NASA Won't Say If or When Private Citizens Can Visit the Space Station

As part of a NASA initiative, private companies will soon have the opportunity to add their own modules to the ISS. Whether or not those modules will come with their own staff remains to be seen.

NASA is looking to turn low-Earth orbit over to private industry so it can focus on Mars. In a blog post published on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, explains that the key to creating a thriving economy in low-Earth orbit is a vibrant user community. Meaning private companies, and lots of them.

This announcement comes just a few months after NASA put out a call, looking for new and innovative ways to use the ISS. According to NASA, 12 responses were received from a myriad of respondents, ranging from individuals, to large companies. After reviewing the submissions, a few things became clear: the responses were way more inventive that NASA would have imagined, and companies wanted their own space.

“The private sector responded enthusiastically,” Bolden explained. “Those responses indicated a strong desire by U.S. companies to attach a commercial module to the ISS that could meet the needs of NASA as well as those of private entrepreneurs.”

The agency hopes that the addition of future modules (which could attach to a docking port currently occupied by the BEAM module) will not only increase the number of people living and working in space, but that it will also help private companies create their own space stations in the future. (And maybe even that space Disneyland that Robert Bigelow promised us).

A photo of the BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module) inflatable habitat attached to the International Space Station dated September 30, 2016. Image: NASA

Bolden and NASA are hopeful the new initiative will not only encourage innovation in the private sector, but also help transition the space station from a government entity to a privately-run lab. As of right now, NASA is looking to retire the space station in 2024, but first needs to find new management.

“While NASA prepares for the transition from the Space Station to its successors,” Bolden said, “the agency is also working to support and grow the community of scientists and entrepreneurs conducting research and growing businesses in space.”

To support the growing science demand, NASA has contracted three private companies to ferry cargo (including research experiments and supplies) to and from the space station. In addition, the agency has partnered with two private companies — SpaceX and Boeing — to launch astronauts to the station as early as 2018.

NASA has also started testing out expandable habitat modules. The first, dubbed the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (aka the BEAM), was installed earlier this year. Constructed out of a durable kevlar material, this type of habitat offers many advantages over the bulky, metallic modules carried up by the space shuttle. Not only is it cheaper to launch, but since it’s bigger on the inside that previous designs, it’s basically the TARDIS of space habs. The BEAM prototype will remain affixed to the space station for two years while engineers record how it handles the space environment. Bigelow is already testing the BEAM’s successor, the B330, and would like to see it on orbit in the next few years.

Does the promise of new modules mean we will soon see private astronauts working on the ISS, or even private citizens visiting as tourists again? A small handful of wealthy individuals have visited the ISS following Dennis Tito's historic flight in 2001, through the company Space Adventures. But none have since 2011, despite a proposal that such flights would resume in 2013.

As for the possibility of private astronauts or new tourists to the ISS using the proposed commercial modules, NASA appears to be still ironing out the details. Motherboard asked about these possibilities, but a NASA spokesperson said in an emailed statement that “we are still working through the next steps so we can't address specific questions at this time.”

The eventual ISS handoff is a key step on NASA’s Journey to Mars. Six years ago, during a speech at Kennedy Space Center, President Barack Obama challenged NASA and the country to embark on its next giant leap. A leap that would make humanity a multi-planetary species.

In that call-to-action Obama outlined a plan that would cultivate a strong space economy through commercial partnerships while allowing NASA to do what it does best: develop the technologies needed to send astronauts farther into space than ever before.

Obama reiterated that plan Tuesday with an op-ed published on CNN.com.

“We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth,” Obama stated. “Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we’re already well on our way. Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station.”

Bolden’s blog post echoed much of what Obama said, with both officials agreeing the road would not be easy, and will require the public and private sector to work together. But just how soon that work will involve getting private citizens into space is still to be determined.

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Watch Blue Origin Crash a Rocket In the Name of Safety

Blue Origin is about to take the next leap towards launching humans into space: making sure they don’t die if things go wrong

In what could be their most explosive test yet, the aerospace company is conducting an in-flight test of its crew capsule escape system and you can watch it live beginning at 10:45 am ET. (The test was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but postponed 24 hours due to inclement weather).

Blue Origin anticipates sending paying customers to the edge of space in 2018. But before the first crews launch, they must prove they can keep those passengers safe. This is where the escape system comes in.

Each New Shepard rocket has two main components: a crew capsule — with room for six passengers — and a rocket booster. At 45 seconds after liftoff, mission control will trigger an alarm simulating a problem with the booster. This will ignite a small rocket motor underneath the capsule, pushing it away from the booster, before touching down under parachute in the Texas desert. Here's an animation of what the company expects will happen.

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Both Blue Origin and rival SpaceX depend on built-in engines to whisk their capsules to safety, while previous designs (like Apollo, Mercury, Soyuz) relied on expendable rocket motors mounted on top of the capsule to pull it to safety during an emergency.

Blue Origin previously tested the system both on the ground and on the launch pad, but not in flight. Today will demonstrate how the system performs higher up in the atmosphere (roughly 16,000 feet) at a region known as “Max Q”, where the stresses on the vehicle are highest.

Will the booster rocket — with four historic landings under its belt — survive the turbulent conditions? Most likely not. But if it does, Bezos plans on giving it the royal treatment. “We will in fact reward it for its service with a retirement party and put it in a museum,” Bezos wrote in a post on the Blue Origin website. Otherwise we may see a dazzling pyrotechnic display as it impacts the ground.

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How a Solo Cup and an Air Filter Became an Asteroid Collection Tool

Get hype, space nerds. We are just days away from what could be the most exciting launch this year. On September 8, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will embark on a seven year mission to do what no other NASA spacecraft has done before: return a substantial amount of asteroid to Earth.

This may sound simple enough, but collecting bits of an asteroid is no easy feat. The target asteroid, a carbon-rich space rock dubbed Bennu, spans 500 meters in diameter and is essentially a big, rotating pile of rubble covered in a layer of dusty surface material called regolith. How do you land on that? The short answer is, you don’t.

Physics is the glue that keeps this floating cosmic rubble pile together and understanding the inner workings of these small bodies is crucial to unlocking the secrets of planet formation and evolution.

OSIRIS-REx, which is short for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security and Regolith Explorer, is designed to answer a number of science questions including “Where did we come from?”

Image: Lockheed Martin.

NASA’s deputy scientist, Christina Richey explained that asteroids, like Bennu, are remnants of the original building blocks of our solar system, and can tell us a lot about the formation that occurred over 4.5 billion years ago.

Asteroids rich in carbon are also teeming with other organic compounds, including the building blocks of life—amino acids—so, scientists believe these small, rocky bodies hold the secrets of how life began.

“We think that these asteroids are a source of water and organic material that eventually made its way to Earth and other planetary bodies early in their history,” Richey said.

In order to answer these fundamental science questions, engineers first had to figure out the best way to collect a sample from the asteroid. But how exactly do you do that in microgravity?

Cue Lockheed Martin’s own engineering MacGyver: Jim Harris.

Lockheed Martin knows how to build spacecrafts, it’s been doing it for decades, so to help solve this engineering quandary, the company held an internal contest among their engineers to generate ideas on how best to scoop up some Bennu.

Regolith is like the dirt we see here on Earth, so naturally when you think of how best to collect dirt, things like scoopers and drills come to mind. All of these devices work great here on Earth; however, in Bennu’s microgravity, Harris knew that the traditional methods of collection, like a scooper, would be risky. “The problem is that you have loose material covering a surface with very low gravity,” he said. “As soon as you touch it, the material could scatter.”

Designs like drills, even a clam-shell scoop proved to be no match for the asteroid’s reduced gravity. The team couldn’t collect the sample they needed.

Rather than attempting the difficult feat of landing on the surface of Bennu, the team decided on a touch and go approach—basically the spacecraft would give Bennu a smooth, gentle high-five while taking a piece of it home.

Lockheed Martin’s chief scientist at the time, Dr. Ben Clark, suggested that Harris take a look at a paper he wrote several years earlier, detailing sample collection on comets. Harris now had a plan. Using a solo cup and an air compressor in his driveway, he came up with the idea to blast dirt particles with air and then collect the ejected particles.

Image: Lockheed Martin.

Picture this: a solo cup with holes poked in it. Now picture air being puffed into the cup, with an air filter on the outside. “We used a compressor to blow air against the ground,” Harris said. “As the air went out the holes and through the filter, we collected the particles.”

To test this theory, Harris and his son went out to their dirt-covered driveway. Armed with his holy solo cup, he set out to prove that blasting compressed air into the dirt would result in dirt being kicked up into the cup. He was right.

Originally dubbed Muucav (vacuum spelled backwards), Jim’s design is now officially called the Touch And Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, aka TAGSAM. Starting as nothing more than a solo cup and an air compressor in one engineer’s driveway, ten years and a few iterations later, that bit of crafty engineering has turned into the instrument we see today.

The TAGSAM is attached to the end of an 11-foot-long robotic arm, complete with elbow and wrist joints to help it maneuver into place. What was once a solo cup now resembles the carburetor on a ‘57 Chevy.

Once the spacecraft has maneuvered itself into prime sample collecting position, the TAGSAM will blast Bennu’s surface with nitrogen gas and then hoover up the displaced particles—a process that takes no more than five seconds to complete. TAGSAM is packing three containers of gas, so they will have three chances to collect a minimum of 60 grams (2 oz of asteroid).

It took a bit of work to go from driveway to launch pad, including extensive testing on NASA’s vomit comet. However, engineers are pleased with the outcome and testing has shown that the device can collect up to 4.5 pounds (2 kilograms) of material, making it the largest sample returned since the Apollo Moon missions.

We can expect to see the sample back on Earth in 2023 when the spacecraft’s asteroid-toting capsule will touch down under parachute in Utah, carrying with it the secrets of the solar system.

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