NASA Wants To Buy Suborbital Flights
NASA Developing a Plan to Fly Personnel on Suborbital Spacecraft
“For the first time in the agency’s history, NASA has initiated a new effort to enable NASA personnel to fly on future commercial suborbital spaceflights. NASA’s Flight Opportunities program has successfully worked with emerging commercial suborbital transportation systems to fly research payloads to space for short periods of microgravity time. In addition, the Flight Opportunities program recently released a call that allows those non-NASA researchers to propose accompanying their payloads in suborbital space.”
NASA Suborbital Crew Space Transportation Services
“In conjunction with a system qualification of suborbital transportation systems, NASA is considering acquisition of Suborbital Crew Space Transportation Services for NASA Astronauts and other NASA personnel from one or more U.S. providers through commercial services contracts. Depending on mission requirements, NASA may purchase single seats, multiple seats within one mission, or seats for an entire ‘charter’ mission. NASA is seeking pertinent information from industry which may be used to formulate one or more solicitations related to the SubC effort.”
I thought NASA already had a contract with Blue Origin for exactly this?
No, they’ve contracted to fly experiments on New Shepard (and done so on three flights in 2019.) This is about flying people on New Shepard. And, interestingly enough, not just astronauts. It also includes the possibility of flying NASA employees and contractors who developed the experiments and allowing them to operate them themselves.
Makes a lot of sense. For the pilot astronauts, NASA still operates several dozen T-38 aircraft. I’ve been told that flying the T-38s is essential for NASA astronaut/pilots to maintain their proficiency. But, since the shuttle was retired, I don’t think that any of the upcoming capsules will fly anything like a T-38. So this seems like much more of a job perk than anything that is truly essential, IMHO.
I was thinking similarly. A suborbital like New Shepard or even Virgin Galactic, will subject you to similar forces as a launch and give you a few minutes in Zero-G to see how bad your body is going to handle it, so it seems a very useful training aid for astronauts. In addition, you can even do short-duration microgravity experiments, where a suborbital will give you a lot more usable time in one shot than a “Vomit Comet” parabolic flight (~20 second bursts of microgravity) and get proofs-of-concept out of the way prior to developing an experiment for ISS. With these suborbitals being fully reusable, if these end up being successful (and more importantly, competitive) money-making ventures, the cost to buy a seat, or even a flight will be quite reasonable for what they deliver.
We are witnessing the beginning of the end of Congressional control over the direction and timing of spaceflight innovation. Science will also benefit as the costs of these logistical steps to project development drop precipitously.
Most folks in this country can’t see what is happening or how much these events will change their lives. They see space tourism as a private rich-folk joyride service. However, if a millionaire can spare the cash for a ride, then it is a price cut for NASA from the way they traditionally do this stuff.