Sentinel Project Gets Big Lift-Off

By ANDY PASZTOR

A group of ex-astronauts and former U.S. space officials on Thursday is expected to announce plans for a historic mission: the first privately funded effort to explore part of the solar system.

The project, dubbed Sentinel, aims to send an unmanned probe as many as 170 million miles into space to identify and track thousands of asteroids. Sentinel is estimated to cost less than $500 million, according to project officials.

Sentinel was conceived by Ed Lu, a former astronaut who later managed advanced projects at Google Inc. and is now also backed by Rusty Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut; Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University professor and former National Aeronautics and Space Administration official; as well as other well-known space experts.

The project reflects the increasing importance of private manned and robotic endeavors in space.

B612 Foundation, the little-known group behind the proposed mission, was initially funded by a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. Now, it is seeking to raise its profile and broaden fundraising by tapping into the growing global fascination with nongovernmental space initiatives.

If it succeeds, Sentinel will set a precedent by melding commercial-acquisition and project-management principles with the scientific goals of a nonprofit group.

After years of unsuccessful efforts to persuade NASA to fund such a mission, "it became clear that it was never going to happen without private support," Mr. Lu said in an interview.

Mapping the complex movements of as many as 10,000 asteroids that could pass near the Earth would help scientists pick promising targets for future scientific space voyages. Proponents also say Sentinel, which is designed to go into an orbit around the sun similar to that of Venus, could provide warnings decades before any potential collision between an asteroid and the Earth.

NASA favors the project and has pledged to provide communication and technical support, according to project documents. NASA officials are scheduled to participate in Thursday's announcement.

NASA's announced goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid around 2035 depends on first obtaining a detailed catalog of potential targets, such as the one the Sentinel project hopes to compile.

Sentinel intends to plug that "gaping hole of data" starting in 2017 and continuing throughout its projected five-year operational life, Mr. Lu said.

The Sentinel spacecraft, essentially a space telescope weighing about 3,000 pounds, is designed to use infrared and other sensors to feed enormous amounts of data for processing by onboard computers

Thursday's announcement follows a recent successful private mission by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The closely held Southern California company sent the first commercially operated cargo capsule to dock with the International Space Station and then safely brought it back from orbit.

SpaceX, as the company is known, likely will launch the Sentinel probe, according to industry officials.

Like SpaceX's mission earlier this summer, plans for Sentinel represent a dramatic departure from traditional space programs.

Sentinel's leaders have decided on technical details and say they are negotiating a fixed-price agreement with Ball Aerospace for the work. That breaks with the traditional practice that involves years of debates by NASA officials before finalizing engineering plans with a contractor for an eventual cost-plus contract, which guarantees the contractor's costs are covered.

In a background document, officials emphasized that "private organizations can now carry out" space projects "that previously only governments could accomplish."Mr. Hubbard, the Stanford professor who previously ran NASA's Ames Research Center in Northern California, said in an interview that private donations over the years helped build many of the country's major astronomy centers. Sentinel's backers, according to Messrs. Hubbard and Lu, want to extend that practice to space telescopes.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 28, 2012, on page B8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sentinel Project Gets Big Lift-Off.