While
SpaceDev has been around for a decade, its January 2006 merger with Starsys
Research Corp. shifted everything into a higher gear, says SpaceDev Managing
Director Scott Tibbitts, who founded Starsys in 1987 and pioneered thermal
actuator technology as an aerospace alternative to conventional explosive
actuators.
Over those
20 years, "we just started moving up the food chain," Tibbitts told Space
News in a Sept. 13 telephone interview. Since its founding Starsys has
developed more than 2,500 devices of various types that have flown on more than
250 spacecraft.
The merger
blended SpaceDev's expertise in advanced prototyping with the Starsys heritage
in space hardware, Mark Sirangelo, SpaceDev's chairman and chief executive
officer, said in an interview.
Sirangelo
said he is positioning the small Poway, Calif.-based company as a provider of
affordable and innovative space services. Products in development include such
things as low-cost satellites and a passenger-carrying space plane. Its focus
now is on six core technology areas: small satellites; hybrid propulsion;
advanced systems; structures; electromechanical systems; and components and
mechanisms.
The company
now has facilities at three locations: Poway, Calif.; Louisville, Colo.; and
Durham, N.C. The diverse trio of locales in three states also helps garner
political support when needed, Sirangelo said.
SpaceDev is
gearing up for the likelihood that NASA will go ahead and hold a
competition for the $175 million in unspent funds that the agency previously
had awarded to Rocketplane Kistler under the Commercial Orbital Transportation
Services (COTS) agreement.
NASA selected two
companies in August 2006 to split $500 million in funding under the COTS
program:
Rocketplane
Kistler of Oklahoma City, and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of El
Segundo, Calif. The money is intended to help each company build and conduct
test flights of their respective launch systems to deliver cargo to the
international space station.
But
Rocketplane Kistler has been unable to meet some of the financial and technical
milestones spelled out in its COTS agreement, which prompted NASA officials
Sept. 7 to notify the company that its contract would be terminated.
Rocketplane Kistler has 30 days from the date of that letter to convince NASA
otherwise.
"We're
gearing up for what might come next," Sirangelo told Space News in a
Sept. 16 telephone interview. The SpaceDev team proposed its Dream
Chaser space plane for the initial COTS competition, but came in third, he
said, losing out to Rocketplane Kistler.
Dream
Chaser is based on the NASA HL-20 lifting body space plane and Sirangelo said
SpaceDev has been putting its own money into the concept since the COTS awards
were made, pushing the space plane forward on several technical tracks. "We've
kept in shape, if you will, because we thought that this was going to come
around," he said.
Sirangelo
said NASA recognizes that it needs to do something quickly because time is
passing, and the agency "can't wait another year to make this happen."
SpaceDev
signed a memorandum of understanding with United Launch Alliance in April to
evaluate human-rating the Atlas 5 launch vehicle and configuring it for use
with Dream Chaser. The first phase of that work, Sirangelo said, is about to be
completed showing that Dream Chaser can ride on an Atlas and attain the orbit
desired. "It's actually pretty good news," he said.
Dream
Chaser is a multi-purpose vehicle, Sirangelo emphasized, that not only will be
able to handle international space station work, but also will be capable of
serving as an orbital platform for space operations, including satellite
servicing. In addition, its design can handle the emerging space tourism
marketplace, either in suborbital or orbital mode, he said.
A fourth
utility for Dream Chaser might involve the military by supplying point-to-point
travel anywhere around the globe, Sirangelo said.
"We are a
revenue and profit-producing company," Sirangelo said, adding that the company
will bring in more than $35 million in 2007 revenue, from a dozen clients and
about 30 ongoing programs.
SpaceDev
has the ability to take some of its money and invest in research and
development, Sirangelo said. A case in point is the SpaceDev docking and
capture hardware that was built for the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency's recently
completed Orbital Express mission.
While that
was government-funded as a Small Business Innovation Research program,
Sirangelo said that SpaceDev put its own time and money into the project to
give it a proprietary interest in that technology should it be utilized again.
Similarly,
SpaceDev's U.S. Air Force work on hybrid rocket motors is being leveraged for
similar motors for the Dream Chaser space plane. Sirangelo said that this type
of bootstrapping is akin to a triple word score in the game Scrabble.
Earlier
this month, SpaceDev announced it had been awarded three contracts to deliver
more than 200 satellite components to Mitsubishi Electric Corp. In total, the
contract is valued at $800,000 and will provide hardware in support of several
commercial satellites while expanding SpaceDev's business in Japan.
SpaceDev
also has provided key mechanisms for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, such as
the items now aboard the Mars
Phoenix Lander, which is en route to the red planet. The company's hardware
also can be found on the long-lived Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and
Opportunity.
For the
long-term, Sirangelo said he envisions SpaceDev becoming a larger aerospace
company that could be an active partner with major aerospace firms, "by virtue
of giving them a faster, more economical research arm."
Tibbitts
said a powerful growth area for the company will be putting large deployable
structures on microsatellites. New and spacious SpaceDev facilities in
Louisville, for instance, are being used to design and develop deployable boom
structures for satellites under subcontract from the Air Force Research
Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate.
Tibbitts
said the company sees great promise in building hardware for small satellites.
"Technologically, there are things that are changing very quickly, particularly
in the area of memory and processor speed ... making small satellites more and
more capable."
