In The Space Review last month I noted an emerging market for commercial suborbital vehicles: research and education. There’s growing interest among scientists in a variety of disciplines to take advantage of vehicles under development to serve the space tourism market to fly experiments at a fraction of the cost of sounding rockets and other options. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, created an advisory team, the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), to help promote the potential uses of suborbital vehicles to the research community.

A key part of this outreach effort is the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC), which will take place February 18-20 in Boulder, Colorado. The early registration deadline for the conference is in just a week, January 15, as the conference organizers state in the announcement below:

NSRC Pre-Registration Deadline: 15 January

Pre-Register for NSRC Before Jan 15 to Guarantee Your Seat: The early registration deadline for the Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (Boulder, Colorado; 18-20 February) is right around the corner next week—on January 15th.

We are encouraging those interested in attending to register early because attendance will be limited by the meeting facility size; early registration is also less expensive than full registration.

For more information on the meeting program, list of speakers, linked speaker abstracts, and how to register, go to: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/nsrc2010/

About NSRC: The Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) will bring together researchers from government, industry, and academia, NASA and FAA officials, and firms building next-gen suborbital vehicles. NSRC will provide a forum to learn about the experiment and EPO capabilities of these new suborbital systems and their revolutionary capabilities. NSRC will also provide an opportunity for attendees to make inputs on vehicle design requirements for science and education.