Reserve your suborbital seats

Most of the U.S. is at least dimly aware of Richard Branson's plan to sell seats to sub orbital space on spaceship 2.  Virgin Galactic has not been shy about promoting their business venture with Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites team.  The same populace also has a vague notion that some very wealthy folks have been able to buy their way to the International Space Station via Russian Rockets.

There are other games in town, however, with the latest and most exciting being an agreement between Armadillo Aerospace and Space Adventures.  Space Adventures is the VA based company that brokered all those flights to the space station.  They also own the parabolic flight outfit, Zero-G, to give folks a shot at some weightless fun without leaving the atmosphere.

The agreement with Armadillo allows them to offer a service between those two end points.  They are signed up to be the sole provider of suborbital trips on Armadillo rockets.  It is not clear at this point how the agreement is structured.  Will Space Adventures Own and operate the rockets or simply broker the flights?  My guess is that they will form a subsidiary company to do the former or perhaps as a branch of Zero-G.

While pure speculation, I assume that in exchange for the exclusive rights to sell flights on Armadillo craft, Space Adventures would front some money for development in addition to a signed purchase agreement.  They would be invaluable for market research and aiding Armadillo in clearing regulatory issues as well.

The intrepid Pixel rocket went from a napkin sketch to a flying craft in three months.  This next vehicle shares many design elements with a scaled up Pixel.  Hopefully they can have the propulsion system hovering by fall.

New Armadillo Aerospace video

Armadillo Aerospace has posted a nice video of their activities this past year.  The video was prepared by Matt Ross  for Space Access 2010.  Space Access is an annual meet-up of commercial space insiders.  A NASA moves toward heavier reliance on commercial services Space Access is seeing growth as ever bigger players pay attention.

Some of the highlights of the film are seeing, Armadillo's stalwart performer, pixel fly again.  It has indeed been converted to Methane/Lox and sold to NASA.  And some concepts of a larger quad vehicle sporting a manned capsule.

Some quick dimensions grabbed from the video for the new quad are; 100 inches wide and eight feet tall for the capsule.  It is not clear if those are internal or exteral dimensions.  It appears as though they are going from a 3ft tank to a 4ft tank giving 2.37 times the fuel and lox capacity.  There does not appear to be any helium pressurization tank in the design from the simple drawings shown.  They will probably end up in any final design however.

Coming soon

President Obama is set to address his NASA plan sometime next week.  I am looking forward to being pleasantly surprised.  So far things are not looking good.  Earlier this week NASA Director Charles Bolden equated an increase in the NASA budget with the creation of more jobs.  To me that signals a return to the business of using NASA strictly as a cash cow.  So far the Administrations decision to cut Constellation AND increase NASA's budget can only rate as "horrible."  The only possible positive is the chance to get human rate launchers in the US sooner via the "commercial option."  Time will tell if they can manage that project without turning it into a regulatory fiasco.

I foresee contract requirements to hire a certain number of people with a certain diversity quota.  Basically you must be bloated to play.  Hopefully I am wrong.