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Hynes: Challenger Center-Another Gateway To Space For Our Community

  If I was in New Mexico, I'd double down on Virgin Galactic, their vehicle is fundamentally a sound design. This is part of a personal conversation I had last week in preparation for the upcoming International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS).  When I have the chance to get feedback from highly qualified people, like former NASA astronauts, I take it. I can be biased on the New Mexico partners involved in commercial space, partially because I am a New Mexican and because I have a long ongoing relationship with Virgin Galactic's leadership. So, just to make sure I am looking at as many sides as I can, I ask. In this case I'm talking about a conversation with Chris Ferguson, Deputy Program Manager for Operations with Boeing’s

Commercial Crew Program. Chris was not speaking on behalf of Boeing, he was expressing his private views to my questions. I wrote my last article about the Boeing StarLiner Commercial Crew capsule. Chris, a former astronaut, was the commander of the last shuttle flight Atlantis, STS 135. He has spoken in the past at ISPCS. We talked this week about his upcoming keynote talk on October 7th. He is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. He will not be speaking about Virgin Galactic, he is there to speak about his work building this next step for human spaceflight, and Boeing’s Next 100 Years of Flight.

Boeing is one of the most well managed aerospace companies in America. Their leadership is aware of the public’s aversion to uncertainty, as they are a publically traded company. Boeing builds aircraft and has a long heritage in the space industry. Boeing manages the International Space Station for NASA and was awarded $4.6 billion dollars last year to provide commercial crew services for NASA astronauts starting in 2017. After almost 100 years in business they must look to growth, while maintaining a consistency and predictability in their product development.

They are one of two American companies and partners with the NASA who are building vehicles to take humans to space?  There's an understanding in the private sector that if you have worked with the government and have gone through their requirements processes you have been sort of anointed as far as the private sector investors are concerned. Many of the companies coming to ISPCS have and are seeking more relationships with the government because they were the ones who have been providing access to space to protect our national security as well as to determine how we can live and work in space.

As I mentioned in a recent articles, The NTSB report on the Virgin Galactic accident indicated that the company that built the vehicle, Scaled Composites, did not have human factors researchers involved in the design process. Additionally the NTSB report suggested that new space ship might do with more instrumentation on the vehicle. In discussing this with Chris he suggested, there's no need for further instrumentation. He was pretty clear you cannot instrument away risk. I agree we don't want to go down the same path we went down with the government human space program. We don't want to have a shutdown of the program like we did previously with NASA when there was a Shuttle accident. There has to be an assumption of is risk and you keep flying. Virgin has to keep moving forward and get into their next test program and to commercial flight.

Chris is a Navy pilot with over 5,700 flight hours in over 30 flight vehicles, and holder of the Distinguished Naval Flying Cross.  When he worked at NASA he worked on the shuttle main engines, the solid rocket boosters, and flight software. Pilots are always interested in the design of the vehicles they fly. As we announced the opening of the Challenger Center this week, one of the legacies of the accident was the development of the Challenger Center network. June Scobe, wife of Dick Scobe who perished in the accident, came to Las Cruces during a meeting with Virgin Galactic. I presented the Student Launch Program to the attendees to help them understand how our community is preparing for this next stage of human spaceflight. She is still very engaged in the Challenger Centers which now number 44 across the globe.

Like all New Mexicans we have a stake in the outcome of how soon Virgin is able to return to flight.  In the meantime, we now have one more way to help teachers, students and members of the community learn more about the whole business of spaceflight. From all my years working on the student launch program I know how it changes lives. The best news I heard was from Stan Rounds, when he told us about one of the students who had been through the flight program at the Challenger Center. Stan said, this student was so immersed in the experience he was sure he'd been to space. That's exactly what I see in the work I do, and so many people at NASA experience the same phenomenon. Now we have another gateway to space for young minds here in the desert.