September 11, 2013
Dr. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist, author, aerospace consultant and space program executive, has been involved with many exciting projects in the field since leaving the halls of WRW. This fall, Stern returned to campus to give UT students and faculty an eye-opening view into the next generation of space flight: the commercialization of suborbital flight – a flight to space without entering orbit – as a means to improve education and research.
Stern, an associate vice president at the Southwest Research Institute, is currently training to fly a series of suborbital space research missions with Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, two private companies leading the commercialization of suborbital flight.
Stern received his two undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy and his twin master’s degrees in aerospace engineering (under the direction of Wallace Fowler) and atmospheric sciences from The University of Texas at Austin. He has over 25 years of experience in space instrument development and is the Principal Investigator (PI) of NASA’s $720M New Horizon’s Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission.
“What I want to convey to students is not about the general development of suborbital flight, but the use of suborbital flights to improve research and education,” Stern said.
Suborbital flights are attractive to researchers, students and other organizations because the flight reaches a height of 130 kilometers (30 km beyond the boundary of space), is inexpensive and organizations have the option to fly the researcher. The commercialization of suborbital flight will give organizations, universities and companies the access to space at any time at a low cost.
“It is hard to imagine what you would do if you had access to space every single day,” Stern said. “What if you can take your experiment flight Monday and put it in lab on Tuesday, recalibrate the flight Wednesday, improve it on Thursday and fly again on Friday? Or what if you could get data five times in a row instead of once a year?”
Researchers will have the opportunity to fly and conduct their own missions, or to send payload experiments aboard the spacecraft. Suborbital flights will provide opportunities for various experiments and training, including in-cockpit and externally mounted experiments, astronaut training, upper atmospheric sampling, microsatellite launch research, ballistic trajectory research and personal spaceflights.
Suborbital space travel will require less intensive training – only a few hours to a few days – instead of the months or years that astronauts spend training for orbital missions. More researchers, students and organizations will have the opportunity to participate in space research, while cutting down experiment time frames from years to a few months or even days.
“Commercial operators are aiming for a simple safety certification and flight training process to provide a cycle time that is consistent with a semester at a university,” Stern said. “This will make it possible for student groups in a classroom to choose an experiment, fly it, receive the data before the semester is over and present their findings.”
To become one of the first leaders of suborbital flight, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has developed its own space program that will launch in 2014. SwRI selected three researchers to conduct flight experiments designed by their own payload specialists. The company purchased nine tickets for suborbital space flight from XCOR and Virgin Galactic to conduct the experiments.
“The innovation being completed in the field is surprising and it’s great to see companies pushing suborbital flight,” aerospace engineering student Supray Prakash said. “It was interesting to hear about all the opportunities in the field.”
