GREENBELT, Md. — The Innovative Partnership Program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. is hosting an Emerging Commercial Suborbital Capabilities Vehicles Workshop at Goddard on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. EDT.
The workshop will give an opportunity for commercial companies who provide sub-orbital services to brief Goddard Earth and space science researchers and scientists about the new vehicles being developed and their potential capabilities. The workshop will also allow both groups to discuss science topics that might be conducted from these platforms. These emerging capabilities are seen as complementary to existing NASA suborbital platforms and personnel from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Va. will be participating to discuss current capabilities that exist within the agency.
This workshop will allow for an open discussion of issues such as platform capabilities and measurement needs. By talking now, any potential payload accommodation requests will be understood and more easily managed.
Suborbital reusable launch vehicles enable researchers to directly access regions of Earth’s atmosphere that are too high for balloons and too low for satellites to operate. There are numerous unresolved scientific issues related to that atmospheric region that science cannot currently address because of inadequate observational sampling.
News media representatives who would like to observe the workshop should contact Edward Campion in Goddard’s Office of Communication for access. Reporters should either send an e-mail to edward.s.campion@nasa.gov or call him at 301-286-0697 no later than 4 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011.
