![]() “NASA brings in its experts and validates that case.” “It’s up to them to be able to describe why they’re safe, and what we’re doing within SubC, to a large extent, is a validation of that claim,” Gerace said. Rather than a formal certification process, like on commercial crew orbital vehicles, NASA will use a “safety case” approach where companies will explain how their vehicles are safe and the agency confirms that. NASA has also changed the approach of how it will determine commercial suborbital vehicles are safe enough for agency personnel. He added it could have other benefits, such as with insurers. “If I was offering a system and had the ability to say that NASA is flying their researchers on our system, that would be a huge marketing benefit,” said Tim Bulk, chief technical officer of Special Aerospace Services, which is supporting the SubC project. ![]() He and others argued that NASA allowing its personnel to fly on suborbital vehicles would be an endorsement of their safety that would help companies. ![]() “It’s really this industry, human spaceflight, wherever it takes place, and furthering that and ensuring that it is both viable and safe.” “Flying NASA civil servants is really not the primary objective,” he said. Gerace, though, said that SubC has broader goals. Instead, SubC is focused now on enabling flights by NASA civil servants, such as scientists and engineers conducting research, on suborbital vehicles. Neither Blue Origin nor Virgin Galactic, the two companies that operate commercial suborbital vehicles capable of carrying people, require those on board to wear pressure suits. NASA astronauts wear pressure suits during dynamic phases of flight on commercial crew vehicles, including launch, reentry and docking and undocking from the station, but do not wear them for other phases of flight. They felt these vehicles, which did not incorporate pressure suits, did not fit those needs.” Any kind of training they have they really want to have in pressure suits. ![]() “The astronaut corps flies in pressure suits. These vehicles don’t really meet those needs,” he said. “The original intent was to provide training opportunities for our astronaut corps. He said that NASA was no longer focusing on using SubC to fly astronauts for training or research. “One tends to think this is about flying our NASA crew in space. “Our name is a little bit of a misnomer these days,” said Chris Gerace. NASA followed that up with a request for information on the qualification process in June 2020, but there had been few updates on SubC since then.Īt the 2023 edition of the conference last week, the manager of SubC at NASA said the emphasis of the effort had changed. That would require, he said then, a certification process of some kind for suborbital vehicles, likely a subset of requirements NASA had established for commercial orbital vehicles. The effort would be analogous to the Commercial Crew program to develop vehicles to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. A NASA program originally intended to fly astronauts on commercial suborbital vehicles has evolved into a broader effort to enable flights by agency personnel and supporting the nascent industry.Īt the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in March 2020, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced a new effort, later called Suborbital Crew or SubC, to allow NASA astronauts to fly on commercial suborbital vehicles for training or to conduct research. The company also flies New Shepard on cargo missions, such as the one in August, which carry research payloads in the capsule.BROOMFIELD, Colo. The New Shepard rocket booster is reusable, and returned and landed on a concrete pad near the launch site for a fifth time. The capsule was flown autonomously, with no human pilot, and returned under a set of parachutes to land in the Texas desert. New Shepard's capsule accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound to pass beyond the 80-kilometer boundary (about 50 miles) the U.S. The crew experienced about three minutes of weightlessness. From start to finish, the launch lasted about 11 minutes. ![]() The rocket launched from Blue Origin's private facility in West Texas, and reached above 100 kilometers (or more than 340,000 feet altitude) before returning to Earth safely a few minutes later. companies bringing passengers past the edge of space or all the way to orbit. The year has seen a flurry of private human spaceflight activity, with three U.S. The NS-19 mission brought Blue Origin to 14 people launched to space in 2021. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit ![]()
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