Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Next Generation Suborbital Research (NGSR) Conference in Boulder, Colo. At this event, researchers from various disciplines, institutions, and locations gathered with suborbital vehicle developers to address details of a growing market segment for suborbital spaceflight: Suborbital Research.

The newly-formed Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, based out of NASA Ames, will be administrating $15M per year for the next five years, which is proposed in NASA’s budget for suborbital research.  This is the first time NASA has allocated funding for this application. Florida hopes to play a key role in the program.

Suborbital vehicles currently in development are designed to reach altitudes of about 100 km, which will produce a period of about 3-5 minutes of quality microgravity time. Significant science can be accomplished in this amount of time. Examples of proposed research include:

• Microgravity Experiment on Dust Environments in Astrophysics: MEDEA is an experiment with three modules designed to study the early stages of planet formation and the behavior of regolith in low gravity planetary environments (presented by Josh Colwell from the University of Central Florida).

• Performing Atmospheric and Ionospheric Science Experiments at the Edge of Space: Suborbital observations can provide regular access to a region of space that has always presented difficulties to experimenters interested in the chemistry and coupling of energy and momentum from the middle atmosphere to the ionosphere, essentially to space (presented by Thomas J. Immel at University of California Berkeley).  

• Condensing Heat Exchanger Concept Developed for Space Systems, or CHESS, presented by J. I. D. Alexander from Case Western Research University.  A more efficient design for water removal from cabin air in space flight. This would remove the water directly from the air without the need of an additional water separator downstream.

Space Florida and NASA’s Innovative Partnership Program funded a microgravity research rack that will play a role in future research initiatives. This device, known as FASTRACK, is designed to house experiments on suborbital flights.  FASTRACK is a universal rack that would serve a wide variety of experiments on any suborbital vehicle, and we feel it will have great utilization opportunity under the CRuSR program.  The rack consists of two middeck lockers and one support drawer containing batteries and instrumentation in its standard configuration (although the rack can be used in multiple configurations).  The standard size is 2’x2’x3’ and a maximum of 300 lbs including experiments.  Each section can be rotated around the z-axis or stacked in any order for user convenience and experiments can use either battery power or vehicle power.  

I brought Space Florida’s FASTRACK unit out to the Boulder conference to display and promote its use.  There was a lot of interest in it by the community, mostly because it is a turnkey system that can be customized so easily. Space Florida is interested in testing the rack further on suborbital test flights (it has flown once successively on ZERO-G).  The rack is available for use now on a weekly basis. Long term plans are to develop a second-generation FASTRACK based on lessons learned and in response to the market.

Overall, the conference was very beneficial, and helped us to focus more strategically on addressing the microgravity research market. I am also happy to report that, as members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, and strong supporters of the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), Space Florida has teamed with the University of Central Florida to host next year’s NGSR conference in Orlando on February 28-March 1.  We are thrilled to have the conference coming to our state. I look forward to seeing you then!

Note: If you are interested in more information about FASTRACK, please feel free to contact me at ">.