Main Engine Cut Off - T+163: Suborbital Crew, Virgin Galactic to ISS

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

NASA recently established the Suborbital Crew office within the Commercial Crew Program, which will focus on developing a plan to fly personnel on suborbital spaceflights. At the same time, Virgin Galactic signed an agreement with NASA to provide private orbital spaceflights to the ISS.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous—and 385 other supporters.TopicsNASA Developing a Plan to Fly Personnel on Suborbital Spacecraft | NASAVirgin Galactic to fly Italian Air Force research mission - SpaceNews.comVirgin Galactic Signs Space Act Agreement with NASA for Private Orbital Spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS) - Virgin GalacticThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. As always, I wanted to share some thoughts today on a new NASA office called Suborbital Crew. It is established within the Commercial Crew Program and obviously is focused on suborbital versions of that. And I also want to talk a little bit about a Virgin Galactic announcement that they've signed a Space Act agreement with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, which is obviously a little outside their purview right now. But there's some interesting aspects to that. So let's start with the Suborbital Crew Office. This is, as I said, established within the Commercial Crew Program. So this is a sub-team

within the crew program generally at NASA that looks to private companies providing flight to space. And obviously this is spurred by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin getting fairly close to flying regular human flights to space suborbitally. Virgin Galactic's case, they can fly a handful of people on Spaceship Two up to about 80 to 90 kilometers. In the case of Blue Origin, that's New Shepard, they can fly six astronauts up to 100 kilometers and beyond. Some cases, if you use the abort system right, significantly beyond, I guess. That could be something that they use more than just the single test in the future. This is a really cool announcement from NASA because it is different than commercial crew in its own right, right? That was a program that NASA decided to take on and find contractors for

and have those vehicles designed to the specifications that NASA laid to take on and find contractors for and have those vehicles designed to the specifications that NASA laid out up front. This, on the other hand, has flipped that script. So, the two companies developed this on their own. NASA has not had any input in those. Both are part of the NASA Flight Opportunities Program, which means they fly some small payloads on board these missions. I believe Spaceship Two has done that so far. I know New Shepard has. So NASA has had some input into, or some part in the program overall, but they've had no input into the specifications and requirements of these vehicles up to this point. And now it gets to the point where both are within a year or so of establishing

human flights to space. It sounds like New Shepard is probably not going to get there in 2020, and 2021 might be their first human flight. And then in the case of Virgin Galactic, they've got a couple of more before they're flying astronauts that are not the pilots on board that vehicle regularly. It sounds like they're going to, at the end of July, unveil the crew cabin, fit it out with the latest seats and a couple of different seats, because what they've been flying up until this point is kind of a bare-bones version of that. They did have one seat in place in Spaceship Two when Beth Moses flew, but they have, to this point, not built out that entire crew cabin yet in a way that would accommodate

passengers. Now this is interesting for these programs in a way because NASA here is being a customer. This is what they say they want to do generally in the industry where if there's services available that they're interested in, they want to buy those services. In this case, they haven't had any input up front, but they're still going to buy those services. Now, what could they do with this thing? Well, they're getting flights fairly cheaply to get astronauts up even suborbitally into space and get them some flight experience. You know, 250 grand per astronaut is what Spaceship Two is apparently charging, maybe a little more than that. New Shepard, probably in the same range. So a full crew cabin for low millions,

and you've got, you know, five to seven minutes of free fall time for your astronauts. You could do experiments during that time. You could do crew tended experiments if you want. Or honestly, you could just get that person a little bit of time in microgravity, which would help them to get accustomed when they're ready to go out and get on the launch pad and fly all the way up to the ISS or beyond or to the lunar, cislunar space or the lunar surface even. They're not going to be like straight up a rookie. They're still going to be a rookie getting to orbit, but they're not going to be, you know, a rookie in the sense that they've never gotten aboard a rocket engine before. So there's probably some useful

stuff that could be done there in terms of the training program. So right now they're doing a lot of work in centrifuges and simulators and all these different environments that try to get them close to what they're going to experience on launch day. So when they do get to launch day, they can just do their job. Obviously, the higher fidelity training that you've got, the better. So if this is something that they could use to train up new astronauts, maybe even use it as part of their astronaut candidate program to assess the readiness of these people to become astronauts, that could be very interesting for NASA for very little investment. Relative to everything that NASA does, a couple of million dollars is pocket change. So it's really interesting

in terms of how they could use it. And I think for the companies, this is a massive market that up until now, we've been thinking about space tourism with these companies and saying, well, who has 250 grand to put down for a seat? There's a market there, but it's not very big. They've just opened themselves up to a giant space agency that has plenty of people they would want to fly. And there are other agencies out there in the world that would want to jump in on the same kind of thing. October of 2019, we saw a contract signed between Virgin Galactic and the Italian Air Force to fly a research mission. I think it was three people or so on a suborbital flight. So the U.S. here with NASA is not the first to establish interest in Virgin Galactic. And I wouldn't be surprised to see other nations kind of jump on the same way.

And this is very similar to Axiom Space. If you've heard those episodes I've done with members of Axiom Space's team, they're the ones that are going to put up new modules to the ISS. They're also going to fly private astronauts to the ISS for missions. And that is even more costly, right? 50, $60 million, whatever it is per seat. That is interesting to some subset of humans that are interested in space tourism. There are a couple of people out there that would want to spend that kind of money, but it's really interesting to nations that might not have a space program or might have just established one, definitely don't have launch vehicles, nor even maybe agreements to fly their

astronauts with the US or Russia or China that want to put up a little bit of cash and have themselves an astronaut. In the same way here, we're going to see that on the suborbital side with NASA, with the Italian Air Force, and I would not be shocked to hear others coming out of the woodwork. So I feel like this is a part of the conversation that was missing from suborbital flights is that there is going to be interest from not just private individuals, but organizations that are going to assign crew members to these flights as well. I don't know if they'll do, you know, buy out the whole vehicle because it would be kind of odd to have, you know, a very serious mission alongside a bunch of people taking selfies, like they should be up there, but

it might be kind of weird when you're trying to get your work done in your very few minutes to have, you know, Bobby from Chicago bouncing around and bumping India while you're up there. Apologies to any Bobbies out in Chicago, but, you know, probably you're not going to be great next to the Italian Air Force members that are trying to do some stuff during their mission. Now, one thing that does concern me here is that in the NASA announcement of Suborbital Crew, it says that they're establishing this office. I'm going to read a little part of this press release that they put out. One of the initial activities for Sub-C, that's what they call suborbital crew, is to work with the Federal Aviation Administration and commercial

suborbital space transportation providers to define the approach for system qualification for NASA personnel, as well as identify the specific performance capabilities NASA desires. So this is the part that gets me a little concerned. I wonder what kind of input NASA is going to have before they're ready to fly their crew members on these vehicles. Are they going to ask for changes? Are they going to ask for additional human rating? Because those requirements on the commercial crew side obviously are way, way more requirements

because they're going up to orbit, they're doing all the rendezvous and docking at the ISS, they're integrating with the ISS for months at a time. There's, you know, in the case of those vehicles, there are the life support systems that have to be operational. In the case of suborbital missions, you're just on the air that's in there because you're only up there for five or seven minutes. So there isn't as much of a life support system on these vehicles. So if NASA comes in and starts requiring a lot of changes to these vehicles, or requiring specific vehicles that need to be checked out to NASA specifications before they're ready to go on and

fly, that could present a problem for specifically these two programs that are already very delayed, one a lot more delayed than the other, and have had a ton of development problems to this point, are not making progress as quick as we thought even within the calendar year that we're in here. So any additional requirements or specifications could just keep pushing this timeline out to a degree that is non-functional to some extent. So if NASA is really committed to just buying a commercial service here, this is the time to prove it. You know, if they're going to be committed to the same way that they could buy an American Airlines flight for, you know, somebody flying between Kennedy Space Center and headquarters, and they're not going to have to look into Boeing's policies for the 730, well,

that's probably a bad example, but they're not going to have to do a whole specification requirements. You know, all this research and human rating stuff for, you know, the seat 23A on a commercial airliner. If they're committed to that model, this is where we're going to see that or not. So that's the thing that I'm going to be watching here. It's the thing that concerns me, honestly, about this program in terms of how it interacts with these two programs of Spaceship 2 and New Shepard as they're so close to the finish line. If this was established a couple years ago, it definitely would have made these vehicles a lot later. But the fact that it's established within a year or two of these things starting to fly humans pretty regularly, maybe that's a good sign that NASA is committed to just buying these services and not having too much input, you know, above the kind of specifications they need to figure out what

missions they would fly on this. But maybe they're not going to have too much input about changes to the vehicles directly. Now, I want to get to some Virgin Galactic Space Act agreement news with NASA about the ISS. But before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who's supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month. There are 423 of you supporting this show. I could not be more thankful for your support. This episode was produced by 38 executive producers. Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous executive producers.

Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. If you want to join that crew, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Jump in there. At the $3 level, you'll get headlines every single weekend where I run through all the stories of the week. And you get a special little podcast feed so you can listen to it right wherever you're listening to this and stay up to date every single week. Let me do the work for you rather than you having to read through all of the news of the week to figure out what is worth paying attention to. So head over there if you want to help support the show and get a little bit of headlines in your life. All right, this Space Act agreement that Virgin Galactic signed with NASA. This is early stages,

I would say, but it is notable for a couple of reasons. And this is very similar to something that we just talked about with Axiom Space, where Axiom is working on new modules for the ISS, but they're also, before those get up there, because those are still, you know, three or four years out at this point, they are going to fly private astronaut missions to the ISS separately. So the existing ISS today, they're going to buy Dragon vehicles, potentially Starliner in the future from Boeing, and fly astronauts to the ISS for some sort of duration mission. They're going to fly, you know, one to two a year, I think was the current schedule. So they're going to be able to provide this private mission capability to the ISS. Well, it sounds like Virgin Galactic signed a SpaceX agreement that is very similar to

that, in that I'll read a little bit of the press release here. Under the agreement, Virgin Galactic will develop a new private orbital astronaut readiness program. This program will include identifying candidates interested in purchasing private astronaut missions to the ISS, procurement of transportation to the ISS on-orbit resources, and ground resources. Building on its commercial spaceflight training experience, Virgin Galactic believes it can provide an unparalleled, personalized customer experience for orbital space travel. So this isn't going to be a Virgin Galactic vehicle doing these flights. They're

only working on Spaceship Two right now. That is a suborbital vehicle. They have grand plans for like point-to-point travel and all these crazy plans, but those are so long-term that I'm not sure, you know, if we should rely on those panning out. But this would be more of them, you know, kind of in the same model that we just talked about with American Airlines. This would be them being the airline. They're not making the vehicle, but they are going to operate the service, find the passengers, establish that relationship, figure out whatever logistics need to happen to get them on the vehicle and to space, and essentially be that front agency for people trying to get to space. Now, this makes a lot of sense for Virgin Galactic because they already have a very long customer list, a customer list that is probably impatient

at this point that they're not getting their flight because Spaceship Two has been taking so long to develop. But there are certainly people within that list that would love to go up to orbit. So if they can upsell some of their people from the flights on Spaceship Two to an orbital flight to the ISS, that's obviously a lot more money coming their way. It's a way to get additional operating cash. And honestly, it's a way to take the people that are sitting around waiting to work on these suborbital missions with customers and give them something to do in the meantime while we are kind of in a holding pattern here before we're ready to start flying. Obviously, these people have a lot of experience, they have a lot of relationships built up, selling these kind of flights to people, and they want to apply that to an orbital variant. And also through that, in the same way that I talked about in the first segment of the show, those astronauts that are going to fly up to the ISS, maybe they're going

to want to also sell them a flight of Spaceship Two as training. Maybe NASA is going to require some training that directs its way to a Spaceship Two flight. So now they're selling not only a Spaceship Two flight, but they're selling an orbital flight as well, all as one sort of package, which is definitely unique. If you're going to Axiom, you're going to go straight up to the ISS. is definitely unique. If you're going to Axiom, you're going to go straight up to the ISS. They might have a training program as well, but I don't know if they're going to require you to fly on Spaceship Two. So all of a sudden, maybe with the same price, you're getting a flight on Spaceship Two, and you're getting a flight to orbit. So you can start to put together this really attractive package if you're Virgin Galactic. Now, that's all the hopeful side of me. The cynical side of me says that, well,

Virgin Galactic is not a giant company, right? I often get annoyed at people that say SpaceX can't do Dragon and Starship at the same time because they're thousands of people. Virgin Galactic right now isn't that size. So I am a little bit concerned that this is going to be a distraction as they're right at the finish line here to get Spaceship Two flying regularly, that this is going to distract a little from their core mission right there. But in all honesty, maybe I'm wrong there, and Virgin Galactic's core mission is to provide flights to space. Doesn't matter how they do it. They have their own vehicle, but they're also going to sell to other ones, and that's just a-okay because their prime mission is to get people into space. Now, the other cynical side of me says Virgin

Galactic is now a publicly traded company, so they certainly need to keep their stock price up if they want to keep things moving in the right direction. So additional announcements, additional agreements at NASA, all of that really helps. However, if you're interested in getting people to space, I think this is a good sign because Axiom right now is one of the only ways to get a private orbital mission to the ISS they have that agreement in place with NASA now we have another one here and that could provide a solid amount of competition that keeps them both on their toes and hopefully in the long term brings the cost down a little bit now obviously right now that is linked heavily to the seat price they can get from SpaceX Dragons or Boeing Starliners, but as the future develops they're going to keep their

eyes out for cheaper ways to get to space, better deals to get to space, and hopefully bring the cost down over time. So both of these stories are interesting in the same way where it's a very early early kind of announcement and could lead in a lot of interesting directions. I'm hopeful, yet have some reservations about them generally. But all in all, I'm excited to see this kind of stuff coming into place. And it's interesting to watch Virgin Galactic translate from their development mode into an operational mode over these series of years. And we'll see how that plays out long term for them. So for now, that is all I've got to say on these two topics. If you've got any

questions or thoughts, email me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko. And once again, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support if you want to help make more of these shows possible and get some headlines in your life. But until next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.