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So says Aviation Week & Space Technology;
Wow....
Presumably this would be spread among SS2, SpaceDev's DreamChaser, Rocketplane's XP, Blue Origin etc. if/when they fly. Most of the above are very close to testing.
NASA is already talking to Virgin and the others about using their vehicles for both microgravity experiments and astronaut training (AW&ST Oct. 23, p. 23). And the agency's interest in buying flights on the new vehicles extends beyond microgravity applications to using them for experiments in Earth's upper atmosphere as an analog for the thin atmosphere of Mars.
"This is a major area where aeronautics and space and exploration all come together, and potentially their capabilities will give us an early test of that," says Simon (Pete) Worden, director of Ames Research Center. "We don't understand how to control something as it reenters the Mars atmosphere. The upper parts of the Earth's atmosphere are emulators of the Martian atmosphere, so we can figure out the control surfaces and the stability and so on, which is right now unknown."
"This is a major area where aeronautics and space and exploration all come together, and potentially their capabilities will give us an early test of that," says Simon (Pete) Worden, director of Ames Research Center. "We don't understand how to control something as it reenters the Mars atmosphere. The upper parts of the Earth's atmosphere are emulators of the Martian atmosphere, so we can figure out the control surfaces and the stability and so on, which is right now unknown."
Presumably this would be spread among SS2, SpaceDev's DreamChaser, Rocketplane's XP, Blue Origin etc. if/when they fly. Most of the above are very close to testing.