ration, and a crew/passenger configuration capable of transporting up to seven people. It is being built by a consortium led by SpaceX under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services ( COTS) initiative. Dragon is also equipped with an ISS-compatible dock that is exposed through a removable nosecone. Return to the Earth's surface is achieved through a parachute-assisted splashdown and recovery.
Dragon is delivered into orbit on top of the Falcon 9 two-stage launch vehicle, an expanded version of the Falcon 1 rocket that completed a successful test launch to orbit on 28 September 2008 (after three prior failures). Both stages of the Falcon 9 are intended to be reusable.
The intended use for the combined vehicle is primarily to serve as a replacement for the Shuttle fleet after their retirement, so space tourism is not an overt goal. Unlike vehicles aimed explicitly at the space tourism market, the Dragon/Falcon 9 combination is not fully reusable, and so is unlikely to withstand competition from a fully reusable orbital vehicle such as those proposed by Scaled Composites and others. However, until such time as such vehicles become available it may be the first privately financed space vehicle to be capable of delivering people, space tourists or otherwise, to orbit.
A suborbital VTOL vehicle being developed by Blue Origin, along similar lines to the former ROTON and Phoenix projects and also to Kankoh-Maru, although unlike these vehicles it is not designed to take passengers into orbit. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, is famously secretive about its plans and progress, so while it is reasonable to suppose that New Shepard would be the basis for a further orbital design analogous to Kanoh-Maru, the company have not announced one.
The New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Blue Origin test launched a demonstrator vehicle in 2006 called Goddard (shown), similarly named for rocket pioneer Robert Goddard.
Ascender is a sub-orbital spaceplane from Bristol Spaceplanes carrying two crew and two passengers intended to provide proof-of-concept for the development of the Spacecab/Spacebus spaceplane, and is capable of reaching space (though not orbit). As well as being an entrant for the X-Prize, Ascender is intended to return commercial revenues through its passenger carrying capability.
Spacebus a design for a 2-stage passenger-carrying HTOL by the company Bristol Spaceplanes in Britain. The first stage uses jet engines for take-off, followed by rocket engines to climb to high altitude for separation, after which the upper stage uses rocket engines to reach orbit. This configuration has a number of advantages described at length in papers by David Ashford (including the recent "Space Tourism - How Soon Will it Happen?" and the 1990 book "Your Spaceflight Manual: How you could be a tourist in space within 20 years"). Using existing jet and rocket engines is very attractive in reducing initial development costs. And though new air-breathing rocket engines might be more efficient, they're not needed initially (the first stage just has to be a bit bigger and use a bit more fuel). And going high with the first stage makes separation easy as it's in thin air, so even hypersonic loads are small.
Spacecab is a scaled-down version of Spacebus designed to carry 6 passengers. It's attractive as a first step to HTOL launch services since it uses only existing technology, and could start passenger operations much earlier than a vehicle requiring new engines to be developed.
Michelle, or 'Modular Incremental Compact High Energy Low cost Launch Experiment', is a manned reusable sub-orbital SSTO proposed by TGV Rockets. Its modular structure is designed to allow a variety of payloads such as scientific instrumentation to be substituted.
By aiming at the sub-orbital market first, Michelle aims to bridge the gap to more expensive orbital vehicles by allowing the necessary technology to be developed incrementally.
|ASTRIUM SPACE JET||
EADS Astrium's suborbital HTOL vehicle is a spaceplane designe