Fun Space Things Happening in Huntsville

Today Dynetics proved that the space business is by no means finished in Huntsville, Alabama, regardless of the future direction of NASA. So what's the hubbub? In this case, Dynetics announced that they are leading a team to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize. What the heck is that? Well, as one person at the press conference joked, "You can always Google it." However, for the sake of the reader's sanity, here's the short version from their web site:

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million international competition to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded and must be registered to compete by December 31, 2010. The first team to land on the Moon and complete the mission objectives will be awarded $20 million; the full first prize is available until December 31, 2012. After that date, the first prize will drop to $15 million. The second team to do so will be awarded $5 million. Another $5 million will awarded in bonus prizes. The final deadline for winning the prize is December 31, 2014.

The team leader for this project is not a surprising choice for anyone familiar with the Huntsville aerospace community: Tim Pickens. Pickens is a former HAL5 rocket enthusiast who decided to turn his passion for rockets into an honest-to-gosh business, starting with designing the propulsion system for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, and then moving on to starting Orion Propulsion, which is now part of Dynetics. Along the way, Pickens and his team have also designed thrusters for Bigelow Aerospace's next space station and a low-cost launcher for military mini-satellites. Pickens and his friend and lead engineer Steve Mustaikis have kept themselves plenty busy. The Google Lunar X Prize is simply the latest mountain for them to climb on the way toward human settlement of space. As Pickens put it quite adamantly, "If we don't step up to the challenge, other countries will."

What interested me was the technical approach for their lander. They will be a piggyback payload on a Falcon 9 launch to get to the Moon. The lander will use thrusters similar to the ones Dynetics is building for Bigelow to soft-land on the Moon's southern hemisphere. Once there, the lander will broadcast live video from the surface, which will be available to the public via internet and mobile devices. No doubt each of the partner organizations in the Dynetics-led coalition will have their own crucial roles to play in the project. Pickens, a fearless promoter as well as rocket builder, noted that sponsorship opportunities were available for the lander and rover. "Come join us and make history. It'll be fun. Let's do it!"





The Dynetics-led group is called the Rocket City Space Pioneers, and it features team members that all "speak geek" fluently: Teledyne Brown Engineering, Draper Laboratory, Andrews Space, Univeristy of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation.


Also lending voices of support to the Rocket City Space Pioneers were Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys and My Dream of Stars, a biography of X Prize founder Anousheh Ansari) and Alabama Governor Bob Riley. Hickam was a natural person to invite, as he's a Huntsville resident and Tim Pickens began his professional rocket-building career working on the X Prize. Governor Riley, understandably, was there to lend a little gravitas to the team and to take the political opportunity to show off Alabama as a place where "we can do something significant." I believe this will be the case.

Pickens made it clear that the X Prize project was part of Dynetics' business model, which makes sense, given the conversations I've had with him over the years. His attitude with Dynetics is the same as it was with Orion Propulsion: by going after the X Prize, he is demonstrating that Huntsville companies can adapt to a space industry that is no longer focused solely on one customer.

The Revolution Might Not Be Televised

One of the cool things about living in Huntsville, Alabama, especially if you're a space geek like me, is that you've got relatively easy access to very smart people who know a lot about building things that go into space. One of those very smart people is a member of the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), former member of Project HALO, and now president of a private space company, Orion Propulsion: Tim Pickens.

Pickens was the guest speaker at this month's HAL5 meeting, and as usual he drew a crowd. Part of that might have come from the title of his talk: "Greening the Aerospace Community," in which he talked about developing green(er) propellants for getting rockets into space. He talked about aerospace companies looking for the "Holy Grail" of rocket propellants--they want the maximum energy for the minimum mass (what rocket scientists would call "high specific impulse"). Orion Propulsion is testing a methane-oxygen engine, using a cadre of college students from University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Marketing Orion Propulsion
Pickens spent a great deal of his time promoting his company, perhaps rightly so. For a company with fewer than 40 employees, Orion has a lot of unique capabilities, including designing, building, and testing new rocket designs. They have contracts with commercial (Bigelow), defense, and NASA (Ares) customers, and are executing them. These include attitude control systems for Bigelow's "Sundancer" inflatable space station, roll control thruster systems for the Ares I crew launch vehicle built on a contract through Boeing, and a small-sat launcher for the Department of Defense. What's fun about Orion is Pickens' willingness to experiment on new hardware and designs, often on what would be a shoestring budget for a government project.

Origins of Orion: SpaceShipOne and Beyond
Project HALO's work on hybrid rockets (solid/HTPB rubber fuel, nitrous oxide oxidizer) caught the attention of Burt Rutan earlier this decade, when he was looking for a rocket engine that a pilot could turn on and off, like a jet engine. Hybrids allow that ability by shutting down the flow of oxidizer, killing combustion. Pickens and a couple of Project HALO team members headed out to Mojave California to supervise propulsion development for SpaceShipOne, the first privately built vehicle to reach space three times. On the strength of that success, Pickens was able to come back home to Huntsville and start, with the help of his wife, Orion Propulsion.

And Pickens is not satisfied with the remarkable progress he's made with his woman (wife)-owned business so far. He's excited by the challenges involved in designing fuel tanks that allow for long-term storage of cryogenic (super-cold) propellants, which are needed for NASA's Altair lunar lander. "Some folks say they're redoing Apollo. That's a lot of bull." He also believes in the usefulness of building completely reusable fly-back first stage boosters, which were considered for the Space Shuttle. But again, he thinks small-scale prototypes are the way to go: "If you can't build a small-sized model fly, you might as well not fantasize about building a big one."

A Vision for Space Hardware Development
As I noted in my blog on young people and the space business, it's this willingness to experiment that gives smaller, "New Space" companies like Orion a leg up on the big aerospace companies or NASA when it comes to recruiting a new generation of graduates coming out of the nation's engineering schools. One typical example came from Pickens' building of a high-voltage exciter, which he wanted to use for an engine igniter. The item he wanted to purchase from an established aerospace company cost $15,000 and weighed 3 pounds. There were features on the "legacy" hardware he needed, but the electronics were 30 years old and "clunky." So what Pickens' team did was take what he wanted from the other company's hardware "and put my stuff on 'em." Pickens' new unit cost $3,000 and weighs half a pound. "Multiply that out by eight or ten thrusters, and you're saving somebody a lot of weight."

Young people don't want to spend ten years of their life designing one tiny part of a very large and complex system; they want to get their hands dirty and have a hand in building the whole thing. Small-scale engines and experiments like Orion's liquid oxygen-methane engine are exactly what fresh-out-of-school engineers are looking for when they come to NASA, and don't always find. While following traditional paths to aerospace legitimacy such as joining a "mentor-protegee" relationship with Boeing and getting Orion AS9100 certified, Pickens has fought to maintain a "Skunk Works" type of environment at his company.

In the end, this was the message Tim Pickens had for his audience, more than talking about the values of environmentally friendlier propellants ("If you're going to fine me for my CO2 emissions, you better have a machine you can turn on to undo the emissions I made"). "I know why Elon [Musk, CEO of SpaceX] is trying to do everything in-house...You need to do some of things I've been a proponent of." And the way to do that, according to Pickens, is to start small, get your hands dirty, and be willing to fail. “We are not allowed to fail. No one wants to pay for that on their watch. Tax payers especially. Maybe this is an artifact of some programs gone bad! Private industry is allowed to try new things that might be different and risky, but the payoff could be huge.” No doubt we will hear more from Pickens and Orion Propulsion in the years ahead. I'm looking forward to seeing what revolutions they produce, even if no one outside the space community ever hears about them.