With the end of the space shuttle program, there has been a mixture of disappointment and fear that America would lose its advantage in space. I have been outspoken in my disagreement on this point, and today I received an email from the Virgin Galactic press office that is exactly the kind of thing I had hoped would happen. NASA will be using Virgin Galactic space craft, modeled after Space Ship Two, as a platform for space-based research.
This is work that previously would have been carried out aboard one of the NASA space shuttles or on board the International Space Station. NASA will select which research projects are selected to fly and be funded through their Flight Opportunities Program. In the release, Virgin Galactic's CEO and President George Whitesides, called NASA's Flight Opportunities Program "an efficient research program that leverages investments in private vehicles to drive new discoveries for researchers and real benefits for taxpayers." As a former Chief of Staff to NASA Administrator Bolden, Whitesides is certainly familiar with NASA's needs.
When I spoke to him in June, he told that with regard to low Earth orbit launches, "the government needs to think carefully, and where appropriate, become a buyer of services rather than an operator." It seems as though NASA has taken that advice and decided that as long the Space Ship Two platform exists, it makes sense for them to simply buy tickets rather than buy their own vehicles.
I recently asked veteran astronaut Scott Parazynski what kind of research is being done on the space-based platforms. He told me "By using that unique environment, you can develop new processes to either develop new materials or, ideally, to create ultra-pure, ultra-uniform materials for either industry or biologic purposes. "For example, in the absence of gravity, he says, medical researchers are able to grow tissues in three dimensions revealing key new understandings of the way such things as tumors develop, so that we can learn to treat them more effectively. That's something that simply can't be done here on Earth yet. "Using suborbital trajectories, scientists and engineers can test out their hardware in a relatively inexpensive way, prior to committing them to longer ISS or deep space missions," said Parazynski.
Both Parazynski and Whitesides told me they believe that NASA should be focusing on lofty goals that at once further the bounds of human knowledge of the solar system, and fuel public interest in science and the space program. By offloading tasks like low Earth orbit launches to private companies like Virgin Galactic, NASA is better able to focus on those bigger, edge-of-the-envelope missions.
Virgin Galactic says "providing access to space to researchers and their experiments is -- both a future mission segment and a significant business opportunity." Parazynski agrees, "If NASA can -- make it relatively quick and painless [for researchers] to get their experiments up into space, there will be a lot of users."
The key to making space flight accessible and commonplace is finding more and more business opportunities. The announcement by NASA and Virgin Galactic is something that we might not have seen at this point if there was instead a choice to rely on the aging shuttles until NASA had a replacement crew launch system available. In my experience, new solutions come faster when the option to rely on old solutions is removed.
Related Reading:
Astronaut Scott Parazynski discusses the future of the space program
Virgin Galactic CEO offers 3 big goals for NASA to inspire America again
What should government's role in space be?
Brad Sylvester writes about the space program for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. Watching the Apollo missions through the static on a small black and white television sparked a lifelong interest in the space sciences for him. Since then, he has spent 40 years watching improvements in the technologies of space travel and in our understanding of the universe. Follow him on Twitter @Space_Matters or on his Space Matters Facebook page.
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