The race to space is today expanding with private companies and celebrities, with collaboration being an essential component. One of these big stars is billionaire PayPal founder and eBay mogulielle Allen who has teamed up with renowned California aerospace engineer Calvin Klein to develop a concept for an affordable, reliable and safe way to get people into space. The aim of the project is to design and manufacture an entirely reusable space vehicle, with the aim of taking astronauts to space on a aircraft within three to four years. It’s one way that we can reduce the cost and risk associated with space travel.
Allen and Klein will be the honored guests at a May 8th lunch in Washington, D.C. commemorating the first successful launch of a private commercial space flight. It was the capsule seats of two Delta Flight to resupply the International Space Station (ISS), successfully reaching orbit around the Earth. This achievement, according to the couple, marks a key milestone in the effort to send people to the International Space Station (ISS), and will enable them to use the U.S. taxpayer’s money to do it. They plan to fly six more unmanned space missions, each one carrying additional crew.
Speaking of crewed missions to the ISS, private space flight pioneers talk of putting people into space not only for research, but for medicine, evacuation, rescue and other emergency situations as well. They say that if one of these missions occurs it will be a major breakthrough for medicine. We discussed this at length in an earlier article; however it bears reiteration. ” astronaut medicine” would be an acceptable and wise use of existing human resources.
Another goal is to design and build a launch vehicle and a crew capsule for astronauts to launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAF) in Florida. If this mission does not achieve all of its primary goals, then it will not be successful in becoming a viable candidate for astronauts to travel to space, and it will not fulfill one of Musk’s primary goals, which was to prove that you could colonize the moon. He has said he wants to see a ” lunar colony by late 2009″, with his design team building a “fully automated complex”. He envisions a launch vehicle and crewed capsules being launched from his own private barge. His idea is to design the vehicle, which will also carry supplies and possibly shelter from Earth, to glide by means of water.
Then there will be a “landing” using a crane on the pad, followed by a “self-landing” at the bottom of the pad. He envisions this taking place using heat shields and fan-like mechanisms to lower the craft to the ground. The idea is to allow astronauts to walk out from inside the Soyuz capsule and walk away. This concept does not mesh well with the current knowledge about how to land an astronaut safely on the moon or Mars.
He believes that his design is better suited for a piloted landings instead of an automated landing. His plan calls for a Soyuz capsule, equipped with three different segments. One segment will be used to house the astronauts, while the second segment will contain the capsule’s plumbing and electrical components. The third segment is simply his habitat, which he says is needed to accommodate any equipment needed. The habitats would resemble those found on the moon.
His ultimate aim is to send up two astronauts to the orbiting space station, and return them using his new type of rocket, which he says will fly from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. His ultimate goal is to send up cosmonauts, which he says will be slightly bigger than the Soyuz module. That way, he says he can increase the crew’s life expectancy and add more equipment to the space station. He envisions sending up six astronauts, including two pilots, and six cargo capsules to the space station.
Pace, however, thinks that we should first develop automated space travel vehicles that can reach speeds of 8 miles per hour and land on the moon or Mars. Then we can send up crews of four or six to these remote lunar or martian bases. If all goes well, he says that these unmanned manned missions will fly by the end of this decade, at which time we will have further means of sending people to the moon and Mars. As far as his plans for getting people safely to the red planet are concerned, he says he’s “not that interested” in that part of the space program, but if NASA gets it right, he says he will be a fan.
