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There were a lot of good presentations Friday at the Space Access ’06 conference in Phoenix, although not necessarily a lot of breaking news. Given limited time (plus the fact that the wireless network in the conference room was down most of the day) I’ll for the moment provide some brief highlights:
Rick Homans, secretary of the Economic Development Department of the state of New Mexico, said he had no involvement in the space industry prior to taking office in January 2003; shortly after taking office he was briefed on the state’s Office of Space Commercialization and spaceport plans. He said the state decided to put in a “very aggressive bid” when they received the RFP for the X Prize Cup, recognizing it as their best and perhaps only shot to develop the spaceport. That eventually led to winning $114 million in state funding earlier this year for the spaceport, although most of that funding, he said, is conditioned on receiving an FAA spaceport license, signing a lease with an anchor tenant (Virgin Galactic), and a bona fide cost estimate for the spaceport that demonstrates it will cost no more than $225 million to build. He said the state expects the FAA license by the end of 2006 or the first quarter of 2007.
[Disclosure: my employer performed an economic impact study about the proposed spaceport for the Economic Development Department.]
John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace provided an update on his efforts, emphasizing, as usual, the various technical accomplishments and plans of his team. Armadillo is now focusing on building a pair of VTVL vehicles to compete for the two levels of Lunar Lander Challenge planned for October at the X Prize Cup. The larger vehicle, designed for level 2 (180 seconds of flight time) would also be able to carry cargo or passengers to 100 kilometers; he said there is “a real possibility” of flying that vehicle to 100 km by the end of the year, although through October Armadillo will be focused on the challenge. The launch site for those flights remains to be determined: New Mexico is a backup site, although farther away than Carmack likes. They hope instead to be able to fly from private land in Texas. All this is being done on a tiny budget: Carmack said his burn rate is less than half a million dollars a year.
Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Kistler discussed the efforts of both Rocketplane and Kistler Aerospace, which Rocketplane’s president, George French, acquired earlier this year. Rocketplane’s development appears to be on schedule: one wing, a structural test article, is nearly complete and will soon be tested to destruction. Engine tests using the RS-88 engine being loaned from NASA will begin this summer. Rocketplane Kistler submitted a COTS proposal to NASA to accelerate development of the long-stalled K-1 TSTO RLV: if they win it, Lauer said the K-1 could be ready to fly in 2008. Even without COTS, Lauer said, they still plan to raise private funding to develop the K-1, with a focus on several markets, including orbital space tourism: the K-1 could carry 5-6 people, he said.
Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace said his company’s fortunes are looking good. The company booked $1.1 million in revenue in 2005 and will earn $3.5 million in 2006 under its current contracts alone. XCOR now has 25 employees and is looking to hire several more, including engineers and project managers, by the end of the year. (One of those new employees is reportedly Henry Vanderbilt, who announced earlier this year he was going to work for an unnamed company in this industry.) While XCOR is focusing most of its efforts on several projects, like the X-Racer and LOX tank development, he said that a couple of people in the company are still focused on developing a suborbital vehicle. XCOR still does not have full funding for the vehicle, but has raised more than half.
Reda Anderson, the first customer for Rocketplane Kistler’s XP spaceplane, talked about what was important to her as a customer. (She doesn’t like the term “space tourist”, preferring something like “explorer”.) Safety, communications, integrity, and catering to the passenger’s friends and family are all key things she looks for in a company providing tourism services, she said. She also showed off the “contract” she made with Lauer in October 2004: a dollar bill wrapped around a business card:
 Perhaps the coolest item of the day was a presentation by Timothy Bendel of Frontier Astronautics. His small company, which is developing an attitude control system for Masten Space Systems as well as a rocket engine, needed to find a new place for its engine development work since local authorities in Colorado blocked such work. They found an ideal location in the small town of Chugwater, Wyoming, north of Cheyenne: a facility complete with machine shop, three phase power, huge concrete facilities, and lots of land, with paved access to I-25. What is it? An abandoned Atlas-E ICBM site. Bendel said he plans to lease the site to other companies seeking such facilities, and is also looking into using the site as a spaceport.
At Space Access ’06 Thursday afternoon, Sam Dinkin offered an update on the progress of SpaceShot, which launched its skill-game contest for Rocketplane seats earlier this month. A few highlights:
- He said that he has a patent pending on SpaceShot’s “asycnhronous” single-elimination tournament concept, which allows people to enter at any time, waiting until a competitor is ready to participate. Otherwise, SpaceShot would have to wait until it got all 260,000+ contestants signed up before the tournament could begin.
- Having a single-elimination tourney is better for the “average player”, he said; multiple-elimination alternatives would weigh in favor of better players.
- Quote: “It’s not rocket science, but it is game theory.”
- One of the requirements of the company’s legal counsel was to put forecasts for Central Park on the web site so that information would be available for gamers without undue research.
- The cash alternative prize is not $300,000, he said, because if you offered that, “most people would take the cash.”
- Why use the National Weather Service data for the contest? “The National Weather Service has a lot more credibility at stake than I do.”
- After his presentation I asked him how far the best contestants had advanced. He said some had reached Level 7, and someone may reach Level 8 as early as today. (There are 17 levels, for the record.)
After taking questions, Dinkin then brought Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane up to the podium. He explained that half of the deposit for the first Rocketplane ticket was due when SpaceShot and Rocketplane signed their agreement, and the other half two weeks after the game started. Dinkin then presented Lauer with a check for the second half of the deposit:
If you’re curious, the check’s amount reads only “Balance of First Flight Deposit.”
SpaceShot issued a press release this morning (not yet available on their web site) that they have entered into a promotional agreement with a new space entertainment venture, SpaceChannel.tv. Each of the first half-million people who sign up for an account with SpaceChannel.tv will receive two free entries in SpaceShot’s competition, a promotion valued at up to $3.5 million. To qualify, though, people have to sign up for SpaceChannel.tv’s “Space Champions Package”, at $50: this gives people 500 “SpaceDimes” which can apparently be redeemed for watching video content on the site. However, as of this writing, the video library there is pretty sparse, and everything there appeared to be free. SpaceChannel does promise to offer additional, original content in the future, including “the world’s first Zero Gravity Sports League” that will be seen there as a reality TV series.
SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. (SEI) has posted an online survey regarding demand for orbital space tourism. Normally I am skeptical of any such online surveys, because the audience is self-selected: rather than a random sampling that takes into account various demographic factors of the audience (as is the case with traditional polling) online surveys can be skewed by the audience that is attracted—or compelled—to take them.
This survey, though, is a little different. Rather than ask people about their own willingness to fly in space, respondents are instead asked to try and gauge the size of the market for several types of orbital tourism activities: orbital flights with and without hotels, as well as circumlunar flights. The size of the potential market at several price points is requested, as well as the confidence the respondent has in his estimates.
I am curious to see how SEI plans to use these data. If it’s an effort to measure the size of the orbital tourism market, I’m skeptical about how useful it might be: few details are given (or available) about the various attributes of such flights, and price points may vary wildly from what’s requested in the survey. In any event, I suspect most people can only offer a gut feel for the size of the market at this time. However, if the survey is designed to gauge the perceived size of the market, then this might be more useful. How big, in numbers of passengers per year, do people believe orbital tourism will be?
I will be leaving shortly to go to Phoenix for Space Access ’06, the annual conference that focuses on the entrepreneurial space transportation industry, with many intersections with space tourism. I will try to post some updates during the conference through Saturday, depending on conference events and network access.
In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman contrasted the commercial spaceport situations in New Mexico and California: while New Mexico was investing over $100 million into a new spaceport, attracting Virgin Galactic and the X Prize Cup, California has done little to promote Mojave Airport, an FAA-licensed spaceport that was the site of the SpaceShipOne flights in 2004. As Alan Boyle reports in MSNBC’s Cosmic Log weblog, things aren’t getting better for Mojave: an effort to secure an $11-million loan for a passenger terminal there failed to win enough votes in a California State Senate transportation committee hearing to advance to the full Senate. The facilities are needed, according to Mojave Airport officials, so that they can expand the number of flights from the spaceport to as many as 600 flights a year by the end of this decade.
The measure, SB 1671, apparently suffered from a report filed by Jennifer Gress, a consultant to the Senate’s Transportation and Housing committee. One concern expressed in the report is whether the East Kern Airport District, which operates Mojave Airport, “has fully explored alternatives to a state General Fund-backed loan.” The report also expressed concern that the funds would be used to support Virgin Galactic, “a company whose owner has a net worth in the billions.” (“Millions for a billionaire”, as the report pithily summarizes.) Stu Witt, Mojave Airport manager, told MSNBC that the bill isn’t dead yet: another committee vote is scheduled for next week.
Update 12:30 pm Wednesday: It turns out the reports of the bill’s near demise were exaggerated: Alan Boyle, in an updated version of his blog entry, reports that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Roy Ashburn, rounded up four additional votes for the bill a few hours after the hearing, giving it one more than the seven needed to be reported out of committee. So there’s still some hope yet for funding for Mojave.
An article in this week’s issue of Flight International magazine has a provocative headline: “US claims right to set new space tourism regulations globally after treaty examination”. As the opening paragraph summarizes:
US persons or organisations operating suborbital test flights outside the USA will still have to obtain a Federal Aviation Administration permit, according to newly proposed rules. This is because, under existing international treaties, governments are responsible for launches made by their citizens or legal entities beyond their own borders.
Another case of imperialist American hegemony? Hardly. While the Flight International article treats this as something of a revelation, this appears to be simply a continuation of existing policy that requires US operators to obtain launch licenses from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) even if those launches take place outside the US. For example, the HyShot 1 and 2 suborbital launches of an Australian hypersonics experiment required AST licenses even though they took place from Woomera, Australia, because they used a commercially-supplied US rocket, the Terrier-Orion. In addition, the multinational Sea Launch venture, led by a US company, Boeing, performs launches under an AST license even through they use a Ukrainian rocket with a Russian upper stage, launching from a Norwegian-built floating launch platform in international waters. So it’s only natural, under the existing regulatory regime, to extend that policy to cover suborbital space tourism flights.
The article does have a few small items of interest relevant to space tourism: it notes that Space Adventures has yet to approach AST for a launch license for its planned Russian-built suborbital spacecraft. Also, New Mexico’s spaceport license application to AST “has environmental work to complete” and Mojave’s spaceport license will likely need to be renewed prior to SpaceShipTwo operations there.
[Disclosure: my employer does work for AST, but is not involved in the licensing or rulemaking process.]
Also in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman examines the number of commercial spaceports that have been proposed or are under development. Much of his essay is a contract between New Mexico, which is committing over $100 million to build a spaceport, and California, which has largely ignored space tourism and related markets, despite the pioneering role played by Mojave Airport. Why are the two states going in opposite directions?
…possibly because the New Mexico state government is not as politically polarized as California’s. Also, New Mexico is a poorer state and is ready to make a real effort to capitalize on every single one of its assets. California has an abundance of resources and if it ends up losing the space tourism industry to New Mexico it will be just one of many that it has lost in the last twenty years.
In an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Richard Speck of Micro-Space Inc. proposed a radical approach to human orbital spaceflight: to keep launch costs low, make the spacecraft as simple and as lightweight as possible. He proposes a spacecraft that is little more than a spacesuited astronaut strapped into a heat shield and thruster system, enough to get into orbit, maneuver to a space station, and then reenter and parachute to a landing. Speck goes through the technical details with such an approach, which could allow people to fly for just a few million dollars even at today’s relatively high launch costs.
An essay in The Business newspaper in the UK by Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, examines the state of the nascent space tourism industry. Pirie is surprised, albeit pleasantly, by what he sees: “What is interesting is the innovative approach which private enterprise has taken. Instead of having a committee approve a chosen operational approach, the private entrepreneurs are competing with a variety of different ways of doing it.” Now, why should that be surprising?
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A tale of two spaceports
Also in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman examines the number of commercial spaceports that have been proposed or are under development. Much of his essay is a contract between New Mexico, which is committing over $100 million to build a spaceport, and California, which has largely ignored space tourism and related markets, despite the pioneering role played by Mojave Airport. Why are the two states going in opposite directions?