Futurismic

Via Jason Stoddard (and originally found at the Something Awful forums – have that, top-down media channels!), here are some Danish dudes doing something that, on paper, seems somewhere between naively hubristic and charmingly Quixotic: they’re trying to build a sub-orbital rocket vehicle for under €50,000. A vehicle that can carry a human passenger, that is. YA RLY.

This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers. Our mission is to launch a human being into space.

We are working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft.

Two rocket vehicles are under development. A small unmanned sounding rocket, named Hybrid Atmospheric Test Vehicle or HATV and a larger booster rocket named Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or HEAT, designed to carry a micro spacecraft into a suborbital trajectory in space.

These guys aren’t just pipedreaming it up in the undergrad lounge, either; they just yesterday tested their HEAT-1x booster rocket. Got propulsion pr0n?

Maybe the top of the gravity well really is entrepreneurial turf from here onwards.

Here’s another prospect to add to the list of alternatives to rocketry, if only for launching inert and non-fragile stuff like fuel or water into orbit. It’s a dirty great air-gun, basically:

At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.

While humans would clearly be killed and conventional satellites crushed by the gun’s huge g-forces, it could lift robust payloads such as rocket fuel. Finding cheap ways to transport fuel into space will lower the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit, and in future it may be needed to supply a crewed mission to Mars.

The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. “We think it’s at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,” he says.

A factor of ten is a lot of money, meaning that initial investment could probably be recouped pretty fast. But is a Jules Verne-style cannon a sexy enough idea to attract the funding? It’s limited range of cargo will probably count against it, for a start.

Meanwhile, the Ad Astra company is making strides with its prototype VASIMR plasma engine, which will hopefully be way more efficient than traditional thruster designs. Fitting one to the ISS could save literally tonnes of orbit-adjustment fuel expenditure per year, and (once the tech is scaled up) plasma engines could get a spacecraft to Mars in little over a month. Here’s a brief video if the VASIMR being tested:

It’s a bit quieter than a regular rocket, isn’t it? But still more exciting than a big air-gun… which may partly explain the enduring romance of rocketry.

We’ve mentioned the one-way option for Mars missions here a few times recently, the latest being in response to the Krauss op-ed in the New York Times. Earning himself his second Futurismic mention in as many days, Karl Schroeder tears down the “poisonous meme” that claims the journey to Mars is too dangerous – the reality is that it’s too expensive.

The objections all sound reasonable:  too much radiation!  Too far away!  Zero gravity is too debilitating!  Too expensive!

All of these objections are true, while at the same time they’re all wildly wrong, and largely for the same reasons.  In fact they’re all true only if getting from Earth to orbit remains as expensive as it is now.

Consider the seemingly insurmountable problem of radiation that Krauss complains of in his piece.  What’s the solution to radiation?  Shielding.  Is shielding a spacecraft impossible, or even difficult?  No, actually it’s easy.  Two meters of water around the crew cabin are enough to solve the problem of radiation in the inner solar system.  The problem is not the shielding; it’s the cost of shipping the water up to orbit that is the problem.

Ditto for, oh, let’s say zero gravity.  No astronaut should ever have to put up with zero gravity for more than a day or two at a time; the simple solution to the debilitating effects of freefall is to spin the spacecraft.  To do it in a manner comfortable to to the astronauts, you need a long boom arm, which might be heavy and awkward to lift from Earth.  The point is, the solution is easy.

Too far away?  If a space voyage is going to take months or years, there are two simple solutions:  send the ship faster, by using more propellant; or bring along more supplies.  Both of these solutions are primarily constrained by the cost of bringing stuff up from Earth.

That cost is, of course, the cost of old-school 1960s vintage chemical rocketry – $10,000 for every kilogram of stuff you want to get into orbit. Schroeder lists a number of alternatives, some of which you’ll have read about here or elsewhere: magnetic accelerators, laser propulsion launchers and so on… all with much lower to-orbit costs, all within the reach of NASA budgets – if they abandoned rocketry.

The question stands, though: given that NASA is well aware of its own budgetary problems, why is it clinging to such dated and inefficient methods? Is it for the prestige, the showiness, the rocket’s red glare? (You have to admit, a Space Shuttle launch is pretty impressive to watch… when it works.) [image by jurvetson]

But back to Schroeder:

Space is only a costly and dangerous destination if you insist on using 1960s technology to reach it.  Once NASA–or more likely the private sector–finally abandons that route, what was impossible will become easy.  –I only fear that the meme of space’s inaccessibility will prevent us from ever building the launch infrastructure that will prove it wrong; at this point, the meme looks like it’s turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That would be a sad thing – to turn our backs on space, not because it was genuinely impossible, but because we’d allowed ourselves to be convinced that it was.

If SpaceX are out of your budget range, and you’re not willing to wait for laser propulsion to mature to commercially viable levels, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were bang out of affordable options for launching your own satellite into orbit.

Not so – thanks to Interorbital Systems, you can buy a TubeSat 750-gram microsatellite and launch space for it on one of the company’s Neptune rockets… for just $8,000.

Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth’s surface, they do not contribute to any long-term build-up of orbital debris. After a few weeks of operation, they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly.  Launches are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2010.

[...]

Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software,  transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held HAM radio receiver. Simple applications include broadcasting a repeating message from orbit or programming the satellite to function as a private orbital HAM radio relay station.

Sounds pretty limited in scope, doesn’t it? But then so do many generic technology platforms, right up until the point where hackers and other inventive types start testing their limits… and $8,000 isn’t a completely unreachable investment for a small clade of geeks with a big idea, or for an organisation with less savoury motives. If nothing else, we may see some sort of orbital-broadcast pirate radio revival… [via SlashDot; image courtesy Interorbital Systems]

The space geeks among you will doubtless have heard of the laser propulsion concept before, but it’s largely remained ensconced in the realms of the theoretical so far.  However, the superbly-named Leik Myrabo reckons he has cracked it, and is currently working on bringing his ideas to a commercially viable status:

Basic research experiments using high-powered lasers are underway in Brazil, with experts investigating the central physics of laser-heated airspikes and pulsed laser propulsion engines for future ultra-energetic craft.

At the Brazil-based lab, a hypersonic shock tunnel is linked to two pulsed infrared lasers with peak powers reaching the gigawatt range – the highest power laser propulsion experiments performed to date, Myrabo said.

“In the lab we’re doing full-size engine segment tests for vehicles that will revolutionize access to space,” Myrabo emphasized. “It’s real hardware. It’s real physics. We’re getting real data…and it’s not paper studies.”

“Right now, we’re chasing the data,” Myrabo said. “When you fire into the engine, it’s a real wallop. It sounds like a shotgun going off inside the lab. It’s really loud.”

The laser propulsion experiments, Myrabo added, are also relevant to launching nanosatellites (weighing 1 to 10 kilograms) and microsatellites (10 to 100 kilograms) into low Earth orbit.

Now, colour me cynical if you will, but I reckon that last throwaway point there about the microsatellites may be the the more plausible goal for this technology, and the stuff about sending passenger vehicles into suborbital space is optimistic grandstanding designed to attract attention and investment. [image by Krassy Can Do It]

Even if the researchers (who are sponsored under international collaboration between the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Brazilian Air Force) are convinced of their omega point, cheap microsat launches will at least provide an income stream while development continues. Either way, it’s good to see another option on the table for commercial space launches.