Commercial aircraft can make parabolic flights for 20-30 seconds of weightlessness at a time. I hope that future suborbital flights will soon be taking paying passengers to the edge of space for approximately 4 minutes of weightlessness, as well as a great view of Earth from the edge of space. Using the airmail paradigm, NASA will purchase seats for these suborbital flights for certain experiments, and possibly astronaut candidate proficiency, if and when they become available. Just as NASA pilots fly T-38s and micro-gravity aircraft flights to maintain proficiency, we should consider how we might use these future suborbital flight opportunities. I have asked NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden to look into this capability under NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. Rex also oversees management of NASA's Centennial Challenge Prize program, authorized by Congress last December. Several NASA prize challenges, like the lunar lander, will be featured here at the X-Prize Cup over the next several days. The spirit and heritage of these prizes harks back to Charles Lindbergh's successful bid for the Orteig Prize in 1927; I hope these new prizes spark similar accomplishments. In another vein, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 also designates the U.S. segment of the space station a national laboratory. NASA is actively seeking commercial partners who would like to use the space station for their own experiments. After the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, NASA was forced to curtail a great deal of space station research, and with our focus on the use of the space shuttle system for space station assembly over the next few years, I believe that commercial cargo and crew services will prove invaluable for increasing access to space and to the space station for these commercial experiments.


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    Titel :

    NASA and the Commercial Space Industry


    Beteiligte:
    M. D. Griffin (Autor:in)

    Erscheinungsdatum :

    2008


    Format / Umfang :

    12 pages


    Medientyp :

    Report


    Format :

    Keine Angabe


    Sprache :

    Englisch




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