ALAMO, Nev. -- Residents of rural Nevada are not surprised by weird objects they see in the sky. But the spacecraft recently spotted near Alamo must have caused a few folks to rub their eyes in disbelief.
The NASA space program is in a holding pattern now that the space shuttle has been retired, but the private space industry is in full-speed mode. A test conducted over a Nevada lake bed is evidence of that , though it looks like the space race has gone retro.
If you were among the very few watching from the Delamar dry lake bed a few days ago, you might have been tempted to double check the year. There, floating down from the sky, suspended by what looked like gigantic fried eggs, was a seemingly vintage space capsule, like something from the Apollo Program that had slipped through a time warp.
"The physics of space travel is the same. We did a real good job on Apollo and we have no reason to try and do something that looks different," said James Johnson with the Boeing Commercial Crew Program.
For Boeing and its Nevada partner, Bigelow Aerospace, the future of space travel looks a lot like the past. It's as if the space shuttle era never happened.
For all of its successes, the shuttle is just too expensive. The bottom line didn't matter that much when the space program was strictly a government program, but if private industry is going to take the lead in the conquest of space, the whole shebang has to pencil out.
"We have to be affordable, just like flying on an airplane. If you had to pay for the entire airplane, you couldn't make it happen. We're looking to make it more economical," said Bigelow aerospace engineer Jay Ingham.
The test near Alamo represents an important milestone in the development of a new and improved commercial capsule, which is why there were anxious moments on the ground as a massive sky crane lifted the test spacecraft to an altitude of 14,000 feet, which is 10,000 feet above the dry lake bed. When all was ready, they cut it loose.
Small cameras attached to the capsule give an astronaut's eye view. The first nervous moment was when a trio of drogue parachutes deployed to put the brakes on the descent. And then 20 seconds into the drop, the drogues were blasted away and a trio of main parachutes took over. Anyone who didn't know what was going on might have reported this as a triple-yolk UFO.
Unlike Apollo-era space capsules, which were designed to land in the ocean, this new generation of spacecraft will come down on land to save on cost. But since parachutes alone don't slow them down enough, the designers installed gigantic air bags on the bottom to absorb the impact.
"It worked really well," said Ingham. "These guys have landed on air bags -- a very large version of what you have in your car that, on impact, attenuates the landing loads."
Ingham beams like a new dad for a reason -- though Boeing is being lauded for the success of this test, the capsule is locally-made.
"We fabricated the entire unit. We did a lot of the design work on the metallic structures, we designed and built all the avionics in there. It was a fairly complicated task," he said.
And it was a departure from the company's main focus, which is to build and market inflatable space habitats -- modules that will one day be the core of privately owned space stations and, eventually, bases on the moon or Mars or beyond.
But as founder Bob Bigelow recognized years ago, the only way his space stations can ever work is if there is a cheap and reliable way to move people and material back and forth. It is in Bigelow's own interest to help partners like Boeing develop safe spacecraft and economical rockets.
"The quicker we can help them get there, the quicker we can get our stuff going and have people capable of getting back into space," said Ingham.
The Boeing/Bigelow capsule is one of four private designs vying for an eventual NASA contract. It could carry as many as seven astronauts or space tourists, and if this version is chosen by NASA, at least some of the components could be manufactured locally.
