NewSpace Journal » Extraorbital

Space Adventures optimistic about the next decade of space tourism

Jeff Foust — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:49:11 +0000

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.”

Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic make a little news in Munich

Jeff Foust — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:11:08 +0000

On Sunday afternoon Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, and George Whitesides, president and CEO of Virgin Galactic, appeared on a panel at the Digital – Life – Design (DLD) conference in Munich. The half-hour panel, with the rather clunky title “New Space Mission”, was designed to provide attendees of this rather eclectic conference with a brief overview of the state of space tourism? (How eclectic? The panel took place immediately after a hip hop performance and before a talk by one of the designers on the movie TRON: Legacy.) The two also managed to make a little news about their respective ventures.

The panel’s moderator, Spencer Reiss of Wired, introduced Anderson as the person would sell you a ticket for a trip around the Moon, “and there’s only one ticket left, and it’s $150 million.” When Space Adventures announced its circumlunar flight plans in 2005, they said they would sell two seats for $100 million each. Anderson indicated a short time later that the price apparently had gone up, but, “we have sold one of those.” Reiss asked Anderson who the purchaser was, but Anderson didn’t give a name: “When we tell you, you’ll know who it is. You’ll recognize the name.” Anderson said “we’ve got people we’re finalizing with right now” for the second seat on the flight, which he said would take place around 2015.

Whitesides, meanwhile, said that Virgin Galactic was planning to begin operations in 2012, with Branson and his family, along with Burt Rutan, on the first commercial flight (as Virgin has planned for some time.) “It’s safe to say we expect certainly to be cash flow positive very quickly” once operations begin, he said. Virgin will start with one flight a week, moving to three flights a week during its first year of operations, allowing it to fly up to 500 people during that first year of operations. He added the company would probably spend “about half a billion dollars” before commercial operations begin.

Whitesides said that once the company is ready to expand operations beyond Spaceport America, it will look first to the Middle East, and not Europe as the company had previously indicated. “If we’re able to export the system, we would first export it to Abu Dhabi if the US government permits it,” he said. Back in mid-2009 Will Whitehorn, then-president of Virgin Galactic, said he was “pretty certain” Sweden would be next after Virgin Galactic, followed by somewhere in the Middle East. Since then, though, Abu Dhabi-based Aabar Investments took a 32-percent stake in Virgin Galactic for $280 million.

Video from the panel is below, but for some reason the last several minutes of the session, including Whitesides’s comments above, are missing:

Watch live streaming video from dldconference at livestream.com

Private human lunar missions in 20 years?

Jeff Foust — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:20:33 +0000

An article in Tuesday’s issue of the London (Ontario) Free Press reports that NASA Ames director Pete Worden believes that “Private flights to the moon may be available to non-scientists ‘by the end of the 2020s.’” Worden, speaking at the University of Western Ontario, played up the potential for private activity on the Moon, and even suggested that the private sector is “going to beat us to the lunar surface”, although the report doesn’t indicate if he meant that in the context of robotic or human expeditions.

A setback for circumlunar tourism?

Jeff Foust — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:37:57 +0000

On Tuesday shareholders in Russian aerospace company RSC Energia, which includes the Russian government, officially named Vitaly Lopota as the company’s new president. Lopota replaces Nikolai Sevastianov, who was effectively ousted last month. Sevastianov got into trouble in part by making bold pronouncements about plans to return to the moon, ranging from far-fetched proposals to mine the lunar regolith for helium-3 to proposals to fly Soyuz missions on circumlunar missions around the Moon. The latter, of course, has been something that Space Adventures has been trying to line up paying passengers for, at $100 million for each of two available seats.

Lopota appears to be distancing himself from those lunar mission plans. For example, Itar-Tass noted that Energia will coordinate its announcements with the Russian space agency Roskosmos because, previously, “Sevastianov often declared plans for manned space flights that disagreed with the official position of the agency and the federal space program for 2006-2015.” RIA Novosti reported that Sevastianov “has been repeatedly criticized, primarily for his daring projects relating to lunar exploration, branded “lunacy” by the Space Agency”. (The irony of branding lunar exploration plans as “lunacy” is apparently lost on Novosti’s editors.) These comments suggest that proposals to modify Soyuz spacecraft for circumlunar missions may be shifted to the back burner under Energia’s new leadership.

Canadian optimism about space tourism

Jeff Foust — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:28:38 +0000

A large fraction of Canadians think that space tourism flights to other planets would be possible within the next 100 years, according to the results of a poll reported by the Canadian Press. A whopping 85 percent thought that such vacations would be possible in the next century “or more”, including 13 percent who believed that such jaunts could be possible in the next 50 years. However, “futurist” Mike Dover of Toronto consultancy New Paradigm tried to put the kibosh on such thoughts in the Canadian Press article: “I don’t see that it would be in the realm of possibilities for amateur or civilian travel for many, many centuries.” Of course, it depends on what’s meant by vacations to other planets—or, for that matter, what a “planet” is. After all, Space Adventures is recruiting passengers for a circumlunar flight that could take place in the next several years, not centuries.

Space Adventures: first circumlunar tourists signed by end of year

Jeff Foust — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:16:21 +0000

Space Adventures’ CEO Eric Anderson believes that his company will have signed up the first tourists for their proposed circumlunar mission by the end of this year. Anderson made the comments last week at the Flight School conference in Colorado, according to SPACE.com. That’s a bit later than what Anderson said a month ago at the ISDC, when said he was working with a few prospective customers over the next few months to sign them up for the flight. The ticket still costs $100 million each, with two available for the flight.

Anderson added that, on the orbital front, his company is working with the Russian space agency Roskosmos to try and increase the number of Soyuz flights to provide more flight opportunities for space tourists. Also, he hopes that the first tourist spacewalk from the ISS could take place in 2009.

The next orbital space tourist…

Jeff Foust — Sat, 26 May 2007 13:08:13 +0000

…has been selected, but hasn’t been announced yet, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said during a luncheon speech at the ISDC Friday. “The next [tourist] flight is next year,” he said. “We have the person who is going to go but we haven’t yet disclosed their name. But it will be another exciting one, it will be another first.” Anderson also said that the current cost of an orbital flight is $25 million, in line with earlier reports about Simonyi’s flight but more than the $21.8 million price quoted by Roskosmos this week.

Anderson was also revealing few details about Space Adventures’ suborbital flight plans. The company has kept a low profile about those plans since a flurry of publicity back in early 2006. “I prefer not to comment on that too much right now,” he said. “We are still working on it. Everything costs more and takes longer, so we’ll see.” At the other extreme, he said there is still strong interest in the company’s circumlunar space flight proposal. “I have a few people who are interested,” he said, adding that he plans to work with them over the next few months to get them to formally sign up.

Mars on the cheap?

Jeff Foust — Fri, 19 May 2006 10:39:20 +0000

PC Magazine, of all publications, has a summary article of the appearance by Space Adventures’ Chris Faranetta and SpaceX’s Elon Musk at the Future in Review (or FiRE) conference in San Diego. (See earlier post.) There’s not too much new here: both go over their plans, and discuss some far-future propulsion breakthroughs (Faranetta is fond of laser propulsion, while Musk is not; both are disdainful of the space elevator concept.) Musk, though, has his eye firmly set on low-cost passenger travel to Mars, and soon:

“I hope that we’re the primary mechanism for getting people to orbit in the world,” said Musk. “By 2020 I’d like to take someone to another planet.” He believes that within 12 years or so, the cost of taking someone to Mars will be little more than “the price of a median house in California,” or just a few million dollars each.

Of course, by 2020 a few million dollars may not buy you anything in the most overheated regions of California’s real estate market.

Space Adventures and SpaceX review the future

Jeff Foust — Wed, 17 May 2006 10:37:50 +0000

SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Space Adventures vice president Chris Faranetta discussed space tourism and the future of commercial space ventures during talks Tuesday at the “Future in Review” conference in San Diego, CNET News.com reports. There’s not much news in this report, other than a comment by Faranetta that Space Adventures hopes to sign up two passengers for its proposed circumlunar flight by 2008.

Orbital space tourism survey

Jeff Foust — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 18:47:48 +0000

SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. (SEI) has posted an online survey regarding demand for orbital space tourism. Normally I am skeptical of any such online surveys, because the audience is self-selected: rather than a random sampling that takes into account various demographic factors of the audience (as is the case with traditional polling) online surveys can be skewed by the audience that is attracted—or compelled—to take them.

This survey, though, is a little different. Rather than ask people about their own willingness to fly in space, respondents are instead asked to try and gauge the size of the market for several types of orbital tourism activities: orbital flights with and without hotels, as well as circumlunar flights. The size of the potential market at several price points is requested, as well as the confidence the respondent has in his estimates.

I am curious to see how SEI plans to use these data. If it’s an effort to measure the size of the orbital tourism market, I’m skeptical about how useful it might be: few details are given (or available) about the various attributes of such flights, and price points may vary wildly from what’s requested in the survey. In any event, I suspect most people can only offer a gut feel for the size of the market at this time. However, if the survey is designed to gauge the perceived size of the market, then this might be more useful. How big, in numbers of passengers per year, do people believe orbital tourism will be?