Features

Economic Reality of Personal Spaceflight. Joe Latrell, president and CEO of Beyond-Earth Enterprises (BEE) -- a commercial firm dedicated to providing small payload launch capabilities at affordable rates -- discusses the challenges the personal spaceflight revolution presents to new orbital space firms such as SpaceX and XCOR in The Space Review. He uses a paper by Sam Dinkin, John Jurist and David Livingston as a reference, and mostly agrees with their conclusion: "really cheap access to space is not really feasible." Latrell cites high payload costs and reusable launch vehicle (RLV) limitations as serious obstacles to any increase in private space launches. He says "RLVs should be thought of as 'limited reusability,'" as the best RLV flight record belongs to Shuttle Columbia, which didn't even make it to 40 flights. He also says no matter how cheap one can build a spacecraft, "you still must deal with issues beyond your control," namely range operations and insurance requirements. Latrell does not think spaceport operators will "stress their infrastructure beyond their limits" to accommodate a couple of small customers, and getting insurance for an experimental spacecraft is far from routine. As for funding, he says the major conflict is that most venture capital groups want rigidity in a business plan, whereas the start-up company wants to be flexible, able to adapt to new technologies.

Proposed Lunar Condominium Development Company Would Help Fulfill EMMB / VSE. Klaus Heiss (High Frontier, Jamestown On The Moon) presented his concept at the recently held conference 'Moon Base: A Challenge for Humanity' that took place in S. Elena, Venezia, Italy. The Lunar Condominium Development Company would establish the first sustained human settlement outside Earth with 12 astronauts at one of the lunar poles by 2015. This settlement would deploy and operate a condominium of large observatories (Hubble / Chandra / Compton class) that would test and demonstrate enabling space exploration technologies through 2030 for realizing the Earth, Moon, Mars and Beyond / Vision for Space Exploration (EMMB /VSE) first articulated by President Bush. Also, it could function as a test bed for human health issues that arise from long-term spaceflight, including telemedicine in a 1/6th g environment. The observatories would include vast distributed aperture instruments (1-1,000 km), and the settlement would perform its own data processing, management, servicing, repairs and updating of facilities. Eventually, the base would expand to a closed ecological / biological life support system module that could support 24 people by 2030.

Vatican Could Someday Advance Lunar Science. The modern Vatican Observatory was started in 1891 for the purpose of trying to understand God's creation. In 1981, the Vatican Observatory Research Group (VORP), which is composed of twelve priest-astronomers, was relocated to Mount Graham in the USA. VORP is hosted by the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory (SO). The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope is located at the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO), a division of SO. The Vatican's movement of its astronomers closer to the leading frontier of astrophysics and its dedication to the newest technologies may eventually mirror how science institutions will want to have astrophysicists closer to the telescopes and observatories operating on the Moon. Like the MGIO, lunar observatories are likely to be an international affair. Although the Vatican currently provides about US$1M a year in funding on the MGIO, the Vatican Bank is perhaps worth billions of dollars, despite church officials' claims of funds being tight. The net worth of the Holy See and Vatican City itself is obviously very large. The substantial portion of humanity represented by the Vatican (about 1.1B people) also makes it a potentially important element in the future of lunar exploration and astrophysics. Info www.pbs.org.