Another tale of “the end of near”

[Apologies for the long delay in posts – I’m catching up on a lot of other work.]

Last week Flightglobal.com reported that there will be no more seats for paying passengers on Soyuz flights to the ISS after April 2009 because of the increase in the station’s crew size from three to six. The article cited ESA officials, who said that the increase in crew size means that all the seats will be filled on the taxi flights, despite the increase in flight rate needed to support the larger crew.

I happened to talk for a moment with Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson after a speech he gave last Wednesday at the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Crystal City, VA. I asked him about the report and he said they had reservations secured for the April 2009 and were in negotiations for flight opportunities beyond that. (Something that was later added to the Flightglobal.com report.) [As Mr. Coppinger notes below, that statement was in the original article, and I simply missed it the first time I read the piece.] Asked if he would be interested in doing business with one of the commercial ventures planning to provide crew resupply services to the ISS under NASA’s COTS program, he said that he would be happy to talk with “whoever can provide safe and effective transport” to the station.

3 comments to Another tale of “the end of near”

  • Rob Coppinger

    Jeff, you are wrong to say “Something that was later added to the Flightglobal.com report”. The story always carried the qoute from Space Adventures about the negotiations claim for post-2009 flights. I remember clearly typing it into the content management system – on Sunday 3 February – before it was pushed to our website software.

    Please check your facts before you start suggesting that people had to change their story.

    Did you ask Eric about the fact that his company’s website makes claims about suborbital services and lunar trips despite the company having no such capability whatsoever?

  • Jeff Foust

    Mr. Coppinger: My apologies. I missed that passage the first time I read the article.

    I did not talk with Mr. Anderson about suborbital or circumlunar flights during our conversation (which lasted a minute while he was heading out the door at the conference), although in the past he has de-emphasized suborbital spaceflight, saying it was not a priority for the company currently.

  • Richard Garriott

    Space Adventures is the only company in field of many, who has sent, and who has any current _capability_ (emphasis added) to send, commercial space flight passengers to space. The company’s program development efforts are significantly more credible than others in the industry and they are the company that has proven the real market for personal space flight (the very subject of this blog). Let’s give them credit where credit is due. Every commercial space company’s website promotes future _capability_ that does not yet exist; Space Adventures is the only company to supplement such promotion with existing capability of any type at all.

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