14 DAY TRIAL // The American space agency has just included 7 more companies in its Flight Opportunities Program, which funds near-space flight services on commercial platforms. In other words, these companies integrate and fly scientific or technological payload to the edge of space and back.
This is a very important thing for research groups that need to conduct research in microgravity for short periods of time, and cannot afford the costs associated with sending their experiments to the International Space Station (ISS).
For these particular groups, suborbital spaceflight is the perfect chance to conduct their research. Companies that carry out such flights provide their customers with only a few minutes of weightlessness, after which the spacecraft lands at a spaceport on the surface.
As soon as the commercial spaceflight industry began developing, scientists figured out that they could ask these companies to replace one passenger seat with a scientific experiment. NASA is seeking to benefit from such research opportunities through the new contracts.
The agreements do not specify the type or number of payloads that NASA will send to space in this manner. What the contracts do say is that the missions' only goal is to help the agency meet its research and technology goals.
The 2-year contracts that were awarded recently are worth a total of $10 million. The agency reserves the right to select from the pool of available spacecraft and companies when deciding on how to send a certain payload to the edge of space.
“Through this catalog approach, NASA is moving toward the goal of making frequent, low-cost access to near-space available to a wide range of engineers, scientists and technologists,” says Bobby Braun.
“The government's ability to open the suborbital research frontier to a broad community of innovators will enable maturation of the new technologies and capabilities needed for NASA's future missions in space,” he adds. Braun is the Chief Technologist at NASA.
The companies that NASA selected for the new round of contracts are:
1. Armadillo Aerospace, Heath, Texas 2. Near Space Corp., Tillamook, Oregon 3. Masten Space Systems, Mojave, California 4. Up Aerospace Inc., Highlands Ranch, Colorado 5. Virgin Galactic, Mojave, California 6. Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, Camarillo, California 7. XCOR, Mojave, California.