Ed Wright
Citizens in Space
- program used to be called Teachers in Space
- changed the focus recently to broaden it (also, a split with Space Frontier Foundation, which retains Teachers in Space program)
- Decades ago, Business Week has story on Cray 1 – “The machine that will change the world”
- At same time, Popular Electronics wrote about Altair 8800 – “the computer you can build”
- The Altair 8800 actually changed the world
- The experiments to fly on reusable vehicles and the vehicles themselves have a similar potential to change the world
- “There’s a revolution coming in spaceflight. New vehicles which are low cost, reusable and highly reliable.”
- Sputnik and Gagarin was a false dawn of human spaceflight
- An expensive government monopoly
- “Innovation always begins at the low end.” – Burt Rutan
- XCOR flights – 10 flights, 10 citizen astronauts and 100 experiments
- Any experiments selected becomes open source
- Create a community that can pick up and run with it
- Hope that the professional scientific community will be able to pick it up
- Experiments need to be reproducible on a citizen-science budget
- Through repeated flights, can bring down the cost
- 8-16 payloads per flight (1U or 2U CubeSats) behind pilot’s seat
- Probably carry 10-12 experiments per flight
- 2 aft cowling ports where experiments are exposed to space
- Current call for experiments on the website (www.citizensinspace.org)
- High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge
- $10,000 cash prize
- Microbes living above 10,000 feet
- Experiment placed in aft coiling port
- Launch experiment on all 10 flights
- Examine organism’s life span, genetics, reproduction rates, limits of where life can exist, comparative biology for looking at life on Mars, affects on weather
- Requires actual prototype hardware, not PowerPoint presentations
- Hardware submission in late winter/early spring 2013
- www.citizensinspace.org/astrobiology-challenge
- “We’re looking to fly hardware, not paper”
- First flights late 2013, early 2014
- Have selected 3 citizen astronauts for training, will select 7 other ones
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