Virgin Galactic is planning to launch tourists into space via a unique system – a “mothership,” called “Eve,” will carry the actual passenger ship, called the “Enterprise,” to a hight of about 50,000 feet. From there, the Enterprise will detach from the mothership, and, propelled by a hybrid rocket system, launch into space.

Yesterday saw the first successful test flight of the Enterprise attached to Eve, known as a “captive carry” flight. Naturally, the folks at Virgin are thrilled:

Commenting on the historic flight, Burt Rutan said: “This is a momentous day for the Scaled and Virgin Teams. The captive carry flight signifies the start of what we believe will be extremely exciting and successful spaceship flight test program.”

Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Galactic added: “Seeing the finished spaceship in December was a major day for us but watching VSS Enterprise fly for the first time really brings home what beautiful, ground-breaking vehicles Burt and his team have developed for us. It comes as no surprise that the flight went so well; the Scaled team is uniquely qualified to bring this important and incredible dream to reality. Today was another major step along that road and a testament to US engineering and innovation.”

Tests of the spacecraft will continue through at least 2011. According to Fast Company, 330 customers have ponied up the $200,000 necessary for a ticket on the Enterprise, even though launch dates are to be determined.

Good news for those of us following developments in private space exploration, as SpaceX successfully tested its Falcon 9 rocket over the weekend. SpaceX is contracted with NASA to provide cargo transport to the International Space Station through 2016, and is scheduled to take its first official test flight of its Dragon spacecraft sometime this spring:

But regardless of the exact launch date, Saturday’s engine test brings the Falcon 9 rocket a step closer to that test flight, SpaceX officials said.

“The test validated the launch pad propellant and pneumatic systems, as well as the ground and flight control software that controls pad and launch vehicle configurations,” SpaceX officials said in an update. “The completion of a successful static fire is the latest milestone on the path to the first flight of the Falcon 9, which will carry a Dragon spacecraft qualification unit to orbit.”

This successful rocket test was the “final step” for the rocket and launch pad – all that waits now is testing of the flight termination system and sign-off from the U.S. Air Force and SpaceX can move forward with the test flight.

(Image courtesy of SpaceX)

“It is a fascinating topic, which many students will benefit from studying,” said Viv Kinnaird, dean of the faculty of business and law.

Topics already arising in the field include gaps in health and safety for potential space tourists, and damage to satellites from other objects orbiting the Earth. Looking further ahead, some lawyers have raised questions about land titles on the moon or other planets.

Chris Newman, one of the lecturers who will be teaching the module, said: “It is a growing area which has relevance across commercial, company, property, environmental, intellectual property and IT practice sectors. We think that our qualification will offer valuable knowledge in a fascinating area.”

Several universities around the world offer programs in air and space law, although from the looks of it, “space lawyers” are still fairly rare.

(Via BoingBoing)

The biggest barrier to manned exploration of Mars is the time it would take to get there – with current technology (chemical rockets) it would take about eight months. However, a new propulsion technology that uses jets of superheated plasma to propel a craft using “steady, efficient thrust” could cut that time to merely 40 days. Road trip!

A mission trajectory study estimated that a VASIMR-powered spacecraft could reach the red planet within 40 days if it had a 200 megawatt power source. That’s 1,000 times more power than what the current VASIMR prototype will use, although Ad Astra says that VASIMR can scale up to higher power sources.

The real problem rests with current limitations in space power sources. Glover estimates that the Mars mission scenario would need a power source that can produce one kilowatt (kW) of power per kilogram (kg) of mass, or else the spacecraft could never reach the speeds required for a quick trip.

Existing power sources fall woefully short of that ideal. Solar panels have a mass to power ratio of 20 kg/kW. The Pentagon’s DARPA science lab hopes to develop solar panels that can achieve 7 kg/KW, and stretched lens arrays might reach 3 kg/KW, Glover said. That’s good enough for VASIMR to transport cargo around low-Earth orbit and to the moon, but not to fly humans to Mars.

Unfortunately, while we may actually have the propulsion technology to send humans to Mars in a relatively timely manner, we don’t have the power source. Solar panels won’t do the trick, and the proposed power source, a nuclear reactor, is only a concept at this point. Even so, Ad Astra, the company that created VASMIR, has approached commercial spaceflight providers to explore potential launch options.

We’ve known that the Moon definitively contains water ice since late last year when NASA crashed a probe into the south pole and measured the resulting plume of debris. This evening NASA unveiled findings that measured the presence of water ice on the north pole, and we learned that ice is abundant there to the tune of at least 600 million tons:

“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”

During the past year, the Mini-SAR mapped the moon’s permanently-shadowed polar craters that aren’t visible from Earth. The radar uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize surface properties. Results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.

“After analyzing the data, our science team determined a strong indication of water ice, a finding which will give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit,” said Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF Program for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate in Washington.

The presence of abundant water ice on the Moon makes it all the more feasible for humans to set up a long-term presence there, enabling potential colonists to create oxygen and hydrogen, as well enabling them to avoid having to ship water for basic human needs, i.e. drinking and washing, from Earth.

(Via Wired Science)

There’s a chance that humans are unique in the universe – the only species that has evolved sapience. From what we know based on our extremely limited observations of our tiny little speck of space, Earth may be the home to the only life in the universe, period.

At some point, at most billions of years in the future, life on Earth will come to an end. With this said, should humans spread life across the galaxy, from the lowest bacteria to humanity itself? Michael Mautner of Virginia Commonwealth University says that humans have a “moral obligation” to do just that - and we should start now.

“We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life,” Mautner explained to PhysOrg.com. “Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose.”

As Mautner explains in his study published in an upcoming issue of theJournal of Cosmology, the strategy is to deposit an array of primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets and protoplanets throughout the universe. Like the earliest life on Earth, organisms such as cyanobacteria could seed other planets, digest toxic gases (such as ammonia and carbon dioxide on early Earth) and release products such as oxygen which promote the evolution of more complex species. To increase their chances of success, the microbial payloads should contain a variety of organisms with various environmental tolerances, and hardy multicellular organisms such as rotifer eggs to jumpstart higher evolution. These organisms may be captured into asteroids and comets in the newly forming solar systems and transported from there by impacts to planets as their host environments develop.

To accomplish this feat, Mautner proposes loading ships equipped with solar sails with a “few hundred tons” of biomass and then aiming them at planets that may provide microorganisms with an environment to survive. Unfortunately, this could take thousands to millions of years. If we’re still around at that point, hopefully we’ll have figured out how to effectively terraform other worlds and colonize them ourselves.

(Via Blogging the Singularity)

“The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” – Carl Sagan

To minimize existential threats that could lead to the destruction of all of humanity, humans must eventually leave the planet that has nurtured us. While the search for exosolar “New Earths” continues, near future technology could enable us to comfortably colonize bodies in our solar system, including Earth’s moon, Mars, Titan, and even large objects in the Kuiper Belt.

To date, mankind’s most notable achievement in space travel has been NASA’s Apollo program, which successfully put humans on the Moon. The last successful landing took place in 1972, nearly four decades ago. We haven’t been back since.

While going to the Moon benefited the United States in the Cold War, it was phenomenally expensive. That much hasn’t changed in the last 37 years, even though technology has. We’ve put robots on Mars, discovered water ice on the Moon, have glimpsed far-off galaxies with Hubble. While these developments are terrific and have enabled humans to learn a great deal about the universe, there’s still a need for humans to actually set foot on the Moon if we’re going to set up a long-term human presence there.

In 2003, President Bush announced plans for the United States to return to the Moon in 2020. Today, President Obama proposed cancelling this mission:

In place of the Moon mission, Mr. Obama’s vision offers, at least initially, nothing in terms of human exploration of the solar system. What the administration calls a “bold new initiative” does not spell out a next destination or timetable for getting there.

In the meantime, instead of using the Constellation’s Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, $6 billion would instead go to financing space taxi services from commercial companies.

At first, this announcement may spur disappointment in those who, like me, believe manned space travel is important for the future of humanity. However, there is a very positive side to this development – it opens the way for commercial space transport, which is a very good thing, as Rand Simberg notes:

What the administration is doing finally ending the model of the government having a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, which is politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida, and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails, as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time. Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest 6 billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.

Despite the amazing things NASA has done, the free market is positioned to come up with innovative solutions for space travel that NASA hasn’t explored. Rather than remaining our principal means of leaving the Earth, NASA can help develop the infrastructure that will enable private companies to thrive. To get to the Moon, however, governments must allow companies to exploit the Moon’s natural resources for profit, whether that means shuttling well-heeled tourists back and forth or setting up long-term helium-3 mining operations. While government programs will have a place in outer space, the next space travel milestones belong to private companies.