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A roundup of a few space tourism-related items from the last several days:
- Wyle Labs Inc. is creating a new business unit “focusing on providing human spaceflight services to the emerging commercial ‘space tourist’ industry”. The Commercial Human Spaceflight Services unit, led by Vernon McDonald, will offer a variety of medical, training, and operations support services for vehicle operators and spaceports. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Wyle Labs is up for sale by the private-equity firm that holds a controlling interest in the company.
- The San Antonio Express-News reports that the citizenry of Van Horn, Texas, is excited about the prospects of a Blue Origin spaceport near their community. The town is looking for an economic boost from Blue Origin, although only a couple dozen jobs are currently envisioned. Best quote is from Celeste Stokely,a native of Austin who attened the hearing there last week, trying to learn more about Blue Origin’s plans: “I’ve been reduced to reading the space blogs, but they are just guessing.” Well, we do our best.
- Popular Science has posted the article from its latest issue about Rocketplane. Michael Belfiore provides some interesting, although not earth-shattering, details about Rocketplane’s development work, including some details about Polaris Propulsion, the company led by an ex-Rocketdyne engineer that is developing the AR-36 rocket engine that will eventually be used by Rocketplane.
- The AP descibes how the early customers for Virgin Galactic and Rocketplane have taken on roles as “celestial missionaries” for those customers, selling the experience of suborbital spaceflight even before they’ve had a chance to fly.
- Forbes.com (free registration required) interviews Brian Binnie about his suborbital flight on SpaceShipOne and his thoughts about the future. binnie expects progress to be “conservatively paced” since “no one has a business plan that can gracefully recover from a smoking hole in the ground” (although he believes the industry as a whole can survive an accident.) As for himself, “I’m not hanging around Mojave because I’m enamored with the scenery or with getting sand in my teeth. Let’s just say I’m very motivated to see that SS2 supports a business plan.”
For the curious who weren’t there (or were there but didn’t bring a camera), I’ve uploaded some images of the NewSpace 2006 conference to Flickr. It is primarily shots of speakers and panels, but also one of the more interesting items from the auction, as well as a zero-g wedding dress.
The new web site for the upcoming X Prize Cup is now online, a few days (or few weeks) later than planned. The site has information about what events are planned for the two days of the event (October 20-21), as well as travel information for those who plan to attend and webcast information for those who can’t. A few items of note:
It was ironic that Bigelow Aerospace released photos of the Dnepr launch of Genesis 1 on the same day that another Dnepr lifted off from Baikonur. Unfortunately, that launch was a failure: the rocket crashed to earth shortly after liftoff, apparently when its first-stage engines shut down. Had Bigelow’s luck been a little different, it might have been their launch that failed, leaving them uncertain about the success of their design. As it is, their next launch, which had been scheduled for late this year, may be delayed, depending on how long the Dnepr is grounded for any investigation and what payloads remain in the queue ahead of it (at least two more Dnepr launches were on the manifest between Wednesday’s failure and the Genesis 2 launch late this year, making this an unusually active year for the refurbished ICBM.)
Last night the FAA held a hearing in Van Horn, Texas on the draft environmental assessment of the proposed private spaceport being developed in west Texas by Blue Origin. Alan Boyle of MSNBC offers an account of a event where not much happened. About half of the 40 people who attended actually came from out of town (including conference organizers and journalists), and only three people made comments during the hearing: two locals who supported the venture and Boyle himself, who posed several questions about the project to company officials in attendance. This suggests that Blue Origin may get the required FAA approvals—an experimental permit for flight tests and a spaceport license—within a few months.
And about the site itself? The location is still off-limits to the public, although Boyle reports that from the vantage point of the highway that passes closest to the site, “Earth-moving equipment, trucks and even a bus could be seen stirring up dust on Tuesday.”
Business 2.0 magazine has a brief interview with Richard Branson that touches on a number of subjects, including why he got involved in space tourism:
And why space travel now?
NASA has always looked at it as a government-run research program – never thinking of it as human beings, individuals wanting to go into space. We think there are millions of people who’d love to go into space, and why shouldn’t they have that experience?
Ten years ago I thought, “Right, how can Virgin be the first company to send people into space commercially?” Then we went out talking to every single person in the field, so that we’d learn the ins and outs of space travel. By the time Burt Rutan had his breakthrough, we were there. We were the first on the scene.
The “ten years ago” comment is interesting, since there are varying accounts of exactly when Virgin Galactic got started.
Bigelow Aerospace released yesterday some images from the interior of the Genesis 1 module, including some objects, like photos and playing cards, floating inside. (Some of these objects are blurred, which the company attributes to the low-res imagery returned to date; future missions will have more and better cameras and more high-bandwidth communications.) These photos are similar to the ones that Robert Bigelow showed me during our interview last week, but with the non-Bigelow logos on the interior fuzzed out. As a separate page on the Bigelow site explains, the logos on the online images are pixelated because the company “did not have time to get permission from the various companies for display”. Should such permission be granted, the logos will be revealed.
The AP and the British newspaper The Independent both published articles in recent days about Blue Origin’s plans for a suborbital vehicle that will fly from the company’s facilities in West Texas. The articles are based on details previously disclosed in the company’s draft environmental assessment report, which will be the subject of a public hearing today in Van Horn, Texas, the town closest to the Blue Origin site. The hearing, which will be covered by Alan Boyle of MSNBC, may offer the best chance to date to see what the secretive company is up to.
For this week’s issue of The Space Review, I wrote an extended article about Bigelow Aerospace based on Robert Bigelow’s speech at the NewSpace 2006 conference Friday, a media tour of the Bigelow Aerospace factory in North Las Vegas the previous day, and the interview I had with Bigelow last week as well. The intent of the article was to provide a comprehensive overview of many of the items I mentioned in my notes from the interview last week, going into more detail where possible.
Also, I have gallery of images from Thursday’s tour, including both larger versions of images I previously posted as well as some new ones.
He may be, so long as you believe the British press. According to the brief report, Prince Harry has discussed fly on Virgin Galactic with Richard Branson’s son, Sam, who is a close friend of Harry’s older brother, Prince William. A Virgin Galactic spokesman quoted in the report would only say that the company is “hopeful he will accept our invitation.” We’ll see.
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