SpaceDev Makes Record Time Supporting SpaceShipOne Propulsion System

The Guinness Book of World Records may need a new category by the end of 2004. X-Prize competitor SpaceShipOne makes its first publicly announced manned flight into space on June 21st...and then the modern space race REALLY begins!

The Ansari X-Prize competition is patterned after the more than 100 aviation prizes offered in the early 20th century that created today's $300 billion-dollar commercial air transport industry. To win the X-Prize, private teams must finance, build and then fly a three-person spacecraft 100 km (62 miles) to space, return safely, and then demonstrate the reusability of their vehicle by flying it again within two weeks.

Enter revolutionary SpaceDev, the Poway (CA) space solutions company. Since 1999, Jim Benson, founding Chairman and Chief Executive, and the SpaceDev propulsion team have been working with the engineers at Scaled Composites to create safe, inexpensive, private sector human space flight. Only a year after contracting with Scaled, SpaceDev successfully tested Scaled's SpaceShipOne propulsion system, the world's largest nitrous oxide (N2O) rocket motor. The hybrid system is highly innovative, using nitrous as an oxidizer, and hydroxy-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), or rubber, as the fuel. Both are low cost, in plentiful supply and can be safely transported and stored without special precautions, and will not explode when combined. SpaceDev supplied the rocket science and now supplies most of the key internal components for the SpaceShipOne rocket motor.

"I am extremely proud of our SpaceDev rocket propulsion team for helping to successfully developing this elegant system, and we are delighted to be instrumental in making safe and affordable access to space a reality," said Jim Benson. "With SpaceDev's rocket motor technology, and with the historic SpaceShipOne, commercial, manned, suborbital space flight is now truly within reach, and no longer just a dream."

The future of commercial space flight is no longer a question of how or when, but by whom. Smaller commercial space firms like SpaceDev, led by successful entrepreneurs from other industries, are already providing products and services that were previously the domain of NASA or the military. For example, just last year, SpaceDev launched this country's smallest, high performance, low cost satellite called CHIPSat, a science mission for the University of California at Berkeley through NASA's University Explorer Program. "We believe that CHIPSat is the world's first orbiting Internet node, and the world's first satellite whose mission control and operations center is merely a laptop computer, located anywhere in the world," said Benson.

During President Bush's NASA Commission hearing on the future of space earlier this year, witnesses as wide-ranging as science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, wealthy space tourist Dennis Tito, and SpaceDev's Jim Benson, aired their wisdom on the topic. Benson, in particular, was quite vocal about moving space travel into the private sector. "That means migrating from the big aerospace firms and their 'mainframe' mentality toward agile, innovative companies introducing the 'microcomputer' way of thinking into space. Smaller innovative firms like SpaceDev can provide rapid and affordable access to space, if given the opportunity," said Benson at the hearings.

FMI: www.spacedev.com