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An article in an El Paso alternative newspaper, Newspaper Tree, describes a boom taking place in Las Cruces, NM. What’s causing the boom? It turns out that retirees are flocking to the city as a low-cost alternative to locales in Arizona and Florida, although writer Jeff Berg had this to say:
Las Cruces ‘boom’ can only be equated with the retirees, as it has not much else to offer, unless the planned spaceport actually takes off … but one should consider what kind of growth that will offer.
Hmmm… what kind of growth would a spaceport offer? And why would it be viewed negatively, as the tone of the passage suggests? Perhaps the author is confusing Spaceport America with Mos Eisley.
The BBC reports that Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn is making an “informal” visit to RAF Lossiemouth, a Scottish air base that is being considered as a potential European spaceport for the space tourism company. Virgin Galactic has previously stated that they have considered northern Scotland as one of the few locations in Europe, from an airspace perspective, where such flights could operate; Virgin is also reportedly interested in Kiruna, Sweden, home to a sounding rocket launch facility. It’s not clear how a commercial space tourism operation could be integrated into an operational military air base; the web site for RAF Lossiemouth describes the base as “the largest and busiest fast-jet base in the Royal Air Force”.
SPACE.com talks about the connection between space tourism and ecotourism. Much of that linkage is the desire to view the Earth from space, something that has awed virtually every person to fly in space to date. That also applies to suborbital space tourism: earlier this year Chuck Lauer said that the view of Earth—particularly of a tourist’s home region—is more important than the sensation of weightlessness tourists will experience.
But some proponents stretch the ecotourism connection a little too far by touting the environmental friendliness of their vehicles, notably air-launched vehicles like SpaceShipTwo. “It’s environmentally thousands of times cleaner than any other system in the past,” Stephen Attenborough of Virgin Galactic said, while Virgin’s Will Whitehorn claimed that “ground-based rocketry and the effluents spewed into the air by those liftoffs – especially by solid fuel motors – will likely not be environmentally and politically acceptable within a generation, he predicted.” Even at high launch rates, though, it’s hard to see ground-launch space tourism craft becoming more environmentally unacceptable than, say, commercial aviation, especially when most systems on the drawing boards use liquid or hybrid, rather than solid, propellants.
I noted when the new X Prize Cup site went live last week that there was no mention of other activities associated with the cup, like a space tourism symposium held at New Mexico State Univ. a few days before last year’s event. Yesterday someone tipped me off to the fact that, yes, that conference, the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight, will be held again in the days before the Cup. This year the conference will take place over two days, October 17-18, the Tuesday and Wednesday before the Cup; an optional tour of White Sands Missile Range is planned for Thursday, the day before the first day of the Cup itself. A barebones schedule is online, as well as registration information. Most interesting item on the site? The conference MC will be ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson.
A related item to the post earlier this week about Congressman Frank Lucas talking up the Oklahoma Spaceport in his district: in an article in the Alva Review-Courier Lucas trotted out some statistics regarding spaceflight at a town meeting. “From my research I’ve determined that 40 percent of citizens who encounter weightlessness for the first time have the most sensational motion sickness,” he said. While that may apply to orbital spaceflight, I suspect the number isn’t nearly so high for people who fly on zero-g aircraft, either government or commercial, and may also not be applicable to suborbital spaceflight, where the zero-g experience will last on the order of five minutes. Any thoughts?
This week’s international edition of Newsweek has an article about the growth of space tourism. The article is pretty typical stuff, covering the major companies in the field and several of the new spaceports under development. There is one interesting nugget: “The market for commercial space tourism is expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues by 2020, according to a study released last month by Research Reports International, a market-research firm based in Evergreen, Colorado.” Has someone else done a market study of the space tourism market?
As it turns out, my employer (Futron Corporation) had purchased a copy of this report, which I reviewed yesterday. It turns out that there is little, if anything, original in this report: it is a synthesis of a number of publicly-available documents and data on the industry. (Some sections of it seemed to be cribbed, if not outright copied, from a number of FAA/AST reports, unfortunately without attribution.) There’s no new research here: the figures above some from such sources as the space tourism market study we did at Futron back in 2002, as well as the overall ASCENT market study performed for NASA in 2001-2003. So if you’re looking for new market research about space tourism, you won’t find it in this report.
[Disclaimer: Yes, I work for Futron. No, I don’t speak for them.]
Congressman Frank Lucas (R-OK), whose district includes the Oklahoma Spaceport, mentioned it at a town meeting in Enid, Oklahoma on Tuesday, according to an article in the Enid News and Eagle. Lucas described the activities at the spaceport, including plans by “Rocket Plane” [sic] to perform suborbital spaceflights from there. But would Lucas want to take a ride on one of those flights himself? Apparently not. “I won’t be one of those standing in line for a ride,” he said.
Alan Walton, a “self-made millionaire” in Connecticut, is one of Virgin Galactic’s initial customers, or “Founders”, and was recently interviewed by the Hartford Courant. A few interesting items he said in the interview: the complete flight (from takeoff to landing) will be two and a half hours long, with two pilots and six passengers; he will get to experience seven minutes of weightlessness; and passengers will wear pressure suits. Walton added, “I lost 30 pounds because the less you weigh the higher you will go, although I’ve never been heavy.”
New Mexico has been very aggressive about courting aerospace companies, in particular space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic and Starchaser Ltd., among others. A Florida newspaper reports that similar incentives have lured a Florida-based aircraft company to set up a factory south of Albuquerque. The reaction to this move, from one consultant: “Florida supports its industry, it doesn’t directly subsidize it like New Mexico. New Mexico runs it’s [sic] economy more like the Communists in Soviet Russia than anything else here in the west.
I suspect that, to many New Mexicans, them’s fightin’ words.
The Orange County Register published an interview yesterday with Michael Lopez-Alegria, who will fly to the ISS in September as a member of the Expedition 14 crew. Reporter Gary Robbins brings up the topic of space tourism in the interview:
Q: This fall, Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese entrepreneur, will spend eight days on the station as a tourist. He’s paying NASA’s Russian partners for the right to do it. How do you feel about space tourism?
A:Space tourism is here to stay. America has to embrace it. I am not sure NASA has to embrace it. That may not be our role. But NASA could foment tourism like the U.S. post office did with commercial aircraft transportation. I understand that the revenue is important for the Russians, maybe even vital for their program to survive. If you make that a consideration, I’m for it. As mission commander, it is a bit of a liability. (Enomoto) is not a trained professional. There will have to be some supervision.
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