Imagine you’re standing on the moon, watching the daily cargo rocket arrive. It might look like this. Actually, it will probably look more like Masten’s planned XEUS vehicle, an image of which Masten Space Systems director of business operations Nathan O’Konek has shared with me.

Masten Space Systems proposed multi-thrust-axis lander. Image: Masten Space Systems.

Masten is putting together a demonstration system built around a United Launch Alliance Centaur upper stage rocket and its single RL-10 engine.

Four Masten 3,500 pound thrust propulsion modules will bring the ship in for a horizontal touchdown without the high velocity dust plumes kicked up by the big guy.

Dust will be a major concern to people living and working on the moon. Even without blowing around, it can be damaging to spacesuits, machinery, and other equipment. Another advantage of this design is that cargo can be unloaded near the ground, without relying on tall ladders or a crane.

Update: O’Konek points out that “The dispersed engines will help mitigate the plume problem, but they won’t be able to eliminate plume effects completely.”

XCOR CEO Jeff Greason with Lynx rocket engine. Photo: Michael Belfiore.

On a recent visit to Mojave Air & Spaceport, I stopped in on XCOR Aerospace for an update on the development of their new suborbital spaceship, called the Lynx.

The Lynx builds on XCOR’s successful experience with reusable, restartable rocket engines and rocket propelled airplanes. The plan calls for the two-seat Lynx, powered by a quartet of XCOR-developed 2850-pound-thrust liquid fueled rocket engines, to take off from a runway at Mojave and clear the atmosphere at 62+ miles altitude for sight-seeing and scientific missions.

XCOR is already under contract with NASA and others for suborbital research flights. You have until February 10 to register to win a flight sponsored by the Southwest Research Institute at http://nsrc.swri.org/.

So far XCOR has designed, built, and test-fired the spaceship’s rocket engine design, mostly finished designing the vehicle itself, and has also built components such as valves and pumps. “It is my goal, not the same thing as a promise,” XCOR CEO Jeff Greason told me, “to see air under the gear by the end of the year.”

See also my report from my Mojave visit for Popular Mechanics at http://bit.ly/wNJJx5.

Image courtesy Stratolaunch Systems

With him at the press conference was SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan, fueling press coverage that the dream team of Allen and Rutan had once again teamed up for an innovative space launch project. That’s only partly true; Rutan is retired now, and while he’s serving on the Stratolaunch board as an advisor, it will be engineers at his former company, Scaled Composites, who design the launch aircraft. SpaceX will design and build the rocket to be launched by the aircraft. Huntsville-based Dynetics will build a connecting system to mate the two vehicles.

I spoke with Stratolaunch CEO Gary Wentz, a former NASA engineer and manager, to get further details on the company’s plans and where it is now in development. According to Wentz:

-Scaled, SpaceX, and Dynetics are acting as contractors to Stratolaunch, not partners. The effort is funded entirely by Stratolaunch, through Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.

-Through Scaled, Stratolaunch has purchased two used Boeing 747s from United Airlines. The airplanes will be flown into Mojave Air and Space Port early next month for Scaled to take them apart and use their components in building the world’s largest aircraft, the 385-foot-wingspan Stratolaunch mothership.

-The mothership is currently known only by its Scaled model number: M351.

-The Stratolaunch plan calls for the mothership to carry a to-be-built SpaceX Falcon 4 rocket to high altitude from which to launch a payload to orbit. The Falcon 4 will be powered by 4 SpaceX Merlin IB engines (contrary to the now-out-of-date Stratolaunch video, which shows 5 engines).

-Design on the mothership is planned for completion by late summer of next year.

-The mothership is to begin flight testing in late 2015 in Mojave, with rocket test launches from the airplane to begin at Cape Canaveral in late 2016.

-First revenue flights will be unmanned payloads; manned flights, Allen’s ultimate goal, could begin around 2020.

-Stratolaunch has begun clearing dirt at the Mojave Air/Space Port for a 20-acre site to house the aircraft and assembly facilities in two buildings, which are to be completed in the next 18 months.

-The retired Space Shuttle processing buildings and runway at Cape Canaveral are envisioned as Stratolaunch’s base of operations.

-Stratolaunch is not actively seeking customers yet, just focusing on development right now.

Of his motivation for leaving NASA after 18 years to work on Stratoaunch, says Wentz:

“My whole history with NASA was flying flight hardware, and I just saw this as the next opportunity to do that knowing that with the cancellation of the Constellation program it would be 5 to 8 years before they’re in a mode to be able to fly more hardware at the level at which I had become accustomed. It was a good opportunity for me to come out and build something different and actually fly some hardware.”

By Michael Belfiore.

CNN.com, August 15, 2011.

The HTV-2′s hypersonic glide flight test was but one of many high-risk, potentially high-payoff projects funded by DARPA. DARPA is America’s hidden innovation engine. Not so many know the name, but nearly everyone is familiar with the agency’s work: GPS receivers that slip into our pockets, interactive computer displays and the Internet itself.

DARPA only undertakes projects that have a good chance of failing — projects that few others dare to take on. Projects like hypersonic flight. The failure is not surprising; permission to fail is what has enabled the agency’s spectacular success over its 53-year history.

With the HTV-2, DARPA and its partners, including the Air Force and Lockheed Martin, were attempting to advance a technology that has captured the imagination of aerospace engineers since the 1960s. Hypersonic flight, that is flight powered by air-breathing engines at greater than five times the speed of sound, could enable airplanes to cross the United States in minutes rather than hours, to jet from one side of the globe to the other and back on the same day.

Read the full article on CNN.com.

As I mentioned in my last post, Geier is firm believer in having a plan before starting to market your products or services. “Having that plan and having it very current to the needs of your business is absolutely key,” she says in this interview.

She also says that you need need to be as precise about your marketing as you are in the research and development of your products. Ask yourself: “What are the specifications of your marketing plan?” To arrive at those specs, start with two basic questions:

1. What is your budget?
This will define the scope of what you can accomplish and how you will do it.

2. Who is your primary audience?
This will help you form your central message, and how technical it will be.

When developing that all-important central message, says Geier, try to boil down the product or service you are marketing to the three most important features. Just as with good engineering and product design, simplicity is beautiful.

“The biggest challenge that engineers have is making time for marketing,” says Geier. “The engineers are wearing a lot of hats, they have a lot of deadlines.”

Even so, the payoff for spending the time up front for marketing makes it well worth it for the increased website traffic, sales leads, new business it will bring.

Download Geier and company’s free Smart Marketing Guide for Engineers at http://trewmarketing.com/smartmarketing/index.php.

Marketing presents special challenges to technical offerings; not only do you have to get the word out, but you also have to explain complex ideas to folks who may not have the technical expertise to understand them. Technologists often ask me for help in getting their ideas in front of investors such as the US government, and in getting the word out about their work to the general public. But there’s more to good marketing than that.

“The most important thing is to have a plan,” Rebecca Geier, principal and co-founder of TREW Marketing tells me. Her company, which specializes in marketing for organizations in the science and engineering fields, was recently named one of the most innovative small businesses in America by the Wall Street Journal. “Engineers and scientists are so busy, and not having a plan will cause even more inefficiency, wasted time, and frustration. The more thought that goes in up front, the more time is saved later.”

That means defining business goals and then putting together a plan to support those goals, says Geier.

“After a plan is in place, the next most important marketing investment is a well-branded, SEO-optimized, professional company website with quality content, quality content, quality content!”

Stands to reason. Your website is your most visible face in the world, and the first place contacts, prospects, and media folks will likely go for more information about you and your work.

As for getting publicity—that is, mentions in the media—Geier has this to say:

“What we recommend for companies just starting out is to find the 1-2 technical editors in the space they serve and patiently build a relationship with them. Email them to introduce yourself and your company, comment on their articles and blog posts, follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn if you have a presence on these sites, let them know when your company has news, etc. Over time, they may begin to seek your opinion for articles they’re working on.”

As a journalist, I can certainly attest to the effectiveness of that approach. Keep in mind, though, that there’s a fine line between being a pest and being helpful!

You can find more good marketing ideas from Geier and her partner at Trew Marketing, Wendy Covey, in their free epub Smart Marketing for Engineers.

A Bigelow Aerospace inflatable habitation module looms out of the darkness at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

It’s a measure of how far the commercial space flight industry has come that the future vision presented by this exhibit includes a good representative of the private companies that are working to build a permanent presence in space, and not just the usual NASA pipe dreams.

There’s a 1/3-scale model of an inflatable Bigelow Aerospace habitat, along with a diorama of several such habs together making up a moon base. (A working demo also shows how a telescope with a liquid mirror the size of a football field could form the core of a lunar observatory.)

There’s a model of Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne and White Knight 2, along with a display on SpaceX. There’s model of a lunar elevator (a cable anchored on the moon stretching out into space for electric powered vehicles to come and go from the surface), a Mars ship model, and a detailed treatment of what it will take to terraform Mars, complete with a touch screen table for you and your friends to heat up the polar caps and drill for water yourselves.

Exhibit curator Michael Shara explained terraforming at this week’s press event, and why he made it a centerpiece of the exhibit:

“We are almost certainly going to start terraforming mars, changing it into an Earth-like world. After all you back up your hard drive every day, or you should anyway. We should back up life….and mars is the closest and best place to do that, to make sure that we don’t suffer the same kind of fate that the dinosaurs did. They were around for 200 million years. They didn’t invent telescopes. They didn’t figure out an way to deflect an asteroid, something that we discuss in the exhibition. You can visit them here in the halls, but they’re all fossilized. We don’t want to go that way. We want to be able to do something much more dramatic, and that is, I think, in the next few hundred years, start expanding away from our little womb here out into the solar system, and then to the first star, and the next one, and the next one, and across the galaxy.”

Shara said he and his team aim to inspire young people with a vision of humanity as an interplanetary civilization. Just because NASA has retired the Space Shuttles doesn’t mean we’re done traveling to space, he said. Instead, “We’re really just at the beginning.”

The exhibit does an excellent job showing just how and why we’ll get to space to stay, through entertaining, informative, and engaging displays and interactive elements that also puts it all in the context of humankind’s past achievements in space. It’s well worth the visit, and not just for the kids.

Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Saturday, November 19, and runs through August 12, 2012. (See also my photostory on the exhibit on popularmechanics.com.)

Starship concept courtesy of Project Icarus. Image: Adrian Mann.

But what’s the best way to fund really long-range technology development, say, something that will take on the order of 100 years just to figure out how to tackle?

That’s one of the questions DARPA asks with the 100 Year Starship project. The conference of the same name is winding down here at the Hilton Orlando, and the answer, like every other aspect of this hardest-of-all challenge for DARPA, is still subject to debate. One idea, suggested to me by Wired magazine cofounder and technology thinker Kevin Kelly, is to found a new religion with the project at hand as its guiding light.

The best way to go about actually building a starship did begin to emerge over the last couple of days. There are some differences of opinion among these best and brightest minds brought to bear on the problem here, of course, but here’s what I’ve taken as the surest path:

1: Reduce the problem to its most manageable form. We need to take fragile, easily bored, high maintenance humans out of the equation, said aerospace engineer and Planetary Society director Louis Friedman. Instead, we should send the smallest, simplest vehicle possible with programable microbes on board to do the work that people would have done once they arrive.

2: Develop a solar system wide industrial infrastructure. Philip Metzger, research physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, advocated sending autonomous self-replicating machines into the asteroids, the moon, and elsewhere in our own solar system to mine for the raw materials needed to build and launch a starship. That process alone could take 100 years.

3. Develop non-chemical propulsion systems. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and their Apollo colleagues got to the Moon with chemical rockets. No humans have ever gone faster, but it would have taken them tens of thousands of years to get to even the nearest stars. Instead, we’ll need nuclear, antimatter, or beam-powered vehicles. Each has its unique challenges, but it looks like antimatter is destined to remain science fiction longer than the others. I like beam power myself, in which a laser (putting out more power than currently used by all of humanity) is shot at a light sail a good percentage of the size of Texas to propel the starship.

As for why humanity would want to do this extraordinarily difficult and expensive mission at all, Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute, said that she believes the only compelling motivation will be the discovery of life orbiting another star.

See my previous post on the 100 Year Starship project for some background on why on Earth (or off it) DARPA has taken on such a project. See also my conference coverage and some perspective on just how hard this problem is at popularmechanics.com.

Science fiction makes it seem easy: just engage the warp drive, do a little hand waving about Johnson rods or somesuch, and make a hyperspace jump.

The reality will be vastly more difficult. Later this month, DARPA will convene scientists, engineers, big thinkers, and even science fiction writers (one of them, Joe Haldeman, was an instructor of mine at the Clarion West Writers Workshop) at the Orlando Hilton to help get the 100 Year Starship project started.

Step on: lay out the basics of what kinds of propulsion to consider, where to go, and how to survive what is likely to be a multigenerational journey.

DARPA is kicking in half a million dollars to get the project started with NASA’s Ames Research Center as a partner. But after that, a private entity is to take over. DARPA will help the new venture along for two years, and then hand over the keys for the next 98 years.

The obvious question is, what’s in it for DARPA, the US military’s fringe R&D department. From the solicitation inviting organizations to submit proposals for running the program after DARPA hands it off:

“In attempting to achieve major endeavors, such as the first flight to the moon, mankind has pushed the boundaries of what’s possible technically. In addition to yielding a long-term impact, it typically has very real near-term benefits. Space programs and related investments to date have resulted in benefits as far flung as improving water purification processes to better data communications protocols to enhancing breast cancer detection. The technologies developed as part of the 100YSS undertaking will have very direct impact here on earth, including benefitting DARPA’s principal customer—the American warfighter.”

With this project, DARPA asks the questions:

“What if, then, we imagine ourselves, one hundred years from now, going to the nearest stars? What if we commit ourselves to spending the next century tackling the key technological, socio-political, and economic problems that stand in the way? What if we strive to inspire the next five generations—and rekindle the human spirit of exploration, discovery, and wonder? What are the means by which we realize this vision?”

Now that’s looking up! I’ll be covering the 100 Year Starship Symposium as it happens September 30 to October 2. Watch this space and also popularmechanics.com.

Whittinghill's suborbital rockets will form the basis of an orbital vehicle. Image: Whittinghill Aerospace.

Together they comprise a good percentage of the 7-member Whittinghill Aerospace team. Their ambitious goal: send small payloads into orbit.

Their plan calls for ganging together seven 32-foot-long, 2-foot-diameter rockets, each fueled by a hybrid nitrous oxide and rubber fueled motor. A final stage on top will nudge the payload the rest of the way into orbit once it reaches space.

When NASA announced its suborbital Flight Opportunities Program (FOP), George realized that one of the stages of his so-called Minimum Cost Launch Vehicle, or MCLV, could meet the specs for sending experiments on high altitude, zero-g trajectories with reusable vehicles.

“I haven’t named the [suborbital] sounding rocket yet,” George told me on the phone. “This procurement kind of caught me by surprise.’”

This month, NASA named Whittinghill Aerospace, based in Camarillo, on the Southern California coast, as one of seven suborbital launch providers that will fly research payloads for its new program.

It’s all about providing cheaper and more frequent access to space than has ever been available before. NASA hopes that by buying rides for researchers on the new vehicles, it will help foster the fledgling suborbital launch industry as well accelerate space technology development through in-flight testing in experimental payloads.

George Whittinghill, an MIT aerospace grad and a veteran of the US ballistic missile defense program as well as a former NASA employee at Johnson Space Center, figures he has a leg up on more traditional solid fuel sounding rocket designs. His vehicles will be reusable and thus less expensive, and their rubber fuel is safer to handle and transport.

He and Ian, who is a USC aerospace grad, and the rest of the team plan to begin test firing their rocket motors early next year in Mojave, California, home to no less than three other FOP launch providers.

Lean startups advancing competing technologies in pursuit of private as well as government business: this is how new industries get off the ground.

The Whittinghills know what they have to do to get a piece of the action. “My primary interest is to provide dedicated access to the user that wants to launch small payloads. The whole idea is rapid access, fast turn around, low cost. I’m trying to fill the market that’s just not well served right now.”