another blew up. Yet another spaceship lifted off, hovered for a few seconds, then fell over when it landed. Several companies showed off mockups of several future spaceships, and NASA took advantage of the occasion to announce yet more contests for private-enterprise rocketeers.

Even as the gates were opened for Sunday's festival, NASA announced it was partnering with the X Prize Foundation on contests that could result in multimillion-dollar payoffs. "We're ready to undertake two new prize competitions in the arena of suborbital rocket flights," said Brant Sponberg, program manager for NASA's Centennial Challenges effort.

One contest would encourage the development of a reusable suborbital rocket that could carry payloads to altitudes high enough to yield significant advances in space research. The other would be aimed at vertical-launch suborbital rockets that could be adapted for future lunar landers.

"If you can take off and land vertically, and if you reach a certain velocity during flight, you are demonstrating the basic capabilities and rocket energies necessary to land and launch from the moon," Sponberg explained.

Rules and rewards to be determined
He said the rules for the contests — including the required altitudes, payloads and maximum speeds — still have to be worked out over the next couple of months. However, he told MSNBC.com that the altitude for the research-rocket challenge would likely be in the range of 300 to 1,000 kilometers (188 to 625 miles), with payloads of "tens to hundreds of kilograms."

The lunar-lander challenge vehicles, meanwhile, would likely have to reach speeds of Mach 6 to Mach 8, he said.

John Carmack, who makes his money as a video-game developer and spends some of it as the leader of Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, said the lunar-lander challenge "certainly sounds like something up our alley." Armadillo is developing a vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket capable of bringing passengers to the edge of outer space.

Ellis Neel / Alamogordo Daily News Thousands of visitors flocked to Las Cruces International Airport to watch rocket companies show off their fiery stuff on Sunday.

California-based Masten Space Systems is also working on a vertical-launch craft, and Michael Mealling, vice president of business development, said Masten was interested in both challenges. "It just so happens that the flight plan [for the competitions] matches our development cycle exactly," he told MSNBC.com.

One big unknown relates to the size of the purses offered. Sponberg said he hoped the prizes could be set at $1 million or more, but that would depend on congressional approval. He noted that the legislation governing NASA's funding for the coming year was still being considered.

"That's really the long pole in the tent," Sponberg told MSNBC.com.

Looking to the future
Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, said he also was hoping for prizes in the $1 million range, and hoped that competitors would go after the prizes during flights featured at the annual X Prize Cup competition in New Mexico. He told reporters that such collaboration between NASA and the emerging field of space entrepreneurs was "so important to the future of space exploration and space travel."

As is usually the case with the Centennial Challenges, NASA would put up the prize money, but the X Prize Foundation would be responsible for funding the contest operation.

NASA has announced several Centennial Challenges over the past six months or so, and the program's first two contests, for beamed-power systems and super-strong tethers that could be used in future space missions, is due to begin Oct. 21 at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The purses for those contests are legislatively limited to no more than $250,000 each.

Diamandis told MSNBC.com that NASA has given the X Prize Foundation a contract to study the possibilities for far more ambitious prizes, including private-sector orbital flight. Las Vegas hotel magnate Robert Bigelow has already said he would fund a $50 million orbital contest known as America's Space Prize, but it was far too early for Diamandis to say how future projects by NASA or the X Prize Foundation might mesh with Bigelow's contest.

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