The reaction to the upcoming launch varies considerably. At one extreme is an editorial in the Orange County Register, which is excited about the prospects of commercializing spaceflight (beyond, presumably, the commercial launch activity that exists today for communications and other satellites, not mentioned in the editorial.) Even if the launch fails, the editorial argues, “another launch will succeed, and the transition of space travel from a strictly government endeavor to one dominated by private companies will have advanced an important step.”

At another extreme is an op-ed by Examiner.com reported Jason Rhian, who was less than impressed with Shotwell’s performance at Monday’s press conference. He criticized as “flippant and haughty” her response to a reporter’s question about cost: “We don’t really talk about cost at SpaceX.” Rhian: “Given the status that Obama has given to SpaceX above all others, including NASA itself; Shotwell should be required to talk about cost.” Besides confusing the difference between “price” and “cost” (which was the point of Shotwell’s comments; as she noted, SpaceX publishes launch prices on its web site, which other major commercial launch providers do not), it’s worth noting that both the COTS development award and the CRS cargo contract are not traditional cost-plus contracts, where understanding a company’s costs is important. For this week’s launch NASA is not paying SpaceX specifically for a launch but instead has been providing SpaceX with funding as the company met milestones for development of the Falcon 9 and Dragon under its COTS award. (The launch is one of the milestones in the award, but only a token amount of funding is associated with it, as most of the money—$253 million of the $287 million, NASA’s Alan Lindenmoyer said Monday—has already been awarded to SpaceX for achieving earlier milestones.)

• The Washington Times reported on Richard Garriott’s planned flight to the ISS in 2008 in an article published on Christmas Day. In addition to Garriott’s plans to perform commercial experiments on his flight, the article notes that “companies are invited to develop advertising campaigns or commercials that Mr. Garriott could shoot in space.”
• The British newspaper The Guardian reexamines Virgin Galactic’s plans to perform suborbital spaceflights from Kiruna, Sweden, allowing passengers to fly through the aurora borealis. There’s not much news here, other than that a sounding rocket flight is planned for November with cameras on it “to find out what being inside the aurora actually looks like”; it apparently never occurred to scientists to do this before.
• In Monday’s The Telegraph, also from the UK, Jim White feels a blast of nostalgia for the heady days of the 1960s space race thanks to Virgin Galactic (with an assist to Wallace and Gromit). Virgin’s planned suborbital flights will be expensive, but “for many of us of a certain vintage it might well represent the finest value for money: I’m getting all excited about the possibility just writing about it.”

The Telegraph editorial’s key section is:

While these ventures have a futuristic outlook, what no one questions is whether the planet, already inundated with harmful emissions, needs yet more of them from space vehicles that serve no other purpose that to give rides for people with money to burn for a brief personal adventure.

Planes provide needed transportation and scientific rockets hopefully will benefit humankind. But do we really need to unload more fuel emissions into the skies with tourist rockets while we haven’t yet brought the Earth’s present overload of toxic gases under control? Just wondering.

This is not the first time this issue has come up; Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic tried to head this issue off at the pass last year at the SpaceShipTwo cabin mockup unveiling in New York by claiming that each SpaceShipTwo flight would have one ten-thousandth the environmental impact of a space shuttle launch, or about the same carbon dioxide emission as a single Virgin Atlantic business-class passenger on a New York-to-London flight. Other suborbital vehicles under development will probably have environmental impacts of roughly the same order as SS2, given the relatively short duration of the powered portion of their flights (a few minutes of rocket power, and in some cases additional time under jet power.)

Even in the most robust market scenarios the number of flights will only be in the hundreds or low thousands per year for years to come, which means that the total environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight will be an almost infinitesimal fraction of the overall commercial aviation industry. Couldn’t the Telegraph’s editors reached that same conclusion with just a modest amount of research? Just wondering.

I left a comment critiquing his analysis (and, just checking now, it looks like I owe David a response to his reply). If you have something to add, you’re probably best served by commenting there, not here.

However, Professor Kim’s essay suffers from a fatal flaw: the false dichotomy. Either billionaires can spend their money on themselves or donate it to worthy causes, Professor Kim seems to argue. However, there’s no reason why they can’t do both. Even Professor Kim acknowledges in his essay that Simonyi has made a number of significant charitable donations. Moreover, Simonyi’s flight is hardly a selfish joyride: he is using his flight as an educational tool, including planning several amateur radio contacts with US high schools, and will conduct experiments for the Japanese, European, and Hungarian space agencies. Professor Kim, however, seems fixated instead on the single gourmet meal that Simonyi and his ISS crewmates will enjoy during the 13-day flight.