Last month, with considerable fanfare, Space Adventures and the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced at a press conference in Moscow that singer [...]]]>

Sarah Brightman attended to during tests that confirmed her fitness to fly to space as a space tourist in 2015. Some Russian officials have raised doubts that she will fly. (credit: sarahbrightman.com)

Last month, with considerable fanfare, Space Adventures and the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced at a press conference in Moscow that singer Sarah Brightman would be the next commercial spaceflight participant (aka space tourist) to visit the International Space Station (ISS). The announcement contained few details about her trip, including when she would go, although speculation centered around 2015, when NASA and Roscosmos will have ISS crewmembers on a first-of-its-kind year-long stay on the ISS, freeing up seats on Soyuz flights to and from the ISS. Brightman and Space Adventures have said little about the future flight since the press conference.

This week, Russian space industry officials have raised questions about how serious Brightman is about flying in space. Interfax reported earlier this week that unnamed officials have speculated Brightman’s announcement last month was designed to generate publicity for her upcoming album and world tour, which did come up during the press conference. “It is very probable that the singer said she may fly to the ISS to fuel interest in her year-long world tour, which she will begin next year,” the unnamed source told Interfax.

Sergei Krikalev, the former cosmonaut who now heads Russia’s cosmonaut training center, said those claims were news to him, but added he wasn’t surprised. “Many years ago there was an option to send one singer into space. He had undergone a medical selection and there were plans to sign a contract with him,” he said, referring to Lance Bass, who ten years ago had plans to fly as a space tourist but failed to line up sponsorship deals to pay for the flight.

The head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, spoke up on Friday in response to those reports, saying that Brightman was still planning to fly, but that Roscosmos hasn’t made a formal decision yet. “I have met her, she is all set to fly, but Roscosmos has not yet decided on it,” he told RIA Novosti, adding that Roscosmos would make a decision in the first half of 2013. (Interfax said the decision wouldn’t come until the second half of 2013.)

The claims by Russian officials that Brightman wouldn’t fly may be evidence of more general disdain about flying space tourists on Soyuz flights. “Space tourism is, unfortunately, a major problem for professionals like us,” said Pavel Vinogradov, another former cosmonaut who is now deputy head of the Energia Flight Space Center. “Tourism undermines the very foundation of manned space flights, because we have to replace young cosmonauts with tourists.”

Popovkin made a similar comment to Interfax when asked why Roscosmos hasn’t made a decision yet about Brightman: “We need to provide young cosmonauts with flight practice.” The decision may hinge on whether the additional revenue such a flight would provide Roscosmos—on the order of $50 million—overcomes their reticence of flying tourists versus professional cosmonauts.

A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human spaceflight. [...]]]>

Illustration of a Soyuz spacecraft and habitation module en route to the Moon for a circumlunar flight Space Adventures has proposed.

A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human spaceflight. In a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson said his company projects approximately 140 people to fly in space commercially in the coming decade. By comparison, during the last ten years seven people flew to space commercially on eight flights (one, Charles Simonyi, flew twice.)

Anderson said Space Adventures was asked by NASA and by Boeing (who Space Adventures has partnered with on development of a commercial crew vehicle, the CST-100) to provide an estimate on the demand for commercial human orbital spaceflight. That figure, he said, includes direct sales to individuals (the traditional “space tourist”) as well as lotteries and other competitions, corporate research, and educational missions. Anderson said the total specifically excludes what are often called “sovereign clients”, representatives of national space agencies flying for their governments. Those 140 people, he said, would fly to the ISS as well as Bigelow Aerospace facilities and one proposed by a Russian company, Orbital Technologies. “Realistically, having 140 individuals fly by the time 2020 rolls around is a pretty darn big accomplishment,” he said.

That estimate uses some relatively conservative assumptions on factors such as price and training time, Anderson said later. “For the majority of the next ten years, we would see prices roughly where they are now,” between $20 million and $50 million, he said. Price, he said, is probably the most important factor in demand, and there would not be dramatic changes in prices unless there was the development of a fully-reusable vehicle. Training time, he said would likely be no less than two months even for missions not going to the ISS. “I just don’t see a way to get that training time down any less than, say, six weeks,” he said. “There’s just too much stuff people need to know, they need to learn, in order to be prepared for the weightless environment.”

The other major aspect of the Space Adventures call Thursday was to provide an update on their circumlunar plans. Earlier this year Anderson announced that the company had signed up one customer for its proposed mission at a cost of $150 million. Anderson confirmed that on Thursday, and added that the company had started negotiations for the second seat available on the flight. “We are hopeful that the contract for the second client, and therefore the total locked-in mission, will be signed and announceable by the end of the year,” he said. Once the mission is “locked-in”, Anderson said they believe they will be able to fly it in about four years, or as soon as the end of 2015.

Anderson didn’t disclose the identities of either the signed customer or the potential customer they’re currently in negotiations with. However, Anderson did note, intriguingly, that the signed customer is planning some kind of research during the flight. The mission of that customer, he said, “is actually really, really meaningful. It is something that is going to address an issue and a concept that is of great importance to the world.” That work, which Anderson did not elaborate upon, will be “an amplifier to the attention” that circumlunar mission would receive and would “captivate a lot of people”.

Space Adventures also released some new images of the lunar mission concept, which features a habitation module launched separately on a Proton that would dock with the Soyuz spacecraft after the Soyuz completes a mission at the ISS. The hab module, along with the Soyuz modules, would provide 18 cubic meters of habitable volume for the three-person crew and would allow for “an extraordinarily comfortable trip to the Moon and back,” in the words of Richard Garriott, Space Adventures vice-chairman who flew to space as a customer of the company in 2008.

“We’re at an extraordinarily unusual moment in history,” Garriott said. “I good argument can be made that there’s every real possibility that the first human return to the Moon since the original Apollo flights may not be sponsored by any government of the Earth, but will be sponsored by private citizens.”

When Space Adventures announced last week a joint press conference with Boeing to discuss “a unique agreement between the two companies on commercial crew transportation services”, as the announcement put it, it seemed obvious what that agreement would involve: Space Adventures would sell seats on the [...]]]>

Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.

When Space Adventures announced last week a joint press conference with Boeing to discuss “a unique agreement between the two companies on commercial crew transportation services”, as the announcement put it, it seemed obvious what that agreement would involve: Space Adventures would sell seats on the CST-100, the commercial crew capsule that Boeing is developing to primarily serve other markets, such as transporting NASA crews to and from the International Space Station.

And that, in fact, was the announcement made yesterday. However, the nearly 90-minute press conference, held in a conference room at a Boeing office in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC, provided plenty of opportunity for both companies to expound on the agreement and provide more details (or, in some cases, the lack of details). In short, Space Adventures will market “excess seating capacity” on CST-100 flights, primarily to the ISS, to potential spaceflight participants as soon as 2015.

Specific details about such flight, though, have yet to be worked out. John Elbon, vice president and program manager for commercial crew transportation systems at Boeing, said the notional model they were working from is taking advantage of any crew transportation flights NASA would procure as part of a future commercial crew program. The CST-100 is designed to accommodate up to seven people, but current NASA crew rotation models would require only four seats. The remaining capacity could be used for extra cargo, or for one or more spaceflight participants. He also didn’t rule out the possibility of dedicated flights, although this agreement between Boeing and Space Adventures does not include any flights to Bigelow Aerospace’s proposed commercial orbital facilities (Bigelow is a partner with Boeing on its current $18-million NASA Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev, award.)

Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures (and who will remain involved with the company even though he took a job last week as president of Intentional Software, a company founded by two-time Space Adventures client Charles Simonyi) was vague about pricing for such seats, other than that they would be “competitive” with Soyuz pricing. Later, he noted that Space Adventures’ last Soyuz customer, Guy Laliberté, paid “around $40 million” for his trip.

Neither company would divulge how big they think the market is for such flights, but they were confident that there would be sufficient customers, even with a ticket price in the tens of millions. “We believe that we will be able to bring the spaceflight experience to a greater number of people than we would have before,” Anderson said. He added that “every flight opportunity that we have had the opportunity to sell, we have sold”, and thus the market was not constrained by the number of people who want to fly, but instead the number of flight opportunities.

Of course, this is all contingent on Boeing developing the CST-100, which the company said is, in turn, dependent on receiving NASA funding through a commercial crew program—a hot topic of debate across the Potomac from Boeing’s offices. “If we had to do this with Boeing investment only,” Elbon said, “we wouldn’t be able to close the business case.” NASA, he said, provides the program both development money as well as business transporting astronauts to and from the ISS. He said there are examples of past markets that got started with government investment, and Anderson noted aviation industry was supported by government airmail in its early years. “I think the argument that if it’s not purely funded and purely financed by private industry that there’s no market, I think that is, with all due respect, hogwash.”

As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people [...]]]>

Eric Anderson (left) and John Carmack talk about their suborbital partnership at ISDC on Thursday.

As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people to at least 100 kilometers altitude, with Space Adventures selling the seats, starting with its existing customer list of about 200 people, including several former astronauts.

The presentation, featuring Space Adventures president and CEO Eric Anderson and Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack, offered few technical or schedule details about their plans. There is no finalized vehicle design yet: a video shown in the presentation showed a number of differenent Armadillo concepts, from a cone sitting atop four propellant tanks with a central engine to the “fishbowl” concept Armadillo showed off in 2008 for the short-lived suborbital joint venture between Armadillo and the Rocket Racing League. Carmack also offered no timetable for the beginning of tourist flights, although he did note the company hoped to be flying unmanned scientific payloads to altitudes of approximately 100,000 feet (30 kilometers) in the next year, and to 100 kilometers altitude in the following year.

Instead, the presentation was examining in more general terms the companies’ plans, including why Space Adventures, who has made a name for itself for nearly a decade by arranging flights to the International Space Station, would get into the suborbital spaceflight business. Anderson noted that when Space Adventures was founded in the late 1990s, its focus was on suborbital spaceflight at a time when many vehicle developers were saying “we’re only two years away,” he recalled. “We didn’t have any idea at the time that we would be fortunate enough to be able to launch private citizens to orbit before suborbital flights,” he continued. Later, Space Adventures considered working with a Russian company to develop a suborbital vehicle called Explorer, which he said they abandoned because “frankly, it got too expensive.” As Armadillo made progress with their vehicles, “I was just so impressed” with their efforts he was convinced they were the company that could really reduce the cost of space access.

While neither Armadillo nor Carmack discussed the cost of the project, they did confirm that Space Adventures was providing Armadillo with funding to support it, at least in part. Alluding to past partnership announcements that failed to pan out, Carmack said, “One of my new rules on this is that I’m not going to get up and talk about something unless a check has cleared.” And since Carmack was getting up and talking about this, he confirmed, “Space Adventures has actually paid Armadillo Aerospace to begin developing a new suborbital vehicle.” Carmack said later that under their agreement, Space Adventures will pay Armadillo unspecified amounts upon achiveing certain milestones in the vehicle development effort. “The amount of money that has changed hands here is not trivial, but it’s not enough to fund the vehicles,” he said. “It isn’t enough money to pay for these vehicles, it’s enough money to make me think about not pursuing other contracts.” He added that he expected to kick in more of his own money into the venture, but also looked to getting funding from NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program for flying scientific payloads.

The timelines that they did reveal suggest that Space Adventures and Armadillo will not be the first to market for commercial suborbital space tourism, given the progress being made by companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Carmack addressed this as well, in the process perhaps raising the hackles of some of his competitors in the audience at the ISDC. “It’s a fool who doesn’t think he has any competition,” Carmack said. On Virgin, he said, “I think they have explicitly not chosen the most cost effective solution on this. I don’t think they will be able to compete on price, eventually, but some people will prefer their experience.”

Carmack was critical of XCOR from a funding standpoint. “I believe that, if fully funded, they could build a vehicle that could fly, that could service passengers,” he said. “I do not believe they are fully funded.” He then issued something of a warning to other companies, after earlier noting that Armadillo planned to accelerate its development plans and hire more people. “I think one of the best things about having the other companies in the industry is that it’s developed some very skilled and talened people, and we’re probably going to steal some of them.”

Carmack also said he felt Armadillo’s VTVL vehicle was a superior approach to a winged vehicled like SpaceShipTwo or Lynx. A ballistic reentry, he said, is better than a winged reentry, noting one fatality from the X-15 program. Launching a winged vehicle, he added, is “a lot harder than making a ballistic vehicle fly right up.” Thus, for greatly reducing the cost of suborbital spaceflight, “the powered [vertical] landing has significant benefits.” After the presentation I talked briefly with XCOR COO Andrew Nelson, who said, “People will want a lot of different experiences. We believe that most people will want something involving wings.”