space

Yesterday, some commercial space news made the NY Times ("Space Tourism: One Giant Leap for Researchers" and Wired ("Scientists Buy Rocket Rides to Suborbital Space"). Science institutes are buying tickets on suborbital flights to run experiments:

[The Southwest Research Institute] announced Monday that it has signed a contract and paid the deposit to send two of its scientists up in Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle. Southwest also intends to buy six more seats — $1.6 million in tickets over all.

That follows an announcement on Thursday that Southwest is buying six seats from another suborbital company, XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., which has been charging $95,000 a seat for tourists. XCOR’s Lynx space plane carries just two people — the pilot and the paying passenger — so each flight will carry an experiment and an institute scientist.

My immediate reaction was to think of a post on Research Remix that listed the number of papers produced per $100,000 in grant money for different granting agencies ("Rough estimate of papers per dollar"). Basically, the wider the net, the fewer the papers, with major funded university research in the U.S. and Canada yielding fewer than one paper per $100,000 according to many estimates.

I might have dismissed such estimates as unrealistic several years ago. But I see where they're coming from -- don't forget indirect costs, which pad all federal grants, and consider the very high expense of some fields of research. Personally, I can't imagine how I could spend that much on a paper, even if I printed it on graphene. But there it is.

Now, if you're going to spend $100,000 on the average paper, it does make a sort of sense to spend that much on suborbital microgravity access.

But in none of the reports have I seen the comparison to the expense of the usual atmospheric parabolic flights -- the "Vomit Comet" and its international equivalents. Commercial access to these flights can be had for less than $4000 per passenger. Granted, some experiments (the over-the-atmosphere UV sensing, for example) can't be done in the atmosphere. But I'm really skeptical that there's a compelling value in a 4-minute suborbital experiment to justify that cost.

UPDATE (2011-03-01): I have an e-mail response from Lee Valentine, on the board of directors of XCOR Aerospace:

Dear Prof. Hawks,

Your website is wonderful. It gives me a great deal of enjoyment.

I have to disagree, however, with your take on suborbital research.
There is a very big difference between 20 seconds of microgravity and
4 min. of microgravity. For many experiments, for which gravitational
acceleration is the primary consideration, it is a huge difference. Of
course, as I'm sure you recognize, parabolic flights at 35,000 feet do
not get optics above the obscuring effects of the atmosphere.
Similarly, there is no way to sample the atmosphere at 150,000 feet
from a parabolic flight at 35,000 feet.

Numeric measurement is the foundation of science. I do not know where
you got the idea that these flights were one hundred thousand dollars
apiece. The published prices for tourist flights on Virgin Galactic
and XCOR are in the public domain, at $200,000 and $95,000
respectively. Alan Stern pointedly did not mention the price that
Southwest Research Institute paid for them.

I can only speak for XCOR, but I can say with all confidence that
XCOR's Lynx spacecraft is designed to be a mature transportation
system, that is, the marginal cost of flight is a single-digit
multiple of the propellant cost. The Lynx burns about 3 tons per
flight, about three quarters of which is dirt cheap liquid oxygen,
during the flight at a total cost of $.16 a pound. The first
half-dozen flights will be the most expensive ones, later flights will
asymptotically approach the marginal cost.

The greatest benefit of suborbital flight, is not so much the tourist
experience or the science that can be done, it is the opportunity for
capable companies to mature a space transportation system so that the
cost of orbital flight is also a single-digit multiple of propellant
cost. Such a reduction in cost to low Earth orbit makes a huge number
of things possible that are now impossible economically. Things like
satellite solar power, a robust capability to deflect asteroids, and
the possibility of supplying platinum group metals to the terrestrial
economy.

Best regards,

Dr. Lee Valentine,

Director, XCOR Aerospace

Of course he's right -- some experiments can be done in suborbital flights that can't be accomplished on a parabolic flight in the atmosphere. One of the perils of blogging is concision. I replied, in part:

Thank you so much for writing! You've sent a much more thoughtful response than my brief thoughts deserved, to be sure.

I think you're entirely right -- there are some experiments for which suborbital flights are the best approach going in the near future, and the cost is now at a point where grant dollars make them a credible expense. I mentioned that briefly but should have given it more attention.

Of course, that's a lot of money compared to my work...

As you write, the main benefit is in the long-term reduction of cost to low Earth orbit. If science institutes help pull the load for the first few dozen flights, it's certainly good all around. I wish that the press had dug more deeply into the cost/benefit curve and highlighted particular projects, which would clarify matters.

A few years ago, I had the extraordinary opportunity to speak at the IEEE Aerospace Conference. Like any kind of science, there is some amazing stuff and incredibly clever people. My regular readers probably have a good indication that I'm a real space buff -- sort of the romantic, born-before-Apollo-ended type. I find the distant past so interesting because it tells us where we are going.

Vintage Space is a blog written by a historian of spaceflight, which has lately been focusing on the development of landing systems in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. The posts are just fascinating, including "Splashdowns: Why change a good thing?", "Landings, NASA, and the Soviet space program", and most recently, "Inventing landings".

It is impressive to read about the sheer number of naval units put at NASA's disposal for the early landings.

Rosie Redfield begins to disassemble the NASA-sponsored "alien life forms" story:

There's a difference between controls done to genuinely test your hypothesis and those done when you just want to show that your hypothesis is true.  The authors have done some of the latter, but not the former.  They should have mixed pregrown E. coli or other cells with the arsenate supplemented medium and then done the same purifications.  They should have thoroughly washed their DNA preps (a column cleanup is ridiculously easy), and maybe incubated it with phosphate buffer to displace any associated arsenate before doing the elemental analysis.  They should have mixed E. coli DNA with arsenate and then gel-purified it.  They should have tested whether their arsenic-containing DNA could be used as a template by normal DNA polymerases.  They should have noticed all the discrepancies in their data and done experiments to find the causes.

I'm no microbiologist, but I read the paper carefully because it seemed to be such an interesting result if true. And the paper simply does not include the controls to show that arsenate has been taken up as part of the DNA. All the other claims in the press accounts of the discovery -- for example, the idea that the organisms could substitute arsenate for phosphate in ATP -- were complete fiction.

I really appreciate being able to read the informed opinion of Redfield, whose lab specializes in the take-up of exogenous DNA by microorganisms. She writes that if a student had come up with the same results, she would have sent him "back to the bench" to confirm with more controls.

Hmmm....

A spectacular meteorite shower that lighted the sky in several Midwestern states Wednesday night sent meteorite hunters scrambling to get to southwestern Wisconsin during the past two days for the pieces of rock from outer space.

...

“Our first reaction was one of disbelief,” Mr. Boudreaux said Friday. “I expected it to be a piece of asphalt.”

Being in New Mexico, I've clearly missed my chance at 1950s-era gold farming. Although if you've ever seen that TV show, Meteorite Men, you'll know that it takes a different kind of character to succeed in that business.