Commercial Spaceflight

1. Commercial Spaceflight ESA VirginGalactic RSA NASA Opportunities for UK Education & Training J. Duncan Law-Green*, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester *:dlg@star.le.ac.uk Artist’s impression of White Knight 2 and SpaceShipTwo in flight The Commercial Spaceflight Revolution A revolution is occurring in commercial access to space. Spurred by the success of SpaceshipOne in winning the Ansari X-Prize in 2004, at least a dozen companies around the world are developing vehicles for unmanned and manned suborbital spaceflight. The current world leader in developing a suborbital passenger spaceline is Virgin Galactic, a British-owned company. UK education can make active use of commercial spaceflight developments through a number of possible programmes. HighJump Cheap, reusable suborbital launchers (such as the Masten XA-1.0) would launch and return large numbers (hundreds) of small "CanSat" payloads designed by school/college students. Through the “HighJump” project, thousands of young people would have direct experience of designing and operating space systems, spurring the development of the domestic space industry. Number of active duty astronauts by agency (Virgin Galactic projected 2010) Virgin Galactic is expecting to hire around 30 astronaut-pilots in the 2009-2010 timeframe, twice as many astronauts as the entire European Space Agency. Flight tests (with British test pilots at the controls) are expected to start in 2008 from Mojave Spaceport in California, with commercial flights starting in late 2009. Advantages for education and training Commercial spaceflight has a number of advantages for promoting science and engineering education and training. Rapid development: Projects progress on timescale of weeks-months. Goals are clearly defined and readily attained, providing excellent motivation. Small teams: Teams are typically small and tightly-knit. Individuals can make a major contribution to the success of a project. Competition: Development will be intensely competitive, appealing to the most ambitious young engineers. Masten Space Systems XA-1.0 reusable suborbital launcher Teachers in Space The DfES and DTI would recruit several UK science teachers to undergo an abbreviated form of astronaut training, culminating in suborbital flights with a commercial spaceline such as Virgin Galactic. Lesson plans would be devised to make maximum use of the training and flights. Launch providers may offer such educational flights free of charge (a similar programme already exists in the US). The benefits to inspiration of UK science students, and recruitment and retention of science teachers, would be significant. “Should the UK have an astronaut corps? Yes, absolutely. By the way, we already have one. They work for Richard Branson.”