November 14 at 3:30 to 4:30 pm at the College of Computing, room 102
Experimenting on Commercial Sub-orbital Rockets – you can still be an early adopter
Steven Collicott
Laboratory time for the study of two-phase fluids topic in weightlessness has always been scarce. In
contrast, colleagues with Earthly two-phase fluids topics are able to work all day long, every day, in a
laboratory, continually improving their experiments. The International Space Station (ISS) is the most
amazing and the largest orbiting vehicle ever, and yet it is woefully small from the point of view of
laboratory space for all the science and technology maturation that NASA needs for future space
exploration goals.
Right now, in the early years of the New Space Age, several reusable commercial sub-orbital rockets are
operational and deliver three minutes of very high-quality weightlessness for automated or human-
tended experiments in a very wide range of topics. Fluids experiments related to basic capillary fluid
physics, in-space propellant control and gauging, and the separation of blood from air in future
spaceflight medical tools are discusses. Impacts of vehicle capabilities, integration requirements, flight
safety, ground operations, and similar, on experiment design are then considered. Lessons learned from
fluids experiments flying in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, and Exos’s
BLK3 rockets are shared. The major contributions of undergraduate aerospace engineering students to
these experiments, made during the students’ time in the author’s “Zero-gravity Flight Experiment”
design-build-test class are included throughout.
Interested researchers can get involved and still be early adopters, as the field appears poised to boom
in the next three years.
Bio
Steven Collicott is a professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the College of
Engineering at Purdue University. His preferred research and teaching is in the topic of low-gravity fluid
dynamics. To date he has designed a highly successful space station capillary fluids experiment, flown
forty-five parabolic aircraft flight experiments, launched eight experiments in Blue Origin’s New Shepard
crew capsule, one in Virgin Galactic VSS Unity, seven in Exos Aerospace (was Armadillo) rocket test
flights, and built two drop towers. In late 2021 he was chosen to fly a capillary fluids experiment for
NASA Flight Opportunity Program on a Virgin Galactic sub-orbital mission. He has served on National
Academy and CASIS committees related to fluids in space, chaired the Sub-orbital Applications Users
Group of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, and served a three-year executive rotation in the
American Society for Gravitational and Space Research.
