WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain will hold Senate hearings next year on the possible federal role in a commercial space station.
President of Space Island Group, Inc. Gene Meyers, speaking at a breakfast panel on non-traditional space business at the International Space Business Assembly, called it "a huge announcement." Meyers said he spoke to McCain (R-Arizona) in New Hampshire about his company’s concept of a commercial space station built from discarded shuttle fuel tanks.
McCain and Meyers were talking to a group of high school students from Londonderry, New Hampshire at the time, Meyers said. The students plan on collecting millions of signatures over the next year to support a commercial station, he said.
"He says he’s really interested in this project that they’re doing and he’d like to hold informative hearings on it," said Commerce Committee spokeswoman Pia Pialorsi. As chairman of the committee, McCain has Senate jurisdiction over NASA and space issues through the Subcommittee on Science Technology and Space, chaired by Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tennessee).
McCain has been critical in the past of the government-financed International Space Station, which he says has no clear mission.
Space Island’s plan is to join about 12 of the huge shuttle tanks in a large ring and then spin them, providing about 1/3 of standard earth gravity. The station would be available as a space resort and for large-scale commercial processing of medicines or computer chips, Meyers said.
"Something like that could hold 500, 600 people," Meyers said. "It’s amazing how much of the engineering has been done on this already."
Building the station, however, would require a different flight plan for the space shuttle, which currently discards each external tank over the Indian Ocean. NASA builds a new tank for each mission, Meyers said, so nearly a hundred have already gone up.
The constraints are financial, Meyers said, but there is huge public support for the idea, and future development will depend on how much "buzz" the idea can generate.
"There are 11 million people right now who do what I call terrestrial space tourism," meaning visits to space museums and launch sites, said Eric Stallmer, President of the Space Transportation Association.
Meyers said he is not looking to the aerospace industry for help, but to the possible users of the system, such as satellite builders, space insurers who want to be able to make in-orbit repairs to satellites, and the hotel industry.
"A facility of this size... really opens up the vistas of space tourism," Meyers said.
Actual stays in orbit "will probably cost a lot at first," Stallmer said, "but those people who pay the premium cost will bring it down for everyone else."
He likened it to people who paid "$3,000 for the VCR when it first came out."
"Olympic-like sponsorship," with plenty of splashy media coverage, should be the marketing model for the station, Meyers said, rather than the Defense Department model that NASA often employs, which sometimes even shuns the media.
The primary technical problem that remains is getting people to and from the station. Meyers called for the development of a second generation space shuttle, based heavily on the current design, that could both leave its external fuel tanks in orbit, as well as ferry large numbers of people to orbit.
"The next generation shuttle doesn’t need to be as complex, because there will already be an orbital platform," Stallmer said. The ISS can fulfill much of the shuttle’s current science role, leaving the next shuttle freer to concentrate on affordable transport.
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