My Suborbital Life Blog 2: Objectives, Timeline, Training — S. Alan Stern

Late next week I’ll be undertaking my first spaceflight, flying a training and “risk reduction” mission funded by my employer, the Southwest research Institute (SwRI). This flight is in preparation for a NASA-SwRI suborbital research mission that is coming up for me as well, hopefully next year. That research flight will feature two experiments—one to assess the efficacy of the spacecraft for doing suborbital astronomy, and one to take physiological data on an experimenter undergoing suborbital spaceflight.

Its unusual—maybe even unique—to fly a space mission purely as a training exercise. But that’s a testament to the increasing normalization of spaceflight. As a first step in making the very most of this opportunity, my flight team (most notably, SwRI colleague and planetary scientist Dr. Dan Durda) and I have developed the following objectives for this first flight:

SwRI Virgin Galactic First Flight
Primary Objectives

We then mapped the various objectives into a flight timeline centered in the roughly 3 minutes of useful time to conduct work between the two high G-portions of the flight, namely ascent powered flight and re-entry. That 3-minute timeline in its present (mature but not finalized) format is based on a series of 20-second-long time blocks as follows:

SwRI Virgin Galactic First Flight
Timeline

Training for the flight has so far included Zero-G Corporation familiarization flights, high-G training runs in centrifuges and F-104 Starfighter aircraft, and repeated timeline procedures run throughs and refinements; it will shortly also include in-cabin ascent, entry, and timeline procedures runs and refinements in a high-fidelity cabin mockup of VG’s VSS Unity.

Our objective in developing requirements, procedures timelines, and training runs is to maximize the value of this first spaceflight and to minimize risks to performance on the second flight while doing NASA experiment work. And while there is always more one could do, I believe we have a solid plan both for flight ops and for training to perform those that’s commensurate with the low cost of this mission.

Of course, the proof of that will come at showtime, in space, high above southern New Mexico!

Alan Stern is a planetary scientist and aerospace executive. He is a former NASA Associate Administrator for Science, and a former board chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. He has now been a part of 30 NASA, ESA, and commercial spaceflight flight mission teams, 15 of those as mission or instrument Principal Investigator, including the almost $1B New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.