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An article in The Guardian confirms reports that Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic will have a cameo appearance in this summer’s Superman movie:
Branson, a postmodern business figurehead, has a cameo role in the Superman (alongside a Virgin Galactic spacecraft) and Bond movies to be released this year. “It’s fantastic promotion,” he says, finally getting enthusiastic. “They aren’t using Nasa and they wanted to bring Superman into the modern era.”
Earlier reports had suggested that Branson and his son would play pilots of a Virgin Galactic spacecraft attacked by Lex Luthor, who must be rescued by Superman.
Guardian reporter Jane Martinson also offers some insights and tidbits about Virgin Galactic:
Even I, who typically feel sick on a funfair ride, enjoyed a brief moment of wanting to watch the curvature of the Earth after seeing Galactic’s promotional video. Branson, who is investing $240m (£138m) in the venture, has said that he will go on the inaugural flight, with his parents and children.
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis will be in Capitol Hill today, but he won’t be there primarily to talk about commercial spaceflight or space tourism. Instead, he will be one of the witnesses of a House Science Committee hearing this morning on “H-Prize Act of 2006″ (HR 5143), legislation recently introduced by Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) to establish a series of prizes to encourage development of “transformational technologies that can lead to commercialization of hydrogen.” Diamandis’ X Prize Foundation is now moving beyond its origins as a space prize, with plans to run prizes in various other disciplines, including alternative energies.
An article in the Saipan Tribune reports that the FAA is considering a “proposed space tourism” project that would be based from the Pacific island’s airport. Is Saipan set to become the next commercial spaceport? Not exactly. According to this article as well as an earlier report by the same newspaper, a Japanese company called “Space Japan”, modeled after Space Adventures in the US, wants to conduct high-altitude MiG flights from the island, like the flights Space Adventures offers in Russia. That would explain why the article mentions that the FAA’s flight standards office, and not the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, is reviewing the proposal. (Saipan is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth.)
A brief piece by Lunar Enterprise Daily asks this question: “What Does Leading Suborbital Spaceflight Company Want to Be Called Now?” Before wondering if Virgin Galactic is planning a name change, the article is actually referring to Rocketplane Ltd.—or is it Rocketplane Kistler? Since the announcement earlier this year that Rocketplane and Kistler Aerospace would “join forces”, there has been a little confusion among observers about what to call the company. The rocketplane.com web site calls itself simply “Rocketplane”, although the kistleraerospace.com web site now calls itself “Rocketplane Kistler”. Confusing, no?
At Space Access ’06 last week, Chuck Lauer started his presentation by saying that the company’s name “is now Rocketplane Kistler”. “We did have a major change in our corporate structure and focus. This happened over the last few months.” It remains to be seen if the mixed messages in the web sites and other corporate communications is simply the natural lag in re-branding that comes after a merger, or if Rocketplane and Kistler will be retained as separate brands or operating units over the longer term.
The Sunday Times of London offered a brief overview of Bigelow Aerospace and its plans for developing inflatable habitats that could be used for orbital space hotels. There are few, if any, new details about Bigelow’s effort in the article, although it will be gratifying to many that the Times played the story straight, without any snickering or snarky remarks.
A somewhat less viable scheme was profiled last week in the Long Island (NY) Press. Like their colleagues in the UK, the Press plays it straight in a discussion of Space Island Group, a long-running effort by Gene Myers to build orbital habitats using space shuttle external tanks. This is a case, though, where a little skepticism and hard reporting would have benefited the reader: the Press described Myers as “among the handful of pioneers with major financial backing who say that it won’t be long before vacationers are packing their bags for space.” However, there’s no evidence that Myers has “major financial backing”, or that his work is that much farther along than when I read his self-published book on the topic as a Caltech student over 15 years ago. At least the Press is in good company: Business 2.0 also played it straight with Space Island Group earlier this year, claiming that the company will start launching modules “as early as 2008″ – apparently without digging to see if there’s any there there.
A press release a few days ago by ZG Aerospace (not to be confused with Zero Gravity Corporation, operators of commercial weightless airplane flights) proclaimed “Three Months to First-Ever Consumer Space Tourism Launch”. Huh? Read on:
ZG Aerospace (formerly ZeroG Aerospace) today announced that payload space is still available for consumers to send small personal items to space this July, when the first-ever commercial rocket is launched at the new Southwest Regional Spaceport in New Mexico. Through the ZG Aerospace website at www.zgspace.com, consumers can finally participate in space exploration on the ZGS-1 unprecedented payload for as little as $49.95.
This is a reference to the upcoming commercial sounding rocket launch by UP Aerospace, which will have enough payload space for carrying small items, like business cards and photos. While that may well be a viable market niche, it’s hard to call something like that “space tourism”.
It’s still a couple of years or so before SpaceShipTwo will be ready to fly, but Virgin Galactic’s pilots are busy, Flight International reports. Two of them are already flying SS2 in a simulator, while a third is working on the manual for the vehicle. Prospective pilots should note that Virgin may be hiring some day down the road: the company anticipates having 30 pilots flying up to 10 SS2 vehicles, with two pilots in the spacecraft and two in the White Knight 2 carrier aircraft (which implies that they won’t be flying all ten simultaneously.) One interesting item not widely reported previously: in addition to the five SS2 vehicles that Virgin Galactic ordered from The Spaceship Company (the Virgin-Scaled Composites joint venture), it has options for seven more.
In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Bob Clarebrough called the 2004 flights of SpaceShipOne a “Kitty Hark moment”: “that instant when the impossible becomes a reality.” Clarebrough mentions this because suborbital passenger spaceflight has not yet won broad acceptance, pointing to some cynical commentary in both the American and British press in the post-SS1 era. That, he argues, is akin to the lack of acceptance of aviation after the Wright Brothers’ flight, all the way until Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. Clarebrough advises people to ignore the naysayers and focus on the future: “Every plane, rocket, and spaceship lifts off with a cargo of dreams. We may not know precisely how long it will take for those dreams to be fully realized, but let’s cut the pioneers some slack.”
I wrote a lengthy summary article about the just-completed Space Access ’06 conference in Phoenix for The Space Review. It covers many of the topics discussed in my writeups here in more detail. The theme that emerged from the conference was one of incremental progress for the entrepreneurial space transportation field: no one seems to be making revolutionary advances or achieving major milestones in recent months, but instead just gradual advances. That’s not a bad thing: steady improvement is arguably better than the wild gyrations that the industry has experienced in the recent past.
As before, here’s a brief summary of some highlights of the Space Access ’06 sessions on Saturday relevant to space tourism:
You might remember the February 2005 announcement of the Personal Spaceflight Federation, a new industry group created to support the emerging space tourism industry. However, after that initial announcement, there was no other visible activity regarding the organization. Mike Kelly said at the conference Saturday that the federation is in the process of being relaunched. It will take on several issues, such as the development of voluntary industry standards (as noted in the February 2005 announcement) as well as other regulatory issues (FAA rulemaking, ITAR, etc.) and the public’s perception of the industry. He said that there are about a dozen companies involved with the federation, which will include vehicle developers and operators, spaceport operators, and orbital destination developers, but Kelly wouldn’t disclose which companies are involved; a formal announcement is planned for some point in the near future.
John Gedmark of the X Prize Foundation talked about the upcoming X Prize Cup 2006 in October in Las Cruces, NM. The event will feature NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge for developers of vehicles that can vertically take off, hover, translate, and land. (See yesterday’s post about Armadillo’s plans for the competition.) The exact rules and even prize amounts are in flux, and Gedmark would only say that a final announcement would be made about the competition “soon”. The XP Cup will also be the home of the Reusable Rocket challenge, for launching, recovering, and reusing sounding rockets or VTVL vehicles. Rules for that competition are still under development.
Speaking of prizes, Brant Sponberg of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program talked about several other prizes either in progress or under development. One of particular interest for the personal spaceflight community is a low-cost space pressure suit. The notional prize amount for this is $1 million, and the rules are still under development. NASA is also still studying a potential human orbital spaceflight competition, with prizes (first and second) totaling $100-150 million. In addition, Sponberg noted that NASA is looking into the possibility of purchasing suborbital spaceflight services from the commercial sector in order to fly microgravity payloads. One issue is that the microgravity environment of the coming generation of suborbital vehicles has not been quantified; Sponberg said NASA would first fly accelerometers on these vehicles (under Space Act agreements with the companies) to measure the quality of the microgravity, and then see what scientific interest there might be in flying payloads on those vehicles.
A couple of small companies discussed their COTS proposals that look to the space tourism market in addition to flying cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Len Cormier discussed his “Space Van 2010″ proposal, a two stage to orbit vehicle, with staging taking place at an altitude of 81.5 km and a speed of Mach 5.5. (An illustration of Space Van 2010, but no other technical details, is on his web site.) Space Van 2010 would be able to carry four or five passengers. George Herbert of Venturer Aerospace discussed his S-550 capsule proposal, which would launch atop a Falcon 9 to carry up to six people or several tons of cargo to the ISS. The main capsule would be reusable several times; only an external aeroshell would need to be replaced after each flight. Herbert estimated that a S-550 flight would be priced at $15-20 million plus the cost of the launch vehicle.
One of the livelier panels of the conference was a Saturday morning session on investing, featuring Joe Pistritto, Stephen Fleming, and Esther Dyson, all three of whom have made investments in companies in this field. One of the big issues about the so-called NewSpace industry is the difficulty lining up financing, particularly among institutional investors. Dyson in particular gave attendees a dose of tough love by noting how difficult it is for investors to figure out this emerging industry. “There’s an awful lot lacking here in terms of the space industry becoming a real industry,” she said, adding that if she was an investor with “real money” (i.e., a VC), and not an angel investor, “I would run fleeing from the room, because I can’t figure out how this industry works, who sells to whom, how the market works. It’s still not very visible.” However, she said later in response to a question about the difficulty of making investors aware of the industry, “I don’t think there’s a problem. I think we’re early. A two-year-old behaving like a two-year-old is not a problem. A five-year-old behaving like a two-year-old is a problem. We’re still very early in the cycle.”
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SpaceShipOne as a “Kitty Hawk moment”
In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Bob Clarebrough called the 2004 flights of SpaceShipOne a “Kitty Hark moment”: “that instant when the impossible becomes a reality.” Clarebrough mentions this because suborbital passenger spaceflight has not yet won broad acceptance, pointing to some cynical commentary in both the American and British press in the post-SS1 era. That, he argues, is akin to the lack of acceptance of aviation after the Wright Brothers’ flight, all the way until Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. Clarebrough advises people to ignore the naysayers and focus on the future: “Every plane, rocket, and spaceship lifts off with a cargo of dreams. We may not know precisely how long it will take for those dreams to be fully realized, but let’s cut the pioneers some slack.”