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HAWAII’S PORTAL TO SPACE Newsletter www.pacificspacecenter.com July 2020 - Issue 7 Volume 8 Spaceflight Startup Announces Plan to Letter from the Director Launch Space Tours in Stratosphere Rodrigo Romo Aloha kakou, OVID-19 has spread worldwide C throughout the first half of this year and taken a devastating toll on the Above: An artist new human spaceflight startup has re- well-being, health and financial stability rendering shows vealed its plans to launch suborbital space of countless people. Here in Hawaii, we passengers A aboard “Shape- tours for the public in less than five years. The have been fortunate to maintain a rela- ship Neptune” as Space Perspective, billed as “the off-world tively low number of cases due to swift they glide above travel company,” held a press event on June and effective measures taken by state Earth near the 18 outlining a space-balloon flight that would officials, and by the kokua and aloha of edge of space. loft passengers to about 100,000 feet aboard Credit: Space our communities who continue to look Perspective. a pressurized capsule. Though the anticipated out for one another by following recom- altitude is short of the commonly recognized mended safety guidelines. boundary with space, the flight would be high But like most states and countries enough to see the curvature of Earth and the across the planet, Hawaii’s economy blackness of space. has suffered immensely as travel restric- One of the company’s goals is to shift human tions and lockdowns to slow the spread perspectives on Earth and the cosmos through of COVID-19 have devastated our main “the overview effect”—a phenomenon reported source of revenue: tourism. This pan- by astronauts who experience a change in con- demic has shown us how relying too sciousness after seeing the Earth from space. heavily on a single industry in Hawaii “We’re committed to fundamentally changing can leave us extremely vulnerable in the way people have access to space, both to times of crisis. perform much-needed research to benefit life > Continued on Page 4 @PISCES_Hawaii > Continued on Page 3 Economic Development · Workforce Development · Applied Research Page 1/4 www.pacificspacecenter.com Newsletter July 2020 - Issue 7 Volume 8 Demonstrating Spacecraft Technology in Zero-Gravity Left: Dr. Ian McKinley (left foreground) and Dr. William Jones- Wilson (right background) test their agility in a weightless environment during a microgravity flight and technology demonstration in March 2017. Below: Dr. Zhu getting the hang of notetaking By: Dr. Frances Zhu, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology while floating in microgravity. uring my PhD, I had the pleasure of flying McKinley. We spent long days at the hangar Photo credits: Din two microgravity flight campaigns to performing every functionality and safety Cornell/NASA JPL. demonstrate a spacecraft docking mech- check on our testbed. The rest of the team anism consisting of magnets and super- joined us closer to the flight date to rehearse conductors. I had been developing this dry runs of the experiment. Because each technology (called a flux-pinned interface) microgravity section lasts only 30 seconds, for three years together with my team at and our bodies are running on a lot of adren- Cornell University, the Space Systems aline, the flight operators can easily forget Design Studio led by Dr. Mason Peck, and at the order of operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by Dr. We were scheduled to fly on two days, Laura Jones-Wilson. Both flight campaigns thirty parabolas each. On day one, we were made possible through Zero-G, a waited in the hangar to ensure the weather commercial microgravity flight provider. would comply and we were cleared to fly in Prior to the flight, we went through a series our allotted airspace of around 32,000 feet of reviews that increased in rigor to ensure over a 15-mile strip. The the experiment would not shatter into pieces planes that fly parab- in the unlikely event of a crash. We packed olas are notoriously our humongous, 300-pound testbed into called “Vomit Comets”. a shipping crate and sent the hardware to Many of us wore motion Sanford, Florida. In the first week of March sickness patches 2017 (one week prior to the actual flight), I behind our ears that arrived in Sanford to perform hardware > Continued on Page 4 checkouts with a fellow JPL engineer, Dr. Ian Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems Page 2/4 www.pacificspacecenter.com Newsletter July 2020 - Issue 7 Volume 8 Cont: Spaceflight Startup Announces Plan for Space Tours > Continued from Page 1 on Earth and to affect Top right: An artist how we view and connect rendering shows with our planet,” Space Spaceship Neptune Perspective Co-founder rising off the coast Jane Poynter said in a of Florida where the company’s statement. first operational On a tour, eight pas- flight center has sengers and a pilot would been established would be carried skyward at Kennedy Space Center. by a massive space bal- loon roughly the size of Bottom right: Passengers capture a football stadium. The photos of Earth capsule, called Space- from inside the ship Neptune (a nod to the far-flung planet’s ginning in 2023. The first commercial flights Neptune capsule. mostly hydrogen and helium atmosphere), are expected by 2024. Credits: Space would offer rarely glimpsed views of Earth The company’s founders, Jane Poynter Perspective. and space, comfortable seating, a mini-bar and Taber MacCallum, were crew members and lavatory. The total flight time would be of Biosphere 2 in the early 1990s. In 2013, about six hours. they founded World View with a mission sim- The company has already established an ilar to Space Perspective using high-altitude operations center at NASA’s Kennedy Space balloons. Though tours never got off the Center in Florida and plans to launch from ground, scientific experiments did. Poynter the old Space Shuttle runway. Additional and MacCallum are now revisiting their orig- launches are planned from Cecil Spaceport inal vision through Space Perspective. Their in Florida, in Hawaii and Alaska, and other staff have led, designed and/or operated all locations around the world, according to the the human suborbital balloon flights staged company’s website. in the last five decades, according to the In addition to tours, Space Perspective company’s website. also plans to offer opportunities for scientific experiments by researchers, students and educators. At 19 miles off the ground, atmo- spheric pressure is almost zero, providing a near-vacuum environment to do research related to the atmosphere, solar physics and other natural sciences. Space Perspective’s first test flights are planned during the first quarter of next year with crewed flights be- PISCES Hawaii · [email protected] · +1 (808) 935-8270 Page 3/4 www.pacificspacecenter.com Newsletter July 2020 - Issue 7 Volume 8 Cont: Letter from the Director Cont: Tech Demo in Zero-G > Continued from Page 1 > Continued from Page 2 Hawaii lawmakers and government agencies are now working would slowly release medicine to numb our to find solutions for our economic recovery, and one of the top inner ears from sensing wild shifts in accel- priorities in this effort is to find new ways to diversify our economy eration. We also carried bottles of anti-nau- away from tourism. Here at PISCES, we have been working to sea and anti-motion sickness pills for quick identify Aerospace Industry opportunities that could provide sig- release during flight. Once clear, we loaded nificant and sustainable new sources of revenue. While not all our experiment into the empty, white-pad- aerospace ventures may be suitable for Hawaii, the geographic ded hull of the plane. About thirty minutes positioning and geologic features of the islands offer among the later, we had reached altitude and the pilot best opportunities found in the U.S. to create an Aerospace In- issued a notice of “steady flight” over the dustry cluster. This includes: small satellite manufacturing, testing intercom. We briskly popped out of our and in-orbit operations, small vehicle orbital launch, Unmanned seats and began setting up the experiment Aerial Vehicle Systems (UAS) testing, applied research in du- amid the deafening sound of the plane’s jet al-use technologies, technical training, and planetary surface test engines. and training programs. When the parabolic segments of our flight Though Hawaii’s main industry will surely continue to be tour- began, we were all sitting or lying on the ism, Aerospace opportunities also have the potential to comple- ground. As the pilot pulled on the plane’s ment it. Space Perspective, a new human spaceflight startup, re- yoke, we could feel the increase in gravity cently announced their plan to begin ferrying tourists to the upper from 1G to 2Gs over 30 seconds. As the edges of the stratosphere aboard a space-balloon. The company pilot rounded the bend at the peak of the has already established a launch operations center at Kennedy parabola, we felt the transition from 2Gs Space Center in Florida and has plans to set up operations in into 0G. We were weightless! My team Alaska and here in Hawaii. Sight-seeing tours in space would be propped up both spacecrafts in the testbed a totally unique experience, and offer more incentive for tourists and released them toward one another to to visit Hawaii. demonstrate a docking maneuver. After a The next step in forging a plan to diversify Hawaii’s economy few attempts, the spacecrafts successfully is to find strategies to convince stakeholders involved in these docked in the microgravity environment. various ventures to do business in Hawaii.

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