NASA is a potential customer for trips aboard privately developed suborbital spaceships, the agency's chief told entrepreneurs building those spaceships today during the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit in Las Cruces, N.M.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said his agency would be in the market for quick trips to the edge of space, if the entrepreneurs deliver on their promises to create new passenger services. He drew a parallel between the current prospects for suborbital space travel and the government-supported airmail service that blossomed in the wake of World War I.
"Using the airmail paradigm, NASA will purchase seats on these suborbital flights for experiments and possibly astronaut candidates for mission proficiency, if and when they become available," Griffin said.
He noted that such suborbital flights, which could provide as much as four minutes of weightlessness at a time, would be superior to the zero-gravity parabolic flights now used for microgravity experiments and astronaut training.
At the same time, he indicated that NASA was interested in further privatization of its parabolic-flight operation. The space agency already has contracted for such flights through Zero Gravity Corp.
During his summit speech, Griffin also talked up NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS, which is currently providing almost $500 million to SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler to aid in the development of new orbital launch vehicles for resupplying the international space station.
New orbital as well as suborbital spaceships are expected to appear on the scene in the 2008-2010 time frame. For now, Griffin said the agency's COTS commitment was as far as he could go in terms of supporting space entrepreneurs.
"I've probably right now gambled about as much on commercial space as I'm going to be allowed to do until somebody makes it look like it was a good idea," he said.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk and George French, Rocketplane Kistler's chief executive officer, were among the executives attending the summit. Their remarks, unlike Griffin's, were considered off the record under the summit's ground rules - but suffice it to say that the leaders of the "New Space" industry were not displeased by Griffin's remarks.
Here are other points from Griffin's talk:
- Griffin said the space agency expected its commercial partners to have "skin in the game" - that is, to show they're bringing additional private investment to NASA-related ventures. "Partnership with NASA is not an synonym for helping NASA spend its money."
- NASA is considering a revision of its human rating requirements - the standards that must be met for space vehicles that carry humans. "The definition of human rating is not simply how much paper and process you can buy," Griffin said.
- Griffin acknowledged that the current schedule leaves a gap between the scheduled retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2010 and the first manned flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle in 2014. He said he'd like to shrink that gap but was constrained by congressional funding limits. "We're not technically paced; we're funding-paced," he said.
