Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for space technology at NASA, has said the agency is open to the possibility of permitting researchers to fly aboard commercial suborbital spacecraft to conduct experiments as part of the Flight Opportunities program, SpaceNews reported Wednesday.
“As principal investigators propose, both internal to NASA and external, we’ll do the same kind of process that we do with Zero G,â€Â he told the publication in a Dec. 19 interview after his speech at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado.
Zero G is a company that operates a Federal Aviation Administration-regulated Boeing 727 aircraft to provide parabolic flights to researchers and their experiments through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.
Jurczyk noted that NASA is willing to consider developing a process for the evaluation of suborbital vehicles that could potentially be used to transport researchers and experiments funded under the program.
