A pair of articles in Sunday’s edition of the Wichita Eagle discuss the connections between Rocketplane and Wichita and the Oklahoma Spaceport. The Learjet that Rocketplane is converting into its XP spaceplane was built in Wichita, and some of Rocketplane’s employees previously worked for aerospace companies in the Kansas city. Even David Urie, Rocketplane’s executive vice president, is a graduate of Wichita State University. The Rocketplane-Wichita article in particular offers a good overview of the company and has a few tidbits, such as the news that the RS-88 engine that Rocketplane is borrowing from NASA will arrive this summer. Urie said he believes that they are still on track to be the first of several ventures to enter commercial service, although “someone could surprise us.”
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The Neon Trees is a small UK band that plays a type of music that they call “country power-pop” (which actually sounds more like folk than anything else). The uber-blog Boing Boing notes that one song available on their site, “The Life and Times of Jeff”, was inspired by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder who started Blue Origin to develop commercial spacecraft. There’s no overt evidence that’s the case on the band’s site, but there are certainly some suggestive lyrics:
Of course, since Blue Origin is reportedly planning to first develop a suborbital vehicle, those initial flights might be really short, not really long. I’m just disappointed they’re not singing about me. New Scientist magazine has a brief note about plans by Bigelow Aerospace to launch its first test of its inflatable habitats, modules that could eventually be used for orbital hotels. A curious comment in the article: “The launch dates cannot be divulged because the use of an ICBM means the information falls under US arms trade restrictions.” That’s odd, because the launch dates of Dnepr rockets (the former SS-18 ICBM converted into a low-cost launcher) are often reported well in advance. In fact, you can see an official Roskosmos launch schedule that includes a “Genesis-1″ launch on June 13 from a new launch site, Dombarovsky. Uh-oh: did I just violate “US arms trade restrictions”? Yesterday Eric Anderson, CEO of space tourism operator Space Adventures, spoke at the Global Travel & Tourism Summit in Washington. I wasn’t in attendance, but the conference organizers did post an excerpt of his talk, where he impresses upon attendees the future of space tourism:
It’s interesting that Anderson calls suborbital space tourism “space tourism-light”. It’s not necessarily inaccurate, of course: it is a lesser experience in many respects from orbital spaceflight. However, for most people, suborbital spaceflight is going to be the only even remotely accessible form of space tourism for the foreseeable future. You may not have heard of Travelzoo, a web site that bills itself as “a global Internet media company” that specializes in publicizing travel deals, but 10 million people apparently have. The company celebrated the ten millionth subscriber to its email newsletters by awarding that person, Matthew Wagner, a suborbital spaceflight through Space Adventures. Wagner also got a Zero G aircraft flight. Itar-Tass reported Monday that a new poll found that one in three Russians would like to fly in space. That ratio rises to nearly one in two for those aged 18-30. The brief article doesn’t include many details about the poll, including what price(s), if any, respondents were told they’d have to pay to make the trip. The results are based on “500 Russians aged above 18 years in Russia’s eight largest cities”, which is a fairly small sample size, given it’s unlikely any of them could afford a trip. Nonetheless, it’s a sign there is, at the very least, broad interest in space tourism. No, this is not some kind of World Cup reference, but rather the apparent competition between two sites in Europe for a future Virgin Galactic spaceport. The British newspaper The Business noted in Sunday’s edition that Virgin Galactic has set its sights on Kiruna, in northern Sweden. Flights there would begin as early as 2011 and could feature flights through the aurora borealis. Because Kiruna is home to a sounding rocket range today, it has a number of benefits, including free airspace. There’s also, the article adds, the “Icehotel” near Kiruna, which, as the name suggests, is made entirely of ice and rebuilt each winter. However, The Times of London, which briefly noted Virgin’s interest in Kiruna last month, said Sunday that Virgin is also looking at Scotland as a potential spaceport site. Like Kiruna, northern Scotland has relatively open airspace needed for suborbital flights to regularly take place. “It’s very likely that we will operate from northern Scotland in the future,” Will Whitehorn, a native of Edinburgh, told the Times. The best part of the Times article, though, might be when Whitehorn is asked what it’s like to work with Richard Branson:
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Tom Hill reviews a new novel, Orbit, that may be one of the first thrillers associated with space tourism. In the John J. Nance novel, tourist Kip Dawson is trapped in orbit when his spacecraft is apparently struck by a micrometeorite, killing the pilot. Will Dawson get rescued? And what happened exactly to the spacecraft? You’ll have to read the novel to find out (and don’t ask me; I haven’t read it yet.) One sign that space tourism is becoming a little more mainstream: Hill notes that the book is categorized simply as “fiction” instead of “science fiction”. As noted here last week, NASA astronaut and Australian native Andy Thomas has become a major advocate of a spaceport in Woomera, one that could serve the space tourism market. The article mentioned a meeting he had with science minister Julie Bishop about the topic. However, Bishop, in an interview Sunday with Barry Cassidy of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., has a different recollection of that meeting, and the importance of space tourism to any Woomera spaceport plans:
Of course, in the original Advertiser article, Thomas was talking about space tourism. It makes little sense to build up Woomera simply for satellite launches: the market is limited for the foreseeable future and Woomera would have to compete with many other spaceports worldwide. The addition of space tourism—particularly if any operator there could draw upon the East Asian market—could generate enough activity to warrant government investment in spaceport infrastructure. In a post yesterday, I noted that Virgin Galactic is planning to attend a number of upcoming conferences. In addition to those events, there are a couple of other conferences coming up that will discuss, in part, space tourism:
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