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If you haven’t heard by now, some new details (or, rather, some details period) about the New Shepard RLV being developed by Blue Origin were released last week, tucked away in a 229-page environmental assessment of the company’s planned West Texas launch site (PDF, ~12 MB). Both MSNBC’s Cosmic Log and RLV and Space Transport News have discussed the details about the vehicle, which appears to first order to be a derivative of the Delta Clipper. (I also talk about it in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review about the second anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s flight.) The report does raise some questions about the vehicle’s development and operations:
- The out-of-the-way location (about 250 kilometers’ drive from El Paso) is ideal for testing: as the document shows, there’s not much in the way of an environment that can be affected. It’s less ideal, though, for actual commercial operations, particularly when a commercial spaceport—presumably with more infrastructure—will be operating not that far away in southern New Mexico. Will Blue Origin operate New Shepard from other spaceports? What sort of cost-convenience tradeoff is there between effectively building your own spaceport versus using another commercial facility?
- Compared to other operators, Blue Origin has a somewhat slower schedule, with a series of prototype tests through the rest of the decade (starting this year, according to the document), but not entering operation until 2010, after Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, Space Adventures, and possibly others. Will they be coming too late to the market?
- The whole flight, from liftoff to landing, will be less than ten minutes. Will that seem too short to prospective passengers? How much weightlessness time will passengers get? Or, since this will be more like a conventional rocket than spaceplanes like SpaceShipTwo and Rocketplane XP, will this be more “space-like” ands hence attractive to passengers?
Seed magazine (tagline: “Science is Culture”), has put online an article from its June/July print issue about the new, um, crop of spaceports springing up around the world. It’s a fairly straightforward, complimentary article about the emerging spaceport and space tourism industries, looking at both the emerging trends and challenges spaceport and vehicle operators are facing: familiar ground for most readers of this blog. Read on to the end, though, for both the take-away message and a subtle dig one company takes at another:
Many believe that competition is beneficial. “Ten years from now, if New Mexico has the only spaceport, then the industry didn’t make it,” says Rick Homans. “My competition isn’t publicity hungry billionaires,” adds Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, referring to Virgin’s Richard Branson. “It’s the people out there in the world who don’t yet realize that space travel is possible for private citizens.”
The Denver Post and the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call provide coverage of yesterday’s SpaceDev event at Centennial Airport outside Denver, where the company unveiled a full-sized model of its Dream Chaser vehicle. The event was apparently a prelude to a two-day presentation today and tomorrow for visiting NASA officials as part of the COTS source selection process. The two articles don’t offer many new details about the vehicle, although they both have photos of the model (on display in a hangar that belongs to Adam Aircraft, a company teaming with SpaceDev on the COTS effort.)
Scott Tibbitts, founder of Starsys, the company acquired by SpaceDev earlier this year, did have an interesting comment on the “blunt-nosed, small-airplane-on-steroids” Dream Chaser design, which is distinct from the capsule-based designs the other five finalists for COTS have reportedly proposed. “If I’m a kid, I’m not excited about flying in a capsule,” Tibbitts said. “I’d be excited in flying in something that looks like (the Dream Chaser).” If you’re going to fly to space, do you really care if the vehicle you’re flying in looks like a plane, capsule, or anything else, so long as it works?
Today is the second anniversary of the first flight into space by a piloted, privately-developed spacecraft: SpaceShipOne. That flight, as well as the two X Prize-winning flights that followed in September and October of 2004, were witnessed in person by thousands in Mojave and many more on television and online–many of whom were probably interested in flying in SpaceShipOne, or another suborbital vehicle like it, soon.
The good news is that, two years later, you can buy a ticket, or at least put down a deposit for one, through the likes of Virgin Galactic (for SpaceShipTwo), Incredible Adventures (for Rocketplane Kistler’s Rocketplane XP), and Space Adventures (for the Explorer vehicle being developed in Russia, although the company has been signing up suborbital customers for several years now.) Moreover, there are a number of other ventures out there developing suborbital vehicles, with varying degrees of funding and technical progress. Overall, awareness of, and interest in, suborbital commercial spaceflight grew considerably because of SpaceShipOne.
The bad news is that, two years later, you still can’t fly to space yet on a commercial suborbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne was retired after it won the X Prize, and has been hanging from the rafters inside the National Air and Space Museum for nearly nine months now. The end of the X Prize competition also took away an incentive for the other competing teams: one of the flaws of the competition, many of its supporters now acknowledge, is that there was no prize for second place. A couple years ago, the general belief was that whoever won the prize would put their vehicle into commercial service shortly thereafter, making some money and perhaps funding the development of a better next-generation vehicle. Instead, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites decided to skip ahead directly to a larger vehicle, which won’t be ready for passenger flights for a couple of years, and no one else has stepped into the vacuum that has been created. If you had told most people who journeyed to Mojave two years ago that by 2006 you’d still have to wait perhaps two more years before taking a suborbital flight, you may well have been dismissed as a skeptic and naysayer because, goodness sakes, there’s a suborbital vehicle flying today!
There are, of course, good reasons why things have taken longer to develop than one might have anticipated two years ago: there’s a move to larger vehicles rather than the three-seaters required to win the X Prize, the not-uncommon technical difficulties associated with developing new vehicles, the challenges of financing, and the fact that, in retrospect, Scaled Composites was simply so far ahead of the rest of prize competitors (despite the effort by the X Prize in mid-2004 to drum up a “competition” between Scaled and the Da Vinci Project). Still, I’ve noticed a bit of nervousness among some advocates of commercial suborbital spaceflight because of this gap: it’s been two years and we still can’t fly? C’mon, hurry up!
In an article that I published literally hours before SpaceShipOne’s historic flight, I briefly examined the issue of how historic the flight would be: would it be on the same level as, to use an oft-used example, Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic to win the Orteig prize, opening a new era in aviation; or would be like the human-powered Gossamer Albatross crossing the English Channel to win the Orteig Prize, a notable accomplishment but, in the long run, a stunt? “It will take years–maybe decades–before we truly know how significant Monday’s flight could be to the future of space development,” I wrote at the time, and that assessment still holds. There’s enough activity going on to lead one to believe that someone, at some point, is going to start flying suborbital passenger vehicles commercially, and hopefully make some good money doing so. If, three or five years from now, there’s no such service in operation (or, worse, one or more such ventures started but failed, either technically or financially), there might be legitimate cause for concern about the viability of this market. Until then, those anxious to fly will have to wait a little longer.
SpaceDev is reportedly planning an event Wednesday to “unveil” its proposed orbital space plane, Dream Chaser, as part of its effort to win a COTS contract from NASA. The event will be held not at the company’s San Diego-area headquarters but instead in the Denver area, where SpaceDev now has a presence after its acquisition of Boulder-based Starsys Engineering; some of its teammates on its COTS proposal are also located in the area. Wednesday, by the way, will mark the second anniversary of the first suborbital spaceflight by SpaceShipOne, powered by a SpaceDev hybrid engine.
You’d think there would be bigger things to worry about in Lebanon than “creating awareness” about space tourism, yet an article in The Daily Star describes a seminar last week about the potential of space tourism at the Beirut Travel Academy:
“We need to create awareness,” explained Hassan al-Zein, who led the event. “Dubai is going to become the launching center for space tourism in the Middle East, so we need to inform people here about the very real possibility. It has now become affordable.”
While the possibility of travelling at 28,000 km/h “is sure to be of interest to the Lebanese, who are renowned for their love of speed”, the reporter wonders near the end of the article if space tourism is such a wide idea. “After all, how many beautiful spots worldwide have been ruined by the tourism industry?” Good thing that there’s plenty of space to ruin.
An article in the Singapore newspaper Today makes an interesting claim: that the spaceport planned for the island city-state will be “the world’s first commercial tourist spaceport.” The source of that claim is unclear, although the article sites the February announcement by Space Adventures about the spaceport project as “plans to develop the world’s first civilian spaceport in Singapore.” The actual Space Adventures press release makes no such claim, other than a statement by Eric Anderson that with the Explorer suborbital vehicle under development “we will enable operations of the world’s first commercial suborbital flights.”
There are several obstacles that make it unlikely that Singapore’s spaceport will be first. For starters, spaceport project backers in Singapore say the facility is scheduled to open by 2009; by that time commercial suborbital flights may well be available in Oklahoma, Mojave, and perhaps New Mexico. (No date was announced for another Space Adventures spaceport project in the UAE.) Second, the group backing the spaceport is still trying to line up financing, even while a study by KPMG has raised the cost of the effort from $115 to $130 million. Of that, the article revealed, Space Adventures is providing $10 million; no other investment was revealed in the article, although the spaceport group said it still plans to have all the necessary financing lined up by the end of the year.
Orlando Sentinel columnist Eric Michaels recounts a trip on Zero-G’s aircraft he took earlier this year. It’s clear from his column that he enjoyed the trip; his stomach, not so much: “Trust me, I’ve never had so much fun making myself sick.” In his case, the queasiness didn’t come until after he completed all his parabolas. “I was lacing up my sneakers when the Action Stomach started sending hints up the pipe that it wasn’t happy. Seconds later, I watched a backward replay of breakfast. Thankfully, I had eaten lightly.” He notes that Zero-G claims that only one in 100 fliers will experience motion sickness, but “of the eight rookie fliers on my trip, six had to use air-sickness bags.”
Of course, Michaels could have avoided that unpleasantness by taking the motion sickness drugs Zero-G provides. However, “I’m not prone to motion sickness, and Nancy Reagan once told me to ‘Just Say No.’ So I stuck to her sage advice and passed.” In the end, though, “I wish I’d said ‘Yes’ to the drugs.”
Yesterday was a big news for up-and-coming commercial spaceports that want to serve the space tourism market:
Oklahoma’s spaceport at the former Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base has received its operators license from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. (The announcement was rather low-key: while the FAA issued a press release about the license, that press release isn’t available on FAA’s web site; see RLV and Space Transport News for the full text of the release, which apparently got a scattershot email distribution. [Update: the official press release is now available as a Word document on the FAA/AST web site.]) It’s certainly a big step forward for the spaceport, although one that had been anticipated for some time: over a month ago at ISDC, George French of Rocketplane Kistler said that the license would be official “in the next two weeks”. In his MSNBC article, Alan Boyle notes that the license “gives Oklahoma an edge in the nascent space tourism industry”, although that edge may be illusory: other planned spaceports, most notably New Mexico, will likely have their FAA licenses well in advance of any commercial operations planned from them, so it will come down to the ability of the companies that plan to operate from them to carry out their business plans.
Speaking of New Mexico, the state has selected a company to begin work designing the Southwest Regional Spaceport. California-based DMJM/AECOM beat out two other finalists to win the contract to provide architectural and engineering services for the spaceport. That work will include “hangers [sic], control building, support buildings, roads, utilities, launch pads and fuel storage facilities,” according to the state press release. An AP article notes that a final contract between the state and DMJM/AECOM is still being negotiated, and will cover an initial “programming” phase.
SPACE.com reviews Spaceport Singapore, the spaceport announced by Space Adventures earlier this year. While the spaceport will host suborbital spaceflight, it will also provide a number of other attractions, including a space camp and various simulators. One sticking point, something that Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson has mentioned in speeches in the recent past: the full $115 million needed for the spaceport hasn’t been raised yet, although proponents believe they’ll have the money in hand by the end of the year.
Space Adventures announced yesterday that Tom Jones (the former astronaut, not the singer) has signed on the company’s advisory board. Jones is a veteran of four shuttle missions and recently published a memoir of his days as an astronaut, Sky Walking. “I’m impressed with the level of focus and dedication at Space Adventures in opening the space frontier to the private sector,” Jones said in a press release. Jones joins a number of other former astronauts who serve as advisors to the company.
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Just say yes
Orlando Sentinel columnist Eric Michaels recounts a trip on Zero-G’s aircraft he took earlier this year. It’s clear from his column that he enjoyed the trip; his stomach, not so much: “Trust me, I’ve never had so much fun making myself sick.” In his case, the queasiness didn’t come until after he completed all his parabolas. “I was lacing up my sneakers when the Action Stomach started sending hints up the pipe that it wasn’t happy. Seconds later, I watched a backward replay of breakfast. Thankfully, I had eaten lightly.” He notes that Zero-G claims that only one in 100 fliers will experience motion sickness, but “of the eight rookie fliers on my trip, six had to use air-sickness bags.”
Of course, Michaels could have avoided that unpleasantness by taking the motion sickness drugs Zero-G provides. However, “I’m not prone to motion sickness, and Nancy Reagan once told me to ‘Just Say No.’ So I stuck to her sage advice and passed.” In the end, though, “I wish I’d said ‘Yes’ to the drugs.”