For making rockets reusable, and Mars seem possible.
Already the world’s most high-profile commercial spaceflight company,
SpaceX continues to demonstrate its technical bona fides, racking up
recent milestones as historic as they are diverse. Along with fielding a
more muscular version of the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (with engines
that are 50% more powerful than their predecessors), the company
conducted a series of test flights of its Grasshopper rocket, which
traveled as high as 1,066 feet in June 2013 before depositing itself
back on the launchpad, as opposed to dumping in the ocean. SpaceX flies
fast, cheap, and always in control, making founder and CEO Elon Musk’s
plan to eventually establish a permanent, 80,000-person Martian colony,
seem less like a pipe dream, and more like the inevitable.
For keeping up with the commercial upstarts. The
race to replace the Space Shuttle isn’t a sprint, so much as a marathon,
with multiple companies competing for NASA’s patronage over the next
few years. And while relative newcomers SpaceX and Sierra Nevada grab
headlines with their novel spacecraft designs, venerable rocket maker
Boeing is marching forward with its Apollo-style CST-100, a seven-person
capsule that was fully unveiled this past year, and has since cleared
hardware reviews, safety tests, and other hurdles on the way to
restoring the United States’ ability to send astronauts into space
(instead of hitching rides on Russian craft, especially in light of the
current political tensions).
For joining the orbital delivery party. In February
of this year, Orbital Sciences completed its first cargo run to the
International Space Station, turning what had been something only SpaceX
could do into a legitimate industry. It was the second time that the
company’s Cygnus craft docked with the station, though on this visit it
was carrying some 2,780 pounds of material. Orbital’s contract with NASA
calls for seven more unmanned flights through 2016, and is worth $1.9
billion.
For resurrecting the spaceplane. Sierra Nevada’s
biggest contribution to the nascent commercial spaceflight industry is
its Dream Chaser, a smaller, and arguably smarter take on the defunct
Space Shuttle. The two-to-seven-seat vehicle is designed to ride into
orbit atop a standard rocket, and then glide home via standard,
commercial runways (unlike the Shuttle, which required longer strips).
And though a faulty landing gear marred an automated landing test in
October 2013, the Dream Chaser is still on track to carry NASA
astronauts into space as early as 2017. Even if the mini-shuttle fails
to launch, Sierra Nevada will likely remain a player in private
space—the company builds the hybrid rockets used on Virgin Galactic’s
suborbital spaceplane, which were flight-tested for the first time this
past year.
For lighting a fire under space tourism. A decade
since it was founded, and Virgin Galactic is still a gamble. But despite
the daunting technical challenges and blown deadlines (suborbital
flights, rising to a near-weightless altitude of 62 miles, were promised
by the end of last year), Sir Richard Branson’s engineers and pilots
have been hard at work, conducting the first pair of supersonic,
rocket-powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo in 2013. The craft is now
scheduled to start taking paying passengers—up to six at a time—to the
brink of space later in 2014.
For building a rocket that runs like a car engine.
XCOR’s claim to fame, a two-seat rocket plane called the Lynx, doesn’t
actually exist yet. But the concept’s most important component, a piston
pump-powered rocket engine intended to propel a pilot and single
passenger to suborbital altitudes up to four times a day, is hurtling
toward feasibility. XCOR conducted a hot-fire test (igniting the rocket
while it's secured on the ground) last spring, confirming the basic
principles of a design that’s mechanically simple, and highly
reusable—its liquid oxygen and kerosene can be refilled without donning
hazmat suits, and the rocket won’t have to be replaced after each
flight, unlike Virgin Galactic’s single-use engines).
For using trendy tech to pioneer space-based manufacturing.
This startup has a single goal: to take 3-D printing into orbit,
creating everything from replacement parts and tools to massive,
kilometer-size (or bigger) structures that would be too complex and
fragile to survive a rocket launch. It’s a genuinely disruptive scheme
that’s been endorsed by NASA—Made in Space is currently prepping a 3-D
printer for shipment to the International Space Station in August.
For reenergizing electric propulsion. The main
benefit of electric engines over chemical rockets is increased fuel
efficiency, due to gradually heating propellant instead of combusting
it. But that lack of explosive acceleration has made electric thrusters a
niche technology, unsuitable for use in takeoff, and relegated to
nudging satellites or powering unmanned vehicles on slow-but-steady
voyages. Now, after decades of work by its founder and CEO Franklin
Chang Diaz, Ad Astra passed the first NASA design review for its plasma
thruster—which uses concentrated radio waves to more quickly generate
thrust—en route to testing aboard the International Space Station in
2015. The engine could cut the energy cost of keeping that platform in a
stable orbit by 90% or more, saving roughly $200M per year.
For turning asteroid mining into a reality, by any means necessary.
With backers like director James Cameron and Google’s Larry Page and
Eric Schmidt, it might seem surprising that Planetary Resources would
take such measured steps toward its stated goal of mining nearby
asteroids with robotic spacecraft, such as using Kickstarter to fund the
planned launch of low-cost, publicly accessible satellite telescopes
into orbit in 2014. Tacky as that campaign was—backers were offered
"space selfie" photographs, with the Earth serving as a backdrop for an
image displayed on the satellite—it’s evidence that this would-be mining
interest plans to pay its own way to off-world resources.
For building a telescope with galactic ambitions.
The Gaia telescope is inherently hard to fathom, with its billion-pixel
camera and mission to monitor a billion stars over the next half-decade.
It’s an attempt to craft the most detailed 3-D map of the Milky Way to
date, gauging the relative movement of those stars while also building a
catalog of their temperature, chemical makeup, and other basic traits.
Gaia’s camera is still warming up at its vantage point some 932,000
miles from Earth, with full operations starting later this year. But the
trailblazing telescope is a coup for its designer and builder, Airbus
Defence & Space, and a reminder that some industry giants (it’s the
world’s second biggest space tech company) are nimbler than they look,
and still capable of unprecedented innovation.
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