Published September 27, 2000
A $250,000 prize awaits the first privately funded group that launches a two kilogram (4.4 pound) metal plug into space, to an altitude of 200 kilometers (125 miles). The three year deadline is November 8, 2000.
It’s been called the Cheap Access to Space (CATS) competition. Several American and European small rocket test flights have been attempted, but none of the fifty competitors have succeeded.
Considerably more challenging than strapping together one more M-80 rocket and lighting the fuse, the intrepidly simple process has proven formidable. The US and other governments so routinely vault large payloads into space that the public hardly notices.
To attract the widest private company involvement, a second award of $50,000 is offered to the first team to propel the same weight to an altitude of only 120 kilometers (74 miles). Management planners had not seriously estimated the undertaking.
Announcements to the prize committee of planned launches must precede the event by thirty days. Contest administrator David Anderman, who conceived of the project and obtained funding from the Foundation for the Independent Nongovernmental Development of Space, says, “The vast majority of teams have fallen by the wayside.”
“Those groups that have demonstrated the determination and mechanical prowess—about 14 in all—will likely fly test vehicles on time,” says Anderman. “Those that haven’t simply won’t.”
Two groups are aggressively pursuing their attempt to rocket the modest payload to the preset altitudes: John Powell’s J.P. Aerospace team will fly their entry from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert on October 7-8. Last year they sent their rocket to a verified altitude of 14 miles.
On October 14, the High-Altitude Research Corporation of Hunstville will fly their hybrid-motor powered rocket from a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. HARC flew it’s amateur rocket 36 miles in 1997, a Guinness Book World Record.
The deceptively modest-sounding goal has crippled would-be victors in the race for this prize. The unseen challenges are enormous. A technically savvy launch system design must be built from scratch, a research & development drain of a company’s talent and time.
A majority of the technology being used has been derived from 30 years US and Russian military rocketry, the applied talents of sixty thousand specialists. “The reality check for the CATS prize is you can't use any of that.” The goal mandates something new.
Interorbital, a tiny 5-year old southern California company, is attempting something new. “We build every component in house: rockets, motors, fuel guidance systems, everything,” says co-owner Randa Milliron.
Interorbital’s prototype of a sounding rocket will be launched on Halloween from a fishing trawler in the Pacific Ocean, 150 miles west of Vandenberg Air Force Base. The suborbital Tachyon design will use their own hypergolic motors to ignite liquid hydrocarbon fuel by mixture with a liquid oxidizer, nitric acid. No electrical or explosive charge is needed.
Powell’s group will use a 50-year old technique called rackoon launch to reach the stratosphere. The lighter-than-air lift of its carbon-fiber and Kevlar rocket is an unexpected technical challenge. A 600-foot cluster stack of weather balloons will first lift JPA’s 80-pound rocket to 60,000 feet, then fired the remaining 114 miles.
To overcome the complication of firing the rocket directly through the balloons, a whimsical 15-foot tall polyhedron construction of black carbon fiber rods is strung together with white nylon cord. The Buckminster Fuller Tinker Toy array moves the balloons out of the way. Al Differ, a University of California physicist conceived of this solution from his childhood experience building tetrahedrons from match sticks and toothpicks.
Government agencies that regulate both launch sites and the airspace above them, overlay their own constrictions. After years of new rocket development, bureaucratic red-tape hinders and delays private-sector rocket tests. Federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation must first approve them.
A popular and remote lake bottom at BLM-managed Black Rock Desert is a popular location for hobbyist and commercial rocketeers. It is also used as a jet-car speedway for world land-speed record tests.
“You used to be able to do anything you wanted out there,” says SORAC's Colburn who is delayed by the BLM that could thwart his team’s plan to launch by the CATS deadline. “If you wanted to go out and fire a .50-caliber machine gun, well that was fine, and people just showed up and did it. The same went for rockets.”
The FAA sites public safety, holding to the presumption that what goes up must come down on someone or something, even if it’s sent 75 miles straight up.
The permit-process includes a proof of financial responsibility, a policy-, safety-, payload- and environmental-review and compliance monitoring. At launch, teams must notify FAA regional and national flight centers to coordinate air traffic over the desert.
Anyone remember the short-lived television series years ago, staring Andy Griffith, an inventor/ junk dealer who launched his own manned space vehicle from his back yard to retrieve space junk? Back then, the script writers’ conceived that the only notification was a courtesy call to the local airport control tower.