NASA Technology Program Seeks To Help Suborbital Vehicle Developers

摘要

A NASA program originally established to provide suborbital flights for experiments is now expanding its scope to include development of key technologies for the vehicles themselves. NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate issued an announcement of collaborative opportunity May 21 covering public-private partnerships for the development of what it terms "emerging space technology systems capabilities." The goal of the program is to help private companies develop key technologies that could be used for suborbital and orbital launch vehicles and spacecraft. "The entrepreneurial U.S. commercial space industry is rapidly evolving, including the development of new suborbital and orbital launch vehicles," the announcement states. "However, it is also clear that this emerging industry faces significant challenges." The new opportunity grew out of a desire to accelerate progress on suborbital vehicles to support NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, which provides parabolic and suborbital flights for experiments. While that program started several years ago expecting suborbital vehicles to soon enter commercial service, NASA officials now said that given the delays many such vehicles have experienced, the agency wanted to find ways to help companies working on them. "We could either sit back and wait for vehicles to come onboard when they're ready, or we could see how we could help the industry," Laguduva Kubendran, program executive for the Flight Opportunities Program at NASA Headquarters, said during a presentation at the Space Access '15 conference in Phoenix in May.