A Space Adventures Soyuz seat goes for $52 million currently. It’s been widely known for some time that the approximate cost of flying to the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft with Space Adventures is about $50 million—assuming that a seat is available, which today is rare since all the Soyuz seats are being used for ISS crew transfers. At Wednesday’s event, though, Space Adventures president Tom Shelley said on more than one occasion that the price is $52 million. That’s about $20 million less than NASA pays for Soyuz seats, the panelists noted, although the NASA contract includes additional services.

Space Adventures believes there’s price elasticity in the orbital space tourism market. When Shelley said that $52 million price, there was an audible reaction from the audience at the museum, one of shock. Tyson later asked Shelley if he believed the demand curve for orbital space tourism was elastic: would demand go up if prices went down? “If you dropped the price in half, would you have twice as many people signing up?” Tyson asked. “More than twice as many people, we believe,” Shelley responded. He added that the demand Space Adventures has already demonstrated for space tourism has helped support investment in other commercial space transportation systems that could later carry people into orbit.

Space Adventures is still pursuing a circumlunar commercial mission. The company has been quiet in recent years about plans to fly two people on a Soyuz spacecraft that would loop around the Moon, a mission with a current estimated ticket price of $150 million each. In early 2011, for example, Space Adventures said they had sold one seat and were “finalizing” a deal for the second seat. Calling that circumlunar mission “my personal favorite,” Shelley said they planned to carry out the mission by 2017 or 2018. “We have a couple clients under contract and we hope to take that forward,” he said.

People still get hung up on the definition of “space.” How high up to you have to go to be considered to have reached outer space? During the debate, Tyson was critical of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from “the edge of space,” and the panelists agreed that his jump was nowhere near any such edge. They differed, though, on some of the proposed suborbital flights to altitudes of 100 kilometers or so. Tyson said that some people have the “operating definition” of space where you can see stars in the daytime, which he said is about 100 kilometers. (In fact, 100 kilometers, also known as the Kármán line, is often used as the “boundary” of space and is based on aerodynamics, not the visibility of stars.)

Tyson got so wound up about this he managed to confuse suborbital and orbital spaceflight. “When you say ‘low Earth orbit,’ you’re going up to 100 kilometers and going back,” Tyson said at one point, as members of the panel tried to correct him.

People disagree on whether commercial human spaceflight is inspirational. Do people get excited about private citizens going to space in the same way as they do for government astronauts? Space historian John Logsdon doesn’t think so. “I don’t think commercial space is going to serve as inspiration. That’s where the government comes in,” he said. “Rich people taking joyrides is not inspirational.”

Space Adventures’ Shelley strongly disagreed. “We get calls and emails from people on a daily basis saying, ‘I am so inspired by what it is you’re doing, opening up space. I never thought it was going to be possible for me to be able go to space'” as a government astronaut.

Risk remains a major concern. Spaceflight is in inherently risky, and there was some debate if private spaceflight was riskier than government missions, or if private space travellers would be more willing to accept risks. “One of the big differences in this shift from public-sponsored human travel to private-sponsored human travel is the acceptance of higher risk in the private sector,” said Logsdon, noting that some who attempt to climb Mount Everest die in the attempt, but accept that risk given the rewards of scaling the world’s highest mountain—even if thousands of people have done it before.

Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace stressed that less expensive private spaceflight, though, was not inherently riskier than government sponsored missions. “Lower cost does not inherently mean less safe,” he said. “There’s this pernicious misperception that commercial space is going somehow to be less safe or more dangerous or we care more about money than NASA. Nothing could be further from the truth… If we have a bad day, we lose everything.”

Wanda Austin, president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, did argue that spending a little more on “mission assurance” activities (which she said did not have to cost “oodles” of money) was worthwhile. However, at the end of her brief appearance (she appeared via videoconference for the first half-hour of the event because of a prior commitment in California), she did answer positively when Tyson asked her if commercial spaceflight was “ready for prime time.” “We are taking the right steps,” she said. “We’ve already walked through the door, Neil. This is not something that maybe will happen, this is something that is already happening.”

At 10 am EDT Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing titled “Risks, Opportunities, and Oversight of Commercial Space”. Five people are scheduled to appear before the committee, including NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier and two former astronauts, Pam Melroy (now working for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation) and Michael Lopez-Alegria (now president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation). Rounding out the hearing are Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace and Gerald Dillingham of the GAO. The hearing will be webcast on the committee’s website.

At 8 pm EDT Thursday, SpaceUp Houston is hosting the 2012 edition of its “Commercial Spaceflight Panel” at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The two-hour panel will feature speakers from four companies with funded or unfunded Commercial Crew Development awards from NASA (ATK, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX), as well as two suborbital companies (Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR), and Southwest Research Institute, which plans to perform suborbital research on commercial vehicles. That event will also be webcast.

A few things to look for at this year’s event:

An announcement from the Space Studies Institute: Thursday afternoon Gary Hudson, the new president of the Space Studies Institute, is scheduled to speak, with this annotation in the program: “do not miss – we can say no more”. We can expect that Hudson will have some kind of announcement about SSI programs or other activities.

The usual array of company updates: Several suborbital vehicle developers, including Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, and XCOR Aerospace, will be present to talk about their ongoing vehicle development efforts. Also on the schedule for Thursday night is Chuck Lauer to talk about Rocketplane Global, perhaps shedding more light on the news from earlier this year that he is reviving the previously-bankrupt company. Among the other companies in the NewSpace arena presenting at the conference are Altius Space Machines, Garvey Space, mv2space, and Orbital Outfitters. One established space company will be here as well: United Launch Alliance, the joint Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that builds the Atlas and Delta rockets and in participating in several companies’ commercial crew development efforts.

Some policy discussion as well: Regulatory, funding, and related policy discussions have also been a staple of Space Access conferences, and this year is no exception. Much of that will take place on Saturday, with a talk from FAA/AST, a presentation from Rand Simberg about his space property rights proposal, and panel discussions.

An emphasis on the “Maker” community: Space Access has for many years featured talks by individuals or groups working on rocket motors, rockets, and the like. More recently, though, there’s been a surge in interest in do-it-yourself (DIY) technical projects with events like “Maker Faires” and television shows. That will be emphasized here this year with a talk about a “Hackerspace” being developed in Mojave, as well as a panel on “DIY Space Access”.

Some missing names: Some companies traditionally don’t participate at Space Access, and that’s true again this year: Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin are among the companies who are at least not presenting at the conference. (SpaceX is also not presenting, although last year SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell did give a talk at the conference.) Some more familiar names will also be missing this year, though: Armadillo’s John Carmack and XCOR’s Jeff Greason, two long-time attendees, are not making the trip, and both companies will have very limited representation at the conference. In both cases, though, that’s because the companies are busy working on vehicles: Armadillo’s STIG-B rocket and XCOR’s Lynx Mark 1.

The morning plenary sessions feature an array of special speakers, including Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 astronaut who is here in his capacity as a former X-15 test pilot and thus with experience in suborbital flight. Later Monday representatives of five suborbital vehicle developers—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace—will provide updates. Later sessions will focus on selected research topics, from microgravity science to life sciences to astronomy, as well as outreach, media, markets, and policy.

While the conference sessions are not (to the best of my knowledge) being webcast, you can keep tabs on the conference by following the #NSRC2012 hashtag on Twitter, with summaries of key conference events to follow here over the next several days.

The conference’s concluding panel examined training and roles for payload specialists who might fly with their experiments on suborbital flights. This panel covered again some of the ground of a session the previous day on crew training, with some of the same participants. Although some, like Astronaut4Hire’s Erik Seedhouse, have proposed rather rigorous training regimens for suborbital crews, others, like Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, believe that only a modest amount of training will be needed for suborbital payload specialists: on the order of one to three weeks, spread out over a larger period of time. “If we turn this into training where it looks like you’re going on an International Space Station mission, we’re really going to be in trouble. We’re defeating the purpose of low-cost spaceflight,” Stern said.

That discussion helped identify one of the themes of the 2011 NSRC. While the first NSRC last year in Colorado was primarily designed to helped put this market—research and education—on the map, the second one transitioned from the “why” of suborbital research to the “how”: how to fly payloads on suborbital vehicles, how to train payload specialists for the flights, and related topics. The next NSRC is scheduled for the February 2012 in the San Francisco Bay Area, hosted by NASA Ames. By then, perhaps, we’ll start hearing about results from payloads that have actually flown on suborbital vehicles.

The 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference will be held in Orlando, Florida 28 February through 2 March. That’s less than two weeks away!

If you or your colleagues and students have not registered on line yet, you still can, until the end of Friday February 18th; just go to: http://nsrc.swri.org/. (After that, you can register in-person in Orlando at a higher price.)

Following on the success of the inaugural Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference in February 2010, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation is proud to again co-sponsor the 2011 sequel conference.

We can already see that the 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference promises to be a watershed gathering for researchers, educators, and industry/government. The meeting will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about the application of these new vehicles to research and education objectives. The meeting will also provide important networking opportunities for researchers and educators to meet with colleagues, government officials, and representatives from the suborbital industry. Vehicles are under development by companies including Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace.

This year’s registrants include a significant number of international attendees from Canada, Europe, and Asia, in addition to many from the United States.

Over 120 presenters—a 40% increase over 2010—will discuss everything from flight test progress to planned experiments in 7 different research fields to training and roles for research and educator payload specialists. In total, the meeting will feature 20 sessions, 4 discussion panels, a press conference, presentations or booths by 20 sponsors, and a public night presentation by Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides.

The meeting will also include invited talks by experts in diverse fields that include microgravity sciences, atmospheric science, space life sciences, planetary science, education, and crew training.

The 2011 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference is the place to be to learn how to marry your research, education, or business interests to next-generation suborbital spaceflight.

For more information, and to register to reserve your seat, go to http://nsrc.swri.org/

See you there, soon—and don’t forget to register before the end of Friday February 18th when the website registration period ends! (After that you will have to register in person in Orlando, at a higher price).

Groundbreaking is scheduled for Tuesday in Mojave for a new production facility for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The 68,000-square-foot (6,300-square-meter) factory for The Spaceship Company (a joint venture of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites) is slated for completion in September 2011. The formal name of the facility, according to a Tehachapi News article, is the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, which, yes, has the acronym FAITH.

SpaceX has rescheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for no earlier than December 7, citing both delays of other launches at Cape Canaveral as well as a desire to run more tests. The launch will be the first of three planned test flights of the Dragon spacecraft under its COTS agreement with NASA. The delay will also give SpaceX additional time to secure a first-ever reentry license for the Dragon from the FAA.

Some people dream their whole lives about flying in space. For Marc and Sharon Hagle, they sort of stumbled across the opportunity, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The two were taking a Zero-G flight along with, as it turned out, a number of Virgin Galactic sales agents, and as the article notes, “It didn’t take much to sell the Hagles on the chance for some real space travel.”

Some other notes of interest from the conference sessions:

• In a session on the microgravity research market, Andrew Nelson of XCOR said that he believes that, by 2016, there will be an annual market for suborbital flight services of $3.3 billion. Only $800 million of that will be flying people (primarily for tourism), with $1.1 billion for flying payloads and $1.4 billion for launching smallsats.
• In a panel on orbital crew capsules, Robert Bigelow said Bigelow Aerospace had been in discussions with Lockheed Martin back in 2004-2005 on crew transportation systems, and even awarded the company a million-dollar contract to design an “Orion Lite” version that would be a scaled-down version of the Orion spacecraft for NASA. However, asked later what he thought of the potential competition between Orion and commercially-developed systems for ISS crew transportation, Bigelow said bluntly that “I think Orion is unnecessary”: commercial systems could handle access to LEO while spacecraft larger than Orion should be developed for deep-space exploration.
• On that same panel Lockheed’s Kenneth Reightler defended the development of Orion, but also indicated that the company had attracted “quite a bit of interest” from other customers, and that Lockheed had “invested a lot of out corporate money” into the program.
• In a panel late in the day on spaceports, Rick Homans of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority said that the development of Spaceport America is now in a “very complex” phase, as it transitions from construction to operations over the next year. The authority will soon issue a series of RFPs for operational-related activities, from security to visitor services, and is actively seeking a deputy director who will be responsible for spaceport operations.
• Stu Witt of Mojave Air and Space Port, on the same panel, advised Homans and others running spaceports to be ready to deal with both “normal and abnormal” operations, citing from his own experience in Mojave events ranging from plane crashes to the SpaceShipTwo engine development accident in 2007 that killed three people to even the windstorm that prematurely ended the SS2 rollout event last December and toppled tents—after everyone had been evacuated, fortunately. “You’ve got to be planning and planning and planning,” Witt advised.

On Friday the big event, of course, is the dedication of the runway at Spaceport America, which will feature appearances by Sir Richard Branson and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson as well as a flyover by WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo.

• In a session titled “Closing the credibility gap”, speakers from Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and Armadillo Aerospace discussed the importance of testing to demonstrate to customers, investors, regulators, and others that their ventures are, in fact, credible. During her presentation Virgin Galactic operations manager Julia Tizard mentioned that “full scale hot firing” of the rocket motors for SpaceShipTwo is underway in preparation for powered flight tests next year. (It should be noted that the log of RocketMotorTwo test firings was last updated in August.)
• Neil Milburn of Armadillo Aerospace said in another panel that the company plans to bring out two vehicles, Super Mod and the “tube vehicle”, to Spaceport America by the end of this year for test flights under NASA’s CRuSR program, pending FAA approval. Super Mod will be able to fly to at least 40 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 60 kilometers, while the tube vehicle (Milburn admitted that vehicle needs a better name) could go all the way to 100 kilometers.
• Earlier, Milburn said that Project M, a low-profile NASA project Armadillo had been associated with, has changed its name to Project Morpheus. The project had originally sought to land a humanoid rover (based on the Robonaut that will be going to the ISS on the next shuttle mission) on the Moon within 1,000 days (hence M, the Roman numeral for 1,000). The name change reflects a change in focus on the program for more terrestrial technology development.
• Tim Pickens, the founder or Orion Propulsion who now works for Dynetics, said Dynetics’s role in projects like the Rocket City Space Pioneers Google Lunar X PRIZE team is part of an internal investment by the company to become one known for building space hardware. He added that in “the next few weeks” you would see some major investments by the company along those lines.
• Bigelow Aerospace’s Robert Bigelow said despite the ongoing construction of a 185,000-square-foot factory in Las Vegas devoted to the production of expandable modules, he still considered the company to be in R&D mode. The company is looking for customers, and recently signed several memoranda of understanding with countries interested in leasing modules, but he said the company would not take any money from customers until at least 2012, pending the state of crew transportation development. (The company has a considerable presence at the conference; more on that in a later post.)