With companies already promising space tourism, we will need space pilots and tour guides, as well as architects to design where they will live and work. Current projects at SICSA (University of Houston) include a greenhouse on Mars, lunar outposts and space exploration vehicles.

“Space pilot” is pretty easy to understand, as is “space architect”, even if that might seem a little too forward leaning. But what exactly would a “space tour guide” do? Here’s how the report explains it:

Space tour guides will draw on cosmology, astronomy, space science, geography, history and geology to help passengers get the most out of their journey. While the factual side of the tour is important, space guides also need to be excellent storytellers and imaginers to help inspire their charges and encourage them to experience the true awe of space travel. Regular tour guides will need to undergo a similar level of physical and mental preparation and testing as pilots before each trip.

That seems a little much, at least for suborbital flights when customers will only be spending minutes in space and weightlessness. However, there may be the need for the equivalent of flight attendants to guide customers, particularly on flights where people are able to float around the cabin during weightless portion of their flights. (Interestingly, the animations of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo flight experiment don’t include this, although ZERO-G does have flight attendants for their parabolic airplane flights.) Once there are regular orbital tourist flights and facilities to host customers in orbit, then we may see the need for such guides, although as much for safety reasons as for enhancing the tourist experience.

One other interesting aspect of the study is that the job category is the space jobs category is relatively interesting to the public. Asked to name their three most popular job categories in a poll, 19% of UK respondents and 24% of Europeans picked the category, good enough for fifth-highest among Europeans. The job category also ranked in the top five among both Britons and Europeans in terms of having the greatest impact on innovation and economic growth, as well as being the best paid (presumably the former justifying the latter). Finally, the category ranked first among “most aspirational” jobs; the report didn’t explicitly define what it meant to be “aspirational”.

The numbers at first glance don’t sound promising: the press release leads off by claiming that “price concerns are turning holidaymakers off from becoming space tourists”. However, the numbers aren’t that surprising. First of all, the poll doesn’t appear to have limited their polling to people with the means to pay for a spaceflight at currently-planned prices. Second, the numbers aren’t that different from previous polls that did put such limits on respondents: for example, the 2002 Futron/Zogby poll found that 19% of people with the means to pay for a space tourism flight were either “definitely” or “very” likely to take a suborbital spaceflight (a number that rose to 28% when given a more rosy description of such a flight). Even that more pessimistic number resulted in a forecast of thousands of potential tourists a year after just a few years of operation.

“It’s disappointing holidaymakers fear they will be priced out of becoming space tourists,” Fiona Jeffery, chairman of World Travel Market, said in the release. “However, I’m confident the price will drop dramatically the more space tourism takes off.” Even if there isn’t a dramatic drop in prices, though, there’s still a potentially lucrative market to be tapped.

It’s a bit ironic that the site is relaunching today, given that today’s the day Virgin Galactic is unveiling SpaceShipTwo in Mojave. (I’ll be there, and reporting on it here over the next day.) Virgin Galactic has been closely tied to space tourism, but even they have recognized the emergence of other markets besides space tourism. Moreover, that suborbital research market is gaining momentum, as I report in today’s issue of The Space Review. So this is a major milestone, but also part of an interesting time for the entrepreneurial NewSpace field.

If you have any questions or comments about the new design or content, please email me at jeff [at] thespacereview.com, or leave a comment here. I’ll be tweaking the site over the coming days and weeks based on this feedback and more.

As the Sentinel reports today, the state’s inspector general has found that Harris “likely violated” state law by helping arrange $500,000 in state grants for the project and then going to work for the Andrews Institute, the Pensacola medical center where Project Odyssey is located. During a review of 5,000 emails by the office, “it appeared the Project Odyssey consumed most of Harris’ e-mail communications and work time while he was employed with OTTED,” the inspector general’s report states, referring the Office of Trade, Tourism and Economic Development, where Harris worked prior to joining the Andrews Institute. OTTED provided half of the $500,000 for Project Odyssey, with Space Florida contributing the other half. “The emails indicate that Harris’ involvement in Project Odyssey was disproportionate to his time expended on his various other OTTED related duties.”

The inspector general’s report recommended that the case be referred to the state’s ethics commission “for further evaluation and determination of ethics law violations.” The entire project is now in jeopardy, regardless of any technical or economic merits it may have, because of this controversy. “There’s no reason to be spending state dollars to subsidize rich people who will be flying on future flights into space,” Barney Bishop, a member of the Space Coast’s Economic Development Commission, tells the Sentinel. “I would hope they’re going to cancel this contract, because it makes no sense on the face of it, and now there are questions about how it was set up in the first place.”

So what does this mean for NewSpace? With credit tightening and portfolios taking a beating, it seems unlikely that personal spaceflight and other entrepreneurial space sectors will be able to completely escape the current financial turmoil. A quick examination suggests that companies are going to feel it in two ways, involving a somewhat overlapping group of people.

Investors: Earlier this week one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms, Sequoia, sounded the alarm about the current situation in a meeting with the CEOs of its portfolio companies. Sequoia’s message: if you’re not cash-flow positive, you need to get there as soon as possible if you want to have any hope of raising additional funding for the foreseeable future. Getting there may require some drastic cutbacks, but acting now, and quickly, is better than delaying and finding themselves in a “death spiral” where no cutbacks can save the company.

Given that NewSpace companies have, to date, had very limited luck in raising rounds of funding from VCs, this suggests that raising money will be all the more difficult in the near future, especially for those companies developing vehicles or other hardware that require years of work before reaching positive cash flow. Getting money from angel investors, more frequently used by NewSpace companies, may also be more difficult, as these investors, like so many others, have suffered big losses in their investment portfolios in the last several weeks. This could even affect so-called “mega-angels” who put very large sums into ventures, including their own. According to Forbes magazine, Jeff Bezos lost over $1 billion in September as stock market declines devalued his holdings. It’s too soon to say whether this will affect Bezos’s investment in his Blue Origin suborbital vehicle venture, but you could sure do a lot in space with $1.1 billion…

Customers: During Monday’s press conference by Space Adventures to discuss Charles Simonyi’s return trip to the ISS next year, the first question posed to him, from the New York Times, went like this: “Are you the last guy in America with money? Has anything happened in the past, say, two weeks to your assets that makes you think you might want to hold on to cash?” Simonyi responded that “the timing worked out the way it worked out” and that “either we do it now or we don’t do it”.

While Simonyi may still be forging ahead, it’s possible others considering purchasing tickets, a group that includes some angel investors, may have second thoughts now, especially if they’ve lost a significant fraction of their wealth in the stock market’s recent fall. In a healthy economy, spending $200,000 on a suborbital spaceflight might seem like money well spent to realize a dream of going into space; in today’s uncertain economy, the same trip might seem like an unnecessary extravagance. That mindset could be damaging for some space tourism ventures, especially if the downtown lasts for an extended period or if the recovery is slow.

This situation is certainly not catastrophic for NewSpace in general, particularly for those firms that are well-funded, have good balance sheets, and/or can diversify beyond personal spaceflight: think SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and perhaps a few others. However, for other companies, especially those who need to raise significant funds to develop vehicles that will be years away from entering revenue service, it’s going to be much more difficult to make those plans become reality in the near future.

One reason this anniversary has slipped by is there there has been little activity in the suborbital spaceflight arena of the same high profile in the four years since SpaceShipOne’s prize-winning flight. In fact, there have been no FAA-licensed piloted suborbital spaceflights in the last four years; there have been a number of low-level test flights since then, but these have been remotely piloted and under experimental permits. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been progress, just not at the scale, or the rate, that we might have anticipated on that glorious morning four years ago.

As I noted in an article at the beginning of this week in The Space Review, Sunday night’s successful launch of the Falcon 1 might be the biggest milestone for the NewSpace industry, or at least the portion of it focused on space transportation, since SpaceShipOne’s final flight. Just as SpaceShipOne’s flights demonstrated that a private venture could develop a piloted vehicle capable of flying into space (albeit suborbitally) for a fraction of the cost of what a large aerospace company or government agency would have spent, the Falcon 1 launch demonstrated what entrepreneurial space companies can do in the realm of orbital space flight. As with SpaceShipOne, though, the issue will be how well both SpaceX and the rest of the industry can follow up on that initial success, so that future anniversaries have greater relevance.