A Taste of Space on Earth: Pilots, Passengers Train For Spaceliner Flights

Monday, February 25, 2008
Originally published by:
Space News Business Report

By Leonard David
Special Correspondent, SPACE.com

Future space passengers are getting a leg up on appreciating the physiological rigors of suborbital spaceflight they plan to take in the future, but without leaving the Earth. Using state-of-the-art equipment, the National Aerospace Training and Research Center (NASTAR Center) in Southampton, Pa., is helping to train both the pilots and prospective passengers of commercial spaceliners.

The NASTAR Center is a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Tectonics Corp. and houses an array of training devices, including a specialized high-performance human centrifuge. Known as the Space Training System-400, the centrifuge mimics the flight dynamics and sustained Gs of a rocket-powered flight to the edge of space, while providing a realistic view from the simulated cockpit windows. Along with G-force exposure, center facilities make available to patrons altitude exposure, spatial disorientation and other physiological effects they will encounter as they enter the space environment.

Major changes in technology — not only in computing power but also in visual display systems — have transformed the training simulator experience over the years, said Glenn King, the NASTAR Center's chief operating officer and a chief instructor at the facility.

"Those old trainers of the past were just a little box that spun about, pulled by bellows and cables," King said. Today, electrical and computer power, along with high motion control algorithms can position training hardware quickly and very dynamically, giving pilots very accurate feelings of flight, he told Space News in a Feb. 18 interview.

Along with handling space travel training, King said the center supports a variety of military and civil aviation needs, making use of highly modular equipment and programs. "We've invested anywhere between $25 million to $40 million in this facility and are privately funded. We receive no funds from the U.S. government or outside sources. We've funded it ourselves," he said.

Serious People, Serious Money

The emerging commercial space travel business is a real market to service, King noted. "There are serious people out there with serious money. This is going to happen," he said, pointing particularly to the ongoing work at Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif., and that firm's building of the passenger-carrying SpaceShip Two suborbital system.

Training at the NASTAR Center is an integral part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company, which was bankrolled by the U.K. billionaire to create the world's first commercial spaceline based on SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier/drop plane. Seats are selling for $200,000 each.

Dozens of Virgin Galactic spaceflight customers — known as "founders" — have trained at the NASTAR Center for their SpaceShipTwo suborbital encounters.

"We began our NASTAR program last year to help test our hypothesis that at least 80 percent of adults were capable of flying to space from a medical and psychological point of view," said Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic in a Feb. 14 e-mail response to a Space News inquiry.

Whitehorn said that during the fall of 2007 more than 80 paid-up founder astronauts, including himself and Sir Richard Branson,

made simulated SpaceShipTwo flights, with a visual simulation of going to space as part of the NASTAR experience. That flight profile involved a span ranging from 3.5 Gs, that pushes a person's back against their seat, to 6 Gs, that drives an individual down into their seat.

"We discovered that over 94 percent of adults are capable of coping with this level of G force including individuals with a medical condition, provided these were properly understood and accounted for," Whitehorn said.

Whitehorn declined to discuss the pricing for the training, but in a Feb. 21 e-mail he said: "There is a product being developed now to give the undecided potential customers the chance to have a centrifuge experience and we will be announcing the price shortly."

Physical and Mental Demands

Earlier this year, Whitehorn said the SpaceShipTwo training at the NASTAR Center was extended to accredited sales agents, the international sales force that is selling seats for Virgin Galactic.

"By giving people that sell seats a direct experience of what the flight will feel like, we have given them the confidence to help potential astronauts understand the experience," Whitehorn said.

The more prepared a person is for the physical and mental demands of a flight, the better, agreed Jane Reifert, president of Incredible Adventures Inc., based in Sarasota, Fla. Her group offers a range of adventure tour packages, including space training and travel experiences.

"Customers need prior experience of high-g and zero-g in order to be capable of fully relaxing and enjoying their space flight," Reifert said. "You don't want someone who's spent $200,000 or more for a suborbital flight to be too nervous or nauseous to enjoy the view. You also don't want to be the passenger sitting next to someone who becomes violently ill or suffers a panic attack at 300,000 feet (91,000 meters)," she told Space News via a Feb. 20 e-mail.

Self-Regulating Industry

NASTAR's King took note of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) role in developing guidelines for commercial space crew and passenger training. "They are taking a hands-off approach at this point in time. I understand their position and their oversight to give the commercial space traveler a safe environment. If you start putting regulations out, it would stifle the industry at this point. It's just too early."

Keeping that hands-off approach

for a few more years is King's advice. "Let the dust settle and we'll figure out what we're doing. Let the industry self-regulate right now. So far that's the FAA approach. They've put out guidelines ... but haven't mandated them to actual regulations. Let's not put out regulations before we see the data," he said.

For one, there are several variations of suborbital spaceships now being designed, King added. "Each one will have its own set of criteria for crew training and passenger training. It's going to be very difficult for the FAA to set up a generic mandate for all the different carriers to comply with," he explained.

Last month, the center began offering two-hour, half-day, full-day and two-day-combo programs that simulate space voyages, as well as jet flights. Dubbed the Air and Space Adventure Programs, the cost per participant is anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000, King said, for one-day and two-day programs. "People can come in and get a taste of space."

What if a person finds out they are not space travel worthy? King said the center can work with that individual to learn countermeasures such as anti-G training maneuvers or breathing techniques. "All those things that we've taught fighter pilots for years ... we transfer that directly to the space travelers."

Akin to the evolution of aviation, King senses that commercial space travel will become a very routine enterprise. "There will be some hiccups and bumps along the road. But eventually, it will settle down into a regular commercial endeavor," he concluded.

For more information on the National Aerospace Training & Research Center (NASTAR Center), go to: http://www.nastarcenter.com.


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NASA Engineers Work On Alternative Moon Rocket

By JAY REEVES, Associated Press Writer

Mon Jul 14, 4:13 PM ET

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - By day, the engineers work on NASA's new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.

They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it's a brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA facilities. The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts.

A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as little more than a sketch on a napkin that won't work.

A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.

The Jupiter design is being reviewed by a team of 57 volunteer engineers, from line engineers up to NASA middle managers, Tierney said. Those numbers are dwarfed by NASA's Ares workforce, which has thousands of government workers and contractors.

The head of the Ares office at Marshall said he can't rule out the possibility that some of his people are involved with the underground program.

"I don't know what people do on their own time," Steve Cook said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But Cook said he is familiar with the Jupiter project, and he's not impressed. NASA informally reviewed plans for the rocket last fall and determined the idea to be a flawed scheme based on shaky numbers.

"It's not feasible. We said, 'It doesn't work' and moved on,'" Cook said.

Meanwhile, he said, work on the Ares I rocket is so far along that the first test flight is less than a year away.

"We're down to the nuts and bolts ... on this rocket. This is not a napkin drawing," he said.

The debate reflects disagreement over the direction of U.S. spaceflight as NASA prepares to retire the shuttle in 2010. By 2015, the agency plans to begin orbital flights with Ares I and a companion heavy-lift cargo rocket, Ares V. Officials hope to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Astronauts will ride into orbit in a capsule aboard the Ares I, which will have a modified shuttle booster rocket at its core. They will dock with a lunar stage that was carried aloft separately by an Ares V rocket and head to the moon.

The Jupiter design would also require two separate launches to get to the moon, but its rockets would both rely on a shuttle external tank at their center. Some of the design concepts go back to proposals floated at Marshall in the early 1980s. Others date to the early '90s, when Marshall worked on a new rocket system that never flew.

Besides being a simpler, more powerful system, backers say, the Jupiter rockets would save NASA $19 billion in development costs and another $16 billion in operating costs over two decades.

The Government Accountability Office last year raised questions about the cost of NASA's current plan for returning to the moon, which a report estimated at $230 billion over 20 years. NASA said it already has spent about $7 billion on Ares.

Steve Metschan, an engineer and former NASA contractor who supports the Jupiter team, said the upcoming presidential election could change NASA's plan. He accused NASA of suppressing information that shows Jupiter would perform better than Ares.

"Our concern is that by the time everyone figures this out, we will have destroyed our heavy-lift system," said Metschan, of Seattle. "At the end of the day, all we're asking for is an independent review of all this stuff."

Cook said all the estimates on Jupiter were preliminary, and he denied critics' claims that NASA did a full-fledged study of the Jupiter rocket or the engineers' alternate moon-mission program, which they call Direct 2.0.

NASA has looked at "all sorts" of proposed designs, he said, and none was as powerful or safe as Ares.
________________________________________

ON THE WEB:

NASA Constellation: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html
Direct 2.0: http://www.directlauncher.com

Russia Seals Agreement With Private Investor For Space Tourism

by Staff Writers
Moscow (AFP) July 2, 2008

The Russian space agency has sealed a deal with a private investor to build a Soyuz spacecraft specially for tourist hire and operational in 2011, a statement said Wednesday.

"We have concluded an agreement with an investor to begin financing such a Soyuz vessel with an anticipated launch date of 2011," the Roskosmos website stated.

The craft, piloted by a professional astronaut, is designed to carry two so-called space adventurers.

Quizzed by AFP, a Roskosmos spokesman refused to identify the investor despite the agency having signed a deal in June with private American company Space Adventures for a commercial flight to the International Space Station.

Set up in 2001, Space Adventures has already sent five tourists into space on board a Soyuz.
The firm has been in negotiations with Roskosmos to rent the third seat on board a ship which regularly ferries Russian and American astronauts to the ISS.

American Dennis Tito, South African Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen of the United States, Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari and Hungarian-born Charles Simonyi are the five who have each paid up to 25 million dollars (16 million euros) for the thrill of a lifetime.

The next independent space traveller is Richard Garriott, an American electronic games entrepreneur and son of former astronaut Owen Garriott. His flight is due to take off in October.

Click here for full stroy

Who Owns the Moon? Lunar Property Rights (Real Estate On the Moon)

Date Retrieved: June 9, 2008
Source: Popular Mechanics (Magazine)
Title: Who Owns the Moon? The Case for Lunar Property Rights

By: GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it's only within the past few decades that it's been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate?

The first article on the subject, "High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty," was written by Princeton legal scholar John Cobb Cooper in 1951. Various theoretical discussions followed, with some scholars arguing that the moon had to be treated differently than earthbound properties and others claiming that property laws in space shouldn't differ from those on Earth.

With the space race in full flower, though, the real worry was national sovereignty. Both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to reach the moon first but, in fact, each was more worried about what would happen if they arrived second. Fears that the competition might trigger World War III led to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was eventually ratified by 62 countries. According to article II of the treaty, "Outer Space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sover­eignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

So national appropriation was out, along with fortifications, weapons and military installations. But what about private property rights—personal and corporate? Some scholars argue that property rights can exist only under a nation's dominion, but most believe that property rights and sovereignty can be distinct.

In something of an admission that this is the case, nations that thought the Outer Space Treaty didn't go far enough proposed a new agreement, the Moon Treaty, in 1979. It explicitly barred private property rights on the moon. It also provided that any development, extraction and management of resources would take place under the supervision of an international authority that would divert a share of the profits, if any, to developing countries.

The Carter administration liked the Moon Treaty, but space activists, fearful that the sharing requirement would subjugate American mineral claims to international partners, pressured the Senate, ensuring that the United States didn't ratify it. Although the Moon Treaty has entered into force among its 13 signatories, none of those nations is a space power.

So property rights on the moon are still the subject of international discussion. But would anyone buy lunar land? And what would it take to establish good title?

The answer to the first question is clearly "yes." Lots of people would buy lunar land—and, in fact, lots of people have, sort of. Dennis Hope, owner of Lunar Embassy, says he's sold 500 million acres as "novelties." Each parcel is about the size of a football field and costs $16 to $20. Buyers choose the location—except for the Sea of Tranquility and the Apollo landing sites, which Hope has placed off-limits.

To convey good title, Hope essentially wrote the U.N. to say he was going to begin selling lunar property. When the U.N. didn't respond with an objection, he asserted that this allowed him to proceed. Although I regard his claim to good title as dubious, his customers have created a constituency to recognize his position. If he sells enough lunar property, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So there's demand, even for iffy titles. But what would it take to establish title, rather than Dennis Hope's approximation? That's not so clear. In maritime salvage law, which also deals with property rights beyond national territory, actually being there is key: Those who reach a wreck first and secure the property are generally entitled to a percentage of what they recover. There's even some case law allowing that presence to be robotic rather than human. Traditionally, claims to unclaimed property require long-term presence, effective control and some degree of improvement. Those aren't bad rules for lunar property, either. But who would recognize such titles?

Individual nations might. In the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, the United States recognized deep-sea mining rights outside its own territory without claiming sovereignty over the seabed. There's nothing to stop Congress from passing a similar law relating to the moon. For that matter, there's nothing to stop other nations from doing the same.

Ideally, title would be recognized by an international agreement that all nations would endorse. The 1979 Moon Treaty was a flop, but there's no reason the space powers couldn't agree on a new treaty that recognizes property rights and encourages investment. After all, the international climate has warmed to property rights and capitalism over the past 30 years.

I'd like to see something along these lines. Property rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again. I'll take a nice parcel near one of the lunar poles, please, with a peak high enough to get year-round sunlight and some crater bottoms deep enough to hold ice. Come visit me sometime!

PM contributing editor, Instapundit blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the author (with Robert P. Merges) of Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy.

SEE ALSO: Podcast (Glenn Reynolds Calls For Lunar Real Estate Legislation)

Is the private sector about to overtake NASA in space? In a PM Roundtable, new FAA commercial space chief George Nield, XCOR spokesman Doug Graham and Teal Group analyst Marco Cacheras predict the future of backyard rocket power. Plus: Glenn Reynolds calls on Congress for the re-opening of a moon treaty, and software geek-cum-space engineer Fred Bourgeois breaks down his team's open-source plan to win the Google Lunar X Prize—featured on the cover of PM's new issue.

New Report Identifies Dangerous Web Domains

Date: June 3, 2008 (21:01 PDT)
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Title: New Report Identifies Dangerous Web Domains

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer
Wed Jun 4, 7:09 AM ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. - When surfing the Internet for safe Web sites, not all domains are equal.
Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, according to a report to be released Wednesday by antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc.
McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are ".hk" (Hong Kong), ".cn" (China) and ".info" (information).
Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of ".cn" sites and 11.7 percent of ".info" sites that way.
A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain — the world's most popular — were identified as dangerous.
More spammers, malicious code writers and other cybercriminals can establish an online presence when domain name registry businesses cut requirements for registering a site in order to boost their profit and profile. The report doesn't identify domain name registration companies McAfee believes are responsible for those lapses.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies are in the business of registering domain names; some are large and well known, while others are small and less reputable, offering their services on the cheap and with flimsy or no background checks to lure in more customers.
The fact that Internet scam artists gravitate to domain name services with lower fees and fewer requirements isn't new.
What McAfee's "Mapping the Mal Web" report, now in its second year, tries to do is identify the domains that are populated with the highest concentration of risky sites.
The servers for ".hk" and ".cn" Web sites don't have to be in China; Web site operators can register sites from anywhere to target different geographies.
Other risky domains include ".ro" (Romania), with 6.8 percent, and ".ru" (Russia), with 6 percent of sites flagged as dangerous.
Shane Keats, research analyst for McAfee and lead author of the report, said the increase in dangerous sites registered under the ".hk" and ".cn" domains over last year's report was caused in part by better data collection on McAfee's part on those domains and by apparent security lapses in some registrar companies' processes for registering addresses.
"My advice about surfing behavior is that if you're really desperate for cheap Prozac and the pharmacy ends in '.cn,' don't do it. Just don't do it," Keats said. "Find another place to get your Prozac."
Many Internet frauds involve fake sites for pharmaceuticals.
The McAfee report is based on results from 9.9 million Web sites that were tested in 265 domains for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.
Keats said domain name registrars that are strict about authenticating that Web site owners are operating a legitimate business see far fewer malicious Web sites using their services.
Where McAfee found some of the least-risky domain names:
· ".gov" (government use), with 0.05 percent flagged;
· ".jp" (Japan), with 0.1 percent flagged and
· ".au" (Australia), with 0.3 percent flagged.

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URL For This Article: San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/03/financial/f210133D61.DTL&feed=rss.technology

Russia Ends Space Joy Rides

Russia announces end to space tourism in 2010 Apr 21, 2008

"On Cosmonaut's Day (April 12th 2008) the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) announced that they will cease it's $40,000,000-a-flight space tourism enterprise.
Anatoly Perminov, the head of Roskosmos, elaborated on this statement by citing national criticism of the space tourism project; all the while reiterating Roskosmos's focus on the International Space Station and the new launch site at Vostochny Cosmodrome: 'Vitaly Lopota, the president of the Energia space rocket corporation, said he believes space tourism is a forced measure compensating for insufficient financing of the Russian space program.'
This statement (made the day before) by Vitaly Lopota follows another announcement that 'Energia is ready to send missions to the Moon and Mars if told to do so by the government.'"
news.slashdot.org. Read full article here>>.

"The Rights Stuff"

At the Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer intervews Rosanna Sattler about commercial space travel. Read it here!