This is to organize and provide travel support for a two day workshop near the Washington DC area to explore the utility, challenges and interest level for science investigations enabled by regular in-situ profiling of the upper atmosphere. Multiple companies are currently in the process of developing commercial reusable suborbital spacecraft. While these companies originally targeted space tourism as the primary customer base, it is rapidly becoming apparent that this dramatic increase in low cost access to space could also provide revolutionary opportunities for scientific research and STEM education.
The workshop is planned for the spring of 2013. It will be widely publicized within the relevant scientific communities, including via aeronomy community mailing lists. Featured participants, and student participation will be particularly solicited with a focus on under-represented communities, and a modest participant support budget is requested to defray the costs of these individuals. Results of the workshop will be summarized in a report and the workshop will also be used as the basis for the formation of an informal working group that will continue to organize the community around this topic.
The region of space between ≈80–100 km is one of Earth’s most intriguing and most physically complex environments. At 100 km, the coldest place "on" Earth, neutral atmosphere transitions from turbulently mixed to diffusely separated, and the plasma regime transitions from collisional to non-collisional physics. Billions of meteors per day are destroyed in this region and curious, high-altitude, noctilucent clouds (NLCs) form. Too high for aircraft and balloons, and yet too low for orbital satellites and most ground-based sensing techniques, our knowledge of this region comes from observations by a relatively small number of sounding rocket missions. Because this region is so difficult to reach that limited research has been done in it, we frequently refer to this region as the "ignorosphere". Commercial suborbital spacecraft offer the potential to put an end to the ignorosphere by offering unprecedented in situ and remote sensing opportunities with frequent, low-cost access to this region of space. Recently, there has been an unmistakable trend in the space industry toward public/private partnership for access to space. This is particularly true for suborbital space where an extraordinary number of companies are vying to provide routine access to near-Earth space. Initially, these spacecraft companies were targeting space tourism as their primary source of income; however forums, such as the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC), have successfully presented the case for scientific, engineering, and educational applications of these new vehicles. These vehicles are currently designed to reach altitudes of ≈100 km (microgravity environment for ≈3-5 minutes) for $5–200K per flight within a year or two with payload capacity exceeding 600 kg. Considering the current cost of >>$2,000K for a sounding rocket with similar capabilities, the low cost, high flight cadence, and guaranteed return of payload, commercial spacecraft have the potential to revolutionize access to space for scientific research – changing the way scientists envision, plan, and conduct space-based experiments. Because of this potential, it is incumbent upon both the scientific community and the commercial providers to explore methods to cost-effectively expand our knowledge of this little-understood region of space with the new capabilities offered by commercial suborbital spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) hosted a National Science Foundation funded workshop called "The End of the Ignorosphere: An Aeronomy Researcher’s Conference on Commercial Suborbital Access to Space" in Annapolis, MD on 28-30 April 2013 to facilitate this exchange. The conference was attended by nearly three dozen aeronomy researchers and professionals. The workshop focused on spacecraft capabilities, potential spaceports and government efforts to facilitate their use, and the potential science enabled by these new capabilities. Participants included scientists, engineers, vehicle providers, government officials, and students.
