Invitation to Human-Tended Suborbital Science Workshop

Dear Colleague,

Because of your special expertise and interest, the Personal Spaceflight Federation and NASA Ames Research Center cordially invite you to join Ames Center Director Pete Worden in attending the Human-Tended Suborbital Science Workshop, to take place at the Westin San Francisco Market Street on Monday, December 15, 2008 from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and is sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association.

NASA has a long-standing commitment to suborbital science. Recently, in an historic first, NASA created a program office at NASA Ames for the use of emerging commercial suborbital vehicles for scientific research, including, but not limited to, flights to space of researchers to allow for human-tended experiments. The purpose of the workshop is to bring interested researchers from a number of fields together with suborbital vehicle operators to exchange information and discuss the scientific potential of these exciting new capabilities. Emerging commercial suborbital companies that will be participating in the workshop include Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, and XCOR Aerospace.

These new suborbital vehicles could enable otherwise unfeasible scientific discoveries and technology demonstration, lower costs for traditional suborbital science, and create a new way of doing business for NASA and the research community. Researchers from the fields of heliophysics, planetary sciences, earth sciences, and microgravity sciences are expected to attend. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the options offered by a wide range of commercial suborbital service providers and discuss the capabilities, needs, constraints, and opportunities of this program. Equally important, commercial suborbital service providers will have the opportunity to receive input on how their vehicles can be made to best be of service to this important set of potential customers.

Please take a moment to review the workshop information at http://suborbitalex.arc.nasa.gov/, and if you have any questions regarding the workshop that have not been addressed please feel free to contact us there.

To assist with our preparations, please RSVP by contacting Lisa Chu-Thielbar before December 5, 2008 at lisa.chu-thielbar@nasa.gov. We look forward to seeing you at the event.

Sincerely,

Bretton Alexander
President, Personal Spaceflight Federation