AirSpaceMag.com

All this, and a nice climate, too. A Delta II rocket launches from California's Vandenberg AFB.

Yesterday, the California Space Authority kicked off California Space Week Washington, D.C., when representatives from the Golden State’s space industry head east for an annual business trip to the nation’s capital for face time with all the right people. As their web site says, “It’s that time again—time to travel to Washington, D.C., to educate federal officials regarding vital space policy issues. We will meet with Congressional members and staff as well as executive branch officials from the White House, Department of Defense, NASA, Department of Labor, Department of Commerce, and the Department of State to discuss issues related to civil space, national security space, education and workforce, and export controls.” Translation: Keep the business comin’!

To get things rolling, the California Space Authority, a nonprofit corporation representing the commercial, civil, and national defense/homeland security interests of California’s space industry, held a press conference yesterday at Washington’s National Press Club where they released an annual report detailing the magnitude of the state’s space industry.

California stands head-and-shoulders above all other states for space-related work, boasting 44 percent of the U.S. space market. It even accounts for 21 percent of the world’s space market. The industry contributes $77 billion in “total economic impact” to California, creating and sustaining more than 370,000 jobs that paid $19 billion in wages last year. Space work has a greater impact on California’s revenue and jobs than entertainment, tourism, agriculture, or any other industry, the report claims. More than a third of the world’s satellite manufacturing takes place in California, and the state receives more than half of the Defense Department’s $18.6 billion space budget. It is home to three of NASA’s ten centers, accounting for $2.2 billion of NASA’s $17.3 billion budget, while last year the state’s private space companies vacuumed up more than a fifth of the $14 billion NASA handed out to companies around the nation. California-based businesses such as SpaceX, Scaled Composites, Interorbital, SpaceDev, and XCOR also form a critical mass in the new and rapidly growing segment of private space companies.

Today, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is meeting on Capitol Hill with friends from Space Florida, another key player in the space biz, talking with relevant officials from the Obama Administration and other branches of government. Senator Dianne Feinstein takes the baton tomorrow. Specific issues include the importance of addressing ITAR (International Traffic In Arms Regulations) restrictions on commercial satellite providers, and how to optimize the use of the International Space Station’s National Laboratory. This is the second year that Space Florida has joined the California group.

“While many think of space enterprise as rocket scientists and defense contractors,” says Andrea Seastrand, Executive Director of the California Space Authority, “applications from space-based technologies are widely used throughout many other industries. Environmental studies, crop infestation, water use monitoring, and oceanic observation all rely on space capabilities. Space enterprise is an enabler that stimulates entrepreneurial investment, innovation, and the economy.”

Why is this man laughing? (Photo: JD Lasica/Socialmedia.biz)

At 37 years old, Elon Musk is poised to become either the Henry Ford or the Howard Hughes of his generation. If his Falcon rockets and Tesla electric cars succeed, he’ll revolutionize 21st century transportation. If they don’t, he’ll likely be remembered as a colorful, clever, but ultimately irrelevant tinkerer. After all, Neil Young has an electric car, too.

Yesterday was to have marked the start of a new, commercial phase for Musk’s company, SpaceX. So far, nearly all the payloads entrusted to the fledgling Falcon 1 rocket have belonged either to the U.S. Defense Department or NASA, both of whom have a stake in seeing Musk achieve his goal of bringing down launch costs. If the government lost a few inexpensive satellites in the Falcon’s first three failed test flights, what matter? Helping SpaceX build a reliable rocket is considered more important.

But yesterday’s planned launch of a Malaysian satellite—which has been postponed while SpaceX looks into an unspecified “potential compatibility issue” between the spacecraft and the rocket—is for a different kind of customer. RazakSAT, Malaysia’s first Earth observation satellite, cost $41 million to develop, several times what the launcher cost. That’s a lot for a developing country hoping to enter a new high-tech arena, and SpaceX was right to back off from yesterday’s launch and triple-check that everything’s working properly.

Lately it’s been mostly good news for Musk’s six-year-old company. Argentina just signed on to launch two Earth observation satellites on the larger—and still untried—Falcon 9 rocket, which is set to debut from Cape Canaveral later this year. Dwarfing these kinds of commercial contracts is the whopping $1.6 billion that NASA agreed in December to pay for 12 future supply flights to the space station, beginning next year. Most of the payloads NASA packs onboard the Falcon 9 will still have low value—food, water, spare parts and the like. Not unique, expensive satellites. Those go on proven Deltas and Atlases.

But SpaceX’s fortunes ride on how well the Falcon 9 performs. It’s a lot of pressure on Musk, who recently has seemed more Hughes than Ford, at least in his private life: divorce, relationships with starlets, spats with reporters, all of which have landed him in the tabloids more than he’d probably like. Maybe it’s a relief to turn back to the relatively tame world of rocket science, and figure out how to get RazakSAT safely off the ground.

What’s the top aerospace engineering school in the country? Depends on how you measure it, of course, but if you’re ranking on the basis of who spends the most on research and development (as the National Science Foundation does each year), then first place goes to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which spent $56 million on aeronautical and astronautical engineering in fiscal year 2007. Number two was Georgia Tech at $40.5 million, followed by Wichita State University, whose National Institute for Aviation Research accounted for most of the school’s $32.4 million in aerospace R&D expenditures.

Federally funded aerospace R&D totaled $293.7 million across all colleges and universities in 2007, slightly higher than the year before, but down from the 2005 high of $335 million. Nonfederal funding totaled $130 million, a significant jump from the previous year’s level of $97.5 million.

The top aerospace schools by amount of R&D expenditures:

1. Johns Hopkins Univ., $56 million
2. Georgia Tech, $40.6 million
3. Wichita State Univ., $32.4 million
4. MIT, $18.7 million
5. Texas A&M Univ., $16.6 million
6. Univ. of Colorado, $16.2 million
7. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, $15.4 million
8. Univ. of Texas, Austin, $11.2 million
9. Purdue Univ., $11 million
10. Mississippi State Univ., $10.3 million

Zut! Don’t look for it on the fashion runways of Paris just yet. Perhaps on the autoroute first. See, it’s not always aviation stuff that grabs me. It’s the occasional diversion. Such as the wearable airbag.

I was perusing www.helite.com because this little French company outside Dijon, city of moutard, specializes in hang gliders, paragliders, and ultralights, and has been making noises that it will soon fly the first human in an airplane exclusively powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. Thought you heard that Boeing’s Phantom Works did it first last year in Spain? You’re right. It’s just that the Boeing airplane used batteries to boost power on takeoff as a safety measure for the pilot. Helite plans to do its flight next month, sans batteries. Nevermind that they’ll have to use an ultralight rather than Boeing’s larger, heavier Super Dimona powered glider.

The Airbag Veste, un tres bon choix

Anyway, Helite’s engineers realize you can break your neck playing with their toys, or in other more pedestrian pursuits such as riding motorcycles, snowmobiles, and horses. So they’ve developed an airbag that wraps around your neck, back, and flanks in the form of a vest beneath a stylish motorcycle jacket. Connect a ripcord from an inflator on the vest to a latch on your European crotchrocket, and as you unwittingly go over the handlebars at 100 km/h, voila, from the waist up you become the Michelin Man in a fraction of a second, then skip down the street like a Mars lander swaddled in airbags. Be sure to click on the little motorcycle guy on their main page, then click the arrow to navigate the frames in their grainy demonstration of how it works. Or check out this video of a fairly willing motorcyclist demonstrating the vest in Paris.

Sometimes, “better than nothing” is, in fact, just fine. Adrenalin junkies might consider the vest an idea for sissies. But they’d probably say the same thing about the whole-plane parachute that Cirrus owners have now used three times to save their necks. Alors, vive l’accident.

First reunion

The “Above & Beyond” department in our April/May issue chronicles the search by a retired Air Force Brigadier General for the Vietnamese pilot he shot down in 1972. After an emotional reunion, Dan Cherry arranged for Hong My and his son to come to the United States, where the two pilots will present their story at the Sun ‘n’ Fun fly-in in Lakeland, Florida, on April 23-26, and at the National Air and Space Museum on April 28. See the video clip of Hong My’s happy arrival last night.