The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is considering using suborbital flights for Canadian scientists and biomedical inventors.
The agency recently released an announcement of opportunity (AO) exploring how feasible it would be to regularly offer flights on providers such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. Submissions are due by Aug. 2.
Each flight would include roughly four minutes of microgravity, which is 12 times the 20 seconds of availability per cycle on a typical parabolic flight offered by the National Research Council, NASA or private providers such as the United States’ Zero G or Europe’s AirZeroG. (A parabolic flight could offer multiple 20-second windows, however, while a suborbital flight would just have a single window.)
“One of our mandates is to try to provide access to space to Canada,” the CSA’s Mathieu Caron, director of astronauts, life sciences and space medicine, told SpaceQ. Acknowledging the suborbital flights would be “a new direction,” he said the AO would help the CSA determine if proceeding in that direction would effectively meet the mandate.
The CSA, of course, regularly does science on board the International Space Station that can provide months of microgravity. Most recently that was done through a private provider, Axiom Space, through entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Pathy who performed several Canadian science and biomedical experiments while in orbit for a couple of weeks in 2022.
Agency astronauts typically fly half-year missions, most recently with David Saint-Jacques in 2018, although experiments tend to persist in five-year cycles as they include several astronaut participants from other agencies, Caron said.
“It’s quite an investment,” Caron said of the longer-term space mission on ISS, which might include a decade of work all told: 18 months to two years to prepare, something like five years in space, and then time afterwards for analysis and publication.
“With the emergence of various private companies targeting short-duration microgravity flights, it’s something between a parabolic flight and [either] six months on the space station, or a one-week or two-week visit from a commercial vehicle,” he added.
CSA’s solicitation points out that NASA released its own microgravity submission this spring (entries were due July 18) and says that there are five objectives in having the community comment on suborbital flights:
- Estimate the value of conducting research and testing during suborbital flights;
- Prepare a list of health and life Science objectives appropriate for these missions;
- Identify potential technologies for validation in a microgravity environment;
- Confirm the resource requirement for these research projects;
- Validate the proposed funding mechanism.
If approved, the CSA is considering a test suborbital flight that would include a single flight provider and up to two payloads, which could operate autonomously or with a human on board. The flight provider and payloads would both be selected through a standard request for proposals (RFP) opportunity and the test would be supported through contracts, with a six-month one given to a suborbital flight provider and two eight-month ones for payload research and development. Hardware would be made by participating institutions, similar to CSA’s balloon and parabolic flight opportunities.
The CSA is asking interested parties to submit information such as the investigations they would use in suborbital flight, how long it would take to prepare, the budget, the benefit of having a participant in-flight, which suborbital flight provider they prefer, and how much power, mass and volume would be needed.
While other companies may run suborbital crewed flights in the future, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are the ones who have done so, so far. Virgin Galactic concluded its first operational flight on June 29, after having mostly been quiescent since 2021 to perform fleet upgrades. Blue Origin – which has run about half a dozen crewed flights aboard its New Shepard rocket – is still in a flight suspension after an uncrewed version of the rocket failed in September 2022 due to an engine issue.
Each of these companies has a very different approach to flying individuals. Virgin Galactic uses a two-pilot space plane, VMS Eve, which brings the VSS Unity spacecraft to an altitude of roughly 15 kilometres. Then the two pilots on board VSS Unity release their spacecraft to fly themselves, and a group of people in the spacecraft, briefly to an altitude past 80 kilometers, which U.S. government entities such as the Federal Aviation Administration designate as the boundary of space. VSS Unity then lands on a conventional runway, typically at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Blue Origin uses the New Shepard rocket and spacecraft system to bring a full crew of passengers up to more than 100 km, which is designated as the boundary of space by the International Astronautical Federation. The crew then descends back to Earth by parachute near Blue Origin’s launch site in Van Horn, Texas.