SpaceDev Makes Record Time Supporting SpaceShipOne Propulsion
System
The Guinness Book of
World Records may need a new category by the end of 2004. X-Prize
competitor SpaceShipOne makes its first publicly announced manned
flight into space on June 21st...and then the modern space race
REALLY begins!
The Ansari X-Prize competition is patterned after the more than
100 aviation prizes offered in the early 20th century that created
today's $300 billion-dollar commercial air transport industry. To
win the X-Prize, private teams must finance, build and then fly a
three-person spacecraft 100 km (62 miles) to space, return safely,
and then demonstrate the reusability of their vehicle by flying it
again within two weeks.
Enter revolutionary SpaceDev, the Poway (CA) space solutions
company. Since 1999, Jim Benson, founding Chairman and Chief
Executive, and the SpaceDev propulsion team have been working with
the engineers at Scaled Composites to create safe, inexpensive,
private sector human space flight. Only a year after contracting
with Scaled, SpaceDev successfully tested Scaled's SpaceShipOne
propulsion system, the world's largest nitrous oxide (N2O) rocket
motor. The hybrid system is highly innovative, using nitrous as an
oxidizer, and hydroxy-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), or rubber,
as the fuel. Both are low cost, in plentiful supply and can be
safely transported and stored without special precautions, and will
not explode when combined. SpaceDev supplied the rocket science and
now supplies most of the key internal components for the
SpaceShipOne rocket motor.
"I am extremely proud of our SpaceDev rocket propulsion team for
helping to successfully developing this elegant system, and we are
delighted to be instrumental in making safe and affordable access
to space a reality," said Jim Benson. "With SpaceDev's rocket motor
technology, and with the historic SpaceShipOne, commercial, manned,
suborbital space flight is now truly within reach, and no longer
just a dream."
The future of commercial space flight is no longer a question of
how or when, but by whom. Smaller commercial space firms like
SpaceDev, led by successful entrepreneurs from other industries,
are already providing products and services that were previously
the domain of NASA or the military. For example, just last year,
SpaceDev launched this country's smallest, high performance, low
cost satellite called CHIPSat, a science mission for the University
of California at Berkeley through NASA's University Explorer
Program. "We believe that CHIPSat is the world's first orbiting
Internet node, and the world's first satellite whose mission
control and operations center is merely a laptop computer, located
anywhere in the world," said Benson.
During President Bush's NASA Commission hearing on the future of
space earlier this year, witnesses as wide-ranging as science
fiction writer Ray Bradbury, wealthy space tourist Dennis Tito, and
SpaceDev's Jim Benson, aired their wisdom on the
topic. Benson, in particular, was quite vocal about moving
space travel into the private sector. "That means migrating from
the big aerospace firms and their 'mainframe' mentality toward
agile, innovative companies introducing the 'microcomputer' way of
thinking into space. Smaller innovative firms like SpaceDev can
provide rapid and affordable access to space, if given the
opportunity," said Benson at the hearings.
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