Virgin Galactic

SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, fly together above California's Mojave Desert.

Virgin Galactic is looking for three good space pilots to fly its suborbital SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which is already in the midst of flight tests. Although astronaut experience is preferred, it’s not necessary. But if you’re not an experienced test pilot, don’t bother.

More than 150 would-be spacefliers have sent in their applications since the job posting went up on Monday, Virgin Galactic spokeswoman Christine Choi told me via email today. And the in-box is due to remain open until April 30.

The company, backed by British billionaire Richard Branson, has been working on the development of the first SpaceShipTwo craft (dubbed the VSS Enterprise) with California-based Scaled Composites. The suborbital space plane's design is based on SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight back in 2004. SpaceShipTwo will be significantly bigger, capable of accommodating six passengers and two pilots.

The flight plan calls for SpaceShipTwo to be dropped from its carrier airplane, the giant WhiteKnightTwo, and then fire its hybrid rocket engine to rise to an altitude of more than 65 miles, past the international boundary of outer space. From that height, the riders will be able to see the curving Earth below the black sky of space, and experience several minutes of weightlessness. After a re-entry plunge hat provides as much as 6 G's of acceleration, the plane will glide back to a runway landing.

Virgin Galactic is charging $200,000 for a tourist package that includes pre-flight briefings and the suborbital space ride. Around 400 customers have already put down deposits. The expectation is that passenger flights would begin in 2012, but that schedule depends on how the current test program goes. 

Unpowered glide tests began last October, and Scaled expects to begin rocket-powered tests later this year. So far, Scaled's test pilots have been taking turns behind the controls of SpaceShipTwo as well as WhiteKnightTwo. The pilots to be hired by Virgin Galactic will be in on the test program at California's Mojave Air and Space Port as well as the commercial flights expected to originate from New Mexico's Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic says the first new hire would "ideally start with us in June 2011."

Here are a few of Virgin Galactic's "essentials" for applicants:

• U.S. citizenship (to satisfy export regulations).
• A current FAA commercial (or equivalent) pilot license and FAA medical clearance.
• Degree-level qualification in a relevant technical field.
• Graduate of a recognized test pilot school, with at least two and a half years of postgraduate flight test experience.
• Diverse flying background with a minimum of 3,000 hours flying, to include considerable experience of large multi-engine aircraft and high-performance fast jet aircraft and low lift-to-drag experience in complex aircraft.
• Operational experience in an aerospace aviation project or business.
• Preference given to those with experience in spaceflight, commercial flight operations or flight instruction.

The new hires would report to Virgin Galactic's chief test pilot, David MacKay, a Virgin Atlantic jet pilot who has been in training to take SpaceShipTwo's controls himself. Choi said two other pilots who had been designated to participate in the test program were no longer in the running "due to citizenship."

Virgin Galactic isn't the only game in town when it comes to spaceflight. Just down the street in Mojave, XCOR Aerospace has employed former NASA astronaut Rick Searfoss as the chief test pilot for the development of its Lynx rocket plane. Several former space station commanders are serving as executives for spaceship companies such as SpaceX (with Expedition 6's Ken Bowersox), Orbital Sciences Corp. (with Expedition 3's Frank Culbertson) and Excalibur Almaz (with Expedition 10's Leroy Chiao).

Now the space shuttle program is nearing its end, and NASA is facing a years-long spaceflight gap — which means more former astronauts may be thinking about making the jump to the private sector. It'd be interesting to find out how many of Virgin Galactic's scores of applicants are current or former astronauts. But no matter what their experience level is, Virgin Galactic plans to take a lot of care in making its choice.

"We're going to look for the best of the best," the company's president, George Whitesides, told Aviation Week & Space Technology. "We're not in a huge rush. We're going to put this out and we're going to see who applies. Obviously we want to hire these folks as soon as we get good qualified folks, but we don't want to rush it, because these are going to be among the most important hires that we make."

Other developments on the new space frontier:

• The Commercial Spaceflight Federation announced that retired Navy Rear Adm. Craig Steidle, a former NASA executive, would become its president on May 15. In 2004 and 2005, Steidle served as NASA's first associate adinistrator for exploration systems and helped draw up the now-canceled Constellation Program to return to the moon.

"The commercial space industry truly represents the future of America in space, and I’m excited to be a part of it," Steidle said in today's announcement. "This industry is inspiring kids, keeping America economically competitive, creating thousands of jobs and ensuring our leadership in space. It is a privilege to lead the federation as we embark on the grandest adventure of the 21st century: opening up space to everyone."

Steidle succeeds Bretton Alexander, a former White House policy analyst who is leaving his post at the federation to pursue other projects.

• SpaceX founder Elon Musk said there's a "decent chance" that he would make shares in his company available in an initial public offering toward the end of next year. "It's something that we are considering," he told journalists during a Tuesday briefing at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Musk made hundreds of millions of dollars after Paypal, a company he helped found, was sold to eBay in 2002. Since then, he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on SpaceX as well as other ventures such as Tesla Motors and SolarCity. Last year's Tesla IPO generated an estimated $24 million gain for Musk.

SpaceX is holding contracts potentially worth billions of dollars for future resupply of the International Space Station, plus a healthy portfolio of commercial launch contracts. Musk has said the company is in the black already. Last week, he unveiled an effort to develop a Falcon Heavy rocket that would compete with the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin for Air Force heavy-lift launch contracts.

• Boeing says it's close to deciding which launch vehicle would be used for unmanned flight tests of its CST-100 orbital space taxi, and probably for early flights with crew members, Space News reports. The CST-100 development timetable depends to some extent on whether NASA chooses Boeing to receive funding under the second phase of the agency's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev 2. The CCDev 2 announcement is still pending, but Boeing's John Elbon said he was "hopeful that it happens relatively soon."

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

XCOR Aerospace

The latest design for XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane includes an optional pod that can hold experimental payloads.

Researchers have struck million-dollar deals for as many as 17 flights aboard two kinds of private-sector suborbital spaceships, with the prospect of many more in future years. "This is just whetting people’s taste for what is to come," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist who helped engineer the deals and is due to be one of the first to fly.

Stern, an associate vice president at the Southwest Research Institute, is leading SwRI's suborbital research effort and is also presiding over this week's Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando, Fla. The conference is bringing together scientists and space entrepreneurs to develop what Stern calls a "killer app" for spaceflight: zero-G research in rocket-powered suborbital vehicles.

SwRI is involved in both of the deals announced over the past few days: One calls for two researchers to fly on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, with an option to purchase six more seats for a total value of $1.6 million. The other sets aside six flights on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane, with an option for three more flights.

Virgin Galactic has begun glide tests of its first SpaceShipOne craft, dubbed the VSS Enterprise, and expects to start rocket-powered tests by early 2012. XCOR's chief operating officer, Andrew Nelson, said the first Lynx flight tests were slated for early 2012 as well.

"I expect there's a good chance that the first flights could be late next year," Stern told me today. "The majority would be in '13, two years from now."

If all 17 spots are purchased, "this program will put more launches of human beings into space" than any single government agency over the 2012-2014 time period, Stern pointed out. When you lump together all the government-backed astronauts and cosmonauts going to the International Space Station, the total may be bigger, but "if you count just the number of NASA astronauts in those three years, you will find that it's a smaller number," he said.

The cost for the Virgin flights averages out to the standard tourist rate of $200,000 per seat. Virgin Galactic says its SpaceShipTwo flights will reach almost 70 miles in altitude and provide several minutes of zero gravity.

Neither Stern nor Nelson would say how much SwRI would pay for the XCOR Lynx flights, but the tourist rate for the Lynx is $95,000 per seat. Nelson said the first Lynx model to enter service, the Mark I, would rise to at least 38 miles in altitude and yield just under a minute of zero-G — which is enough for SwRI's purposes. The Lynx production model, the Mark II, could fly about twice as high and provide longer stretches of microgravity.

Stern said he would be one of the researchers going into space as part of the deal. Two other SwRI staffers, Dan Durda and Cathy Olkin, have also been trained for spaceflight. SwRI will be paying for all the flights out of its research and development budget.

Three experiments are ready for flight, Stern said: One involves monitoring the researchers' vital signs during zero-G as well as their high-G ascent and descent. Researchers will also make astronomical observations out the windows of the rocket planes using an ultraviolet imager. Durda , meanwhile, has prepared a sample of simulated asteroid-type material that will be studied during the different phases of flight. Such research with fake asteroid stuff could help scientists figure out what to expect if a human mission is sent to land on a real asteroid, as the Obama administration has proposed.

Stern said the SwRI space program was aimed at priming the pump for scientific studies using piloted suborbital spacecraft. Such flights offer a low-cost, quick-turnaround alternative to research on the International Space Station, which generally involves a years-long procedure for approving and executing experments.

"Someone had to break the ice," Stern said. "We're very proud to be the first."

Other companies, including Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin, are also working on suborbital spaceships, and Stern said SwRI has been in discussions with those ventures as well for future flights.

"We're building a spaceflight program, and we'll take all comers" Stern said.

Other perspectives on suborbital science:

• Space.com: Virgin signs deal to launch scientists into space
• The Space Review: Suborbital back out of the shadows
• New York Times: One giant leap for researchers

Stern is due to discuss suborbital science initiatives on March 13 on "Virtually Speaking Science" with co-hosts Alan Boyle and Robin Snelson. Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Orbital Sciences Corp.

An artist's conception shows Orbital Sciences' proposed space vehicle making a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Several industry teams — reportedly including Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic — are vying to build new crew-worthy spaceships for NASA's use.

Today was the deadline for companies to provide NASA with proposals for spacecraft that could transfer astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Such spacecraft would help fill the gap left by the expected retirement of the space shuttle fleet next year. The call for proposals follows up on an earlier round of $50 million in funding that's being disbursed under NASA's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev. This round is known as CCDev 2.

The companies making CCDev 2 bids weren't required to announce publicly what they were doing, but a few companies have confirmed their participation:

SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon capsule, shown here in an artist's conception, has had an initial test.

SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost told me today that "we filed a proposal" for CCDev 2 funding. SpaceX did not participate in the first round of CCDev work, in part because there wouldn't have been enough money available to do what the California-based company needed to do to upgrade its Dragon capsule for crewed flight. However, SpaceX is receiving $278 million from NASA under a separate program to develop a space cargo delivery system, known as Commercial Orbital Transport Services or COTS. Just last week, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon aced their first COTS demonstration flight.

Boeing

An artist's conception shows Boeing's CST-100 orbital capsule.

The Boeing Co. sent out a news release confirming that it submitted a proposal to push ahead with development of its CST-100 spacecraft. It is already receiving $18 million in CCDev funding from NASA for the project, which envisions a seven-person capsule that can be used up to 10 times. Among Boeing's partners are Bigelow Aerospace, a Nevada-based venture whose inflatable space modules could serve as additional destinations for the CST-100; and Virginia-based Space Adventures, which would arrange orbital transport packages for spaceflight participants who would pay their own way.

Orbital Sciences Corp. "did submit a proposal for Commercial Crew Development 2," company spokesman Barron Beneski told me today. Virginia-based Orbital is receiving $171 million under the COTS program to develop its Taurus 2 rocket and Cygnus cargo capsule, but it didn't participate in the initial CCDev round. Beneski declined to tell me anything else about Orbital's proposal, other than to say "we intend to comment on it later this week."

Space News reported that Orbital was teaming up with Virgin Galactic, the New Mexico-based suborbital space company that's backed by British billionaire Richard Branson. The publication said Orbital's craft would be a lifting body capable of carrying four passengers initially, with an option to carry up to six later. The craft would be launched toward the space station from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop an Atlas 5 rocket, and make a runway landing back on Earth at the end of its journey.

California-based Scaled Composites is currently testing Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane as well as the White Knight Two carrier aircraft for future suborbital space tours. Space News said that Virgin would sell commercial seats on Orbital's craft, and ferry the spaceship between its landing strip and the Cape using White Knight Two. Such an arrangement would follow through on Branson's stated aspirations to get involved in orbital spaceflight.

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser would be a lifting body, as shown in this artist's conception.

Tonight, Space News added yet another nugget: It said Virgin would announce a separate CCDev 2 bid that's led by Sierra Nevada Corp. That Nevada-based company is receiving $20 million in CCDev 1 funds to work on its Dream Chaser space glider. Moreover, SpaceDev, a Sierra Nevada subsidiary, is already working on the hybrid rocket engines that are to be used on SpaceShipTwo. Last week, Aviation Week reported that Sierra Nevada was looking at NASA's mothballed X-34 space plane prototype as a testbed for the Dream Chaser development effort. Ironically, the X-34 started out as an Orbital Sciences project for NASA.

There are lots of questions yet to be answered about these proposals — and more generally about CCDev 2:

• Who else is in the running? Besides Boeing and Sierra Nevada, the other companies funded under CCDev 1 include Blue Origin, Paragon Space Development and United Launch Alliance. Some of the other players in the CCDev competition may make themselves known in the days to come, but they're under no requirement to do so.
• How much money is at stake? NASA has said it expects to award about $200 million during this round of funding, but that's dependent on how much money is appropriated for the program by Congress.
• When will these new spaceships be flying? Orbital is reportedly talking about test flights as early as 2014. SpaceX has said it could have its crew-capable Dragon ready within three years after striking a deal with NASA, which would imply a potential 2014 time frame. Sierra Nevada is also targeting 2014 for the Dream Chaser's first flight. And Boeing says it expects to begin crewed flights of the CST-100 by 2015. So under the current best-case scenario, NASA would be facing a three-year gap between the retirement of the shuttles and the start of commercial crew missions.

NASA is due to announce who gets the money in March.

Update for 3 p.m. ET: Orbital Sciences has issued a news release confirming that it submitted a proposal calling for the development of a "blended lifted body" that could be launched on United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 or other expendable rockets. "The design derives from studies performed by Orbital for NASA under the Orbital Space Plane program between 2000 and 2003," the company said.

The spaceship would seat four astronauts, as reported by Space News. Orbital said its major suppliers would include Thales Alenia Space, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Draper Laboratory and United Launch Alliance. I've added an artist's conception of the Orbital blended lifted body to the top of this item.

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Virgin Galactic's billionaire founder, Richard Branson, says that "we're about 12 months away" from flying paying passengers to the edge of outer space. But there are huge hurdles between now and then -- such as actually putting the spaceship through rocket-powered tests.

Branson delivered his latest prediction for the start of Virgin Galactic's commercial service on NBC's TODAY show this morning. He repeated his intention to get on board for the first operational flight of the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, along with other members of his family. That includes his daughter Holly, who was at Branson's side during the TODAY interview. (The TODAY spot also served as the TV unveiling of The Project, Branson's iPad-based magazine.)

After the Bransons take flight, hundreds of people who have paid $200,000 each will go on trips to outer space.

"We have nearly 500 people signed up to go," Branson said, "and so a year to 15 months from now, we'll start bringing members of the public up."

Those passengers will take a rocket-powered roller-coaster ride to a height of more than 62 miles (100 kilometers), watch the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space, and experience several minutes of zero gravity before descending to a gliding runway landing.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to accommodate six passengers and two pilots. The first SpaceShipTwo craft, which has been christened VSS Enterprise, follows in the footsteps of SpaceShipOne, the first privately built plane to take humans beyond that 100-kilometer boundary of outer space. That feat won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the project's backers, and earned SpaceShipOne a place in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

How realistic is the timetable?
Will the Enterprise really be ready for passengers a year from now? Many previous predictions for the start of commercial service have turned out to be over-optimistic, but it's interesting that the time frame for the predictions is shortening. Just a couple of months ago, Branson declared during a conference in Kuala Lumpur that commercial spaceflights were 18 months away.

Clay Observatory via Virgin Galactic

The SpaceShipTwo rocket plane (known as VSS Enterprise) is dropped from its mothership, known as White Knight Two (or VMS Eve), during the spaceship's first unpowered glide test in October.

Since then, SpaceShipTwo's builders at Scaled Composites have begun subjecting the craft to unpowered glide tests. The rocket plane has been carried to an altitude of around 50,000 feet on its carrier airplane, known as White Knight Two, then dropped into the air to test its aerodynamics. The third piloted glide test took place just a couple of weeks ago over California's Mojave Air and Space Port.

The next major step will be to light up SpaceShipTwo's hybrid rocket engine for powered tests. The Scaled Composites team, guided by aerospace guru Burt Rutan, will conduct a series of increasingly ambitious test flights -- leading up to the full takeoff-to-landing flight profile, which qualifies as honest-to-goodness spaceflight. If everything goes well, SpaceShipTwo could conceivably fire up and perhaps even cross into the space frontier before Rutan's retirement next April.

If SpaceShipOne's development timetable is any guide, that part of the job might be doable. It took less than a year for SpaceShipOne to go from its first glide test to its first spaceflight.

But SpaceShipTwo will need a lot more testing to make sure it's safe enough for passenger service, and any snags along the way could force Branson to revise his timetable. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly said that safety comes first -- and would you expect anything less?

Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts about the dawn of the age of commercial spaceflight.

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Virgin Galactic has released a video that tries to put its suborbital spaceflight experience into a wider historical context — wide enough to encompass the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, John F. Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech and the whole Apollo moon effort. Oh, and you also get to go to company founder Richard Branson's Caribbean island resort!

You could call this a nine-minute history of the commercialization of space, or a nine-minute commercial. Either way, selling $200,000 tourist packages for quick trips to outer space represents one not-so-small step toward opening up the final frontier to regular folks.

So when will the first suborbital space tourists fly? That's still an open question, but flight tests of the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and its White Knight Two mothership have been under way for some time already. On Monday, White Knight Two took to the air for the first time since last month's landing-gear glitch. The next big step will be to drop SpaceShipTwo into the air for its first glide. The best guess is that Virgin Galactic's first passengers will get on board in New Mexico in 2012 or so.

That's in accordance with the two-year rule for future spaceflight. 2012 is also the year when Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR Aerospace could be offering suborbital rides, and when Blue Origin could be flying researchers and their experiments into space. How firm will those timelines be? Ask me again in 2012.

This week's announcement about a deal between the Boeing Co. and Space Adventures sets a longer time frame for orbital passenger service. 2015 is the current "no-earlier-than" date — not only for Boeing's spaceship, but for Bigelow Aerospace's commercial space stations as well. By that time the Russians could be back in the space-passenger business as well. Other potential players in the orbital passenger market include SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada — but right now those companies don't seem to be as focused on human spaceflight as Boeing is. (If I hear anything different, I'll let you know.)

Several other recent developments have hinted at the shape of spaceflight to come, at least as far as NASA is concerned:

• NASA has extended Boeing's engineering contract for the International Space Station through 2015, at a projected cost of $1.24 billion over five years. Boeing's Joy Bryant is quoted as saying the company's expertise can "set the stage to enable ISS operations until 2020, and potentially extend operations through 2028." That last date would imply a 20-year lifetime for the station, from the launching of the first pieces to the downing of the last hulk. In comparison, Russia's Mir space station lasted 15 years, from 1986 to 2001.

• Four companies are listed today in NASA's announcement of an umbrella contract covering up to $15 billion in launch services over the next 10 years: Lockheed Martin, United Launch Services, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX.

• The biggest question hanging over NASA's human spaceflight program relates to which vision for the program's future will prevail, at least for the coming fiscal year. It's clear that President Barack Obama's original plan won't make it through Congress, so it seems to be a choice between the Senate's version of the NASA authorization bill and the House's version. The Senate version is seen as friendlier to commercial space ventures (and the space agency's view as well), but this report from The Huntsville Times gives more exposure to the House version's backers.

• If this is the sort of thing that floats your rocket-powered boat, join me and host Jay Ackroyd tonight at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) on "Virtually Speaking," which is being simulcast on Second Life and BlogTalkRadio. We'll be talking about the future of NASA. Maybe you can even set me straight on what kind of future that will be....