Rocketplane Ltd. have a shot out to Space Shot in a press release yesterday, congratulating the gaming company on its debut. Of course, SpaceShot contestants are competing to win tickets for Rocketplane flights, so you’d expect a congratulatory note. MSNBC’s Alan Boyle follows up with SpaceShot’s Sam Dinkin in a blog post, and finds that Dinkin is looking for more customers. “Dinkin declined to say what the growth rate has been, but it sounded as if he’d like to see a lot more players. ‘I want the word to get out,’ he said.”
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Virgin Galactic sent an update to subscribers of its email list on Wednesday. The update isn’t posted on its web site, so here’s a summary:
Australian-born NASA astronaut Andy Thomas has a vision for Woomera, the long-forgotten Australian launch site: a “10-year plan to use the Outback site to send international tourists into space and launch satellites”, according to The Advertiser, an Adelaide newspaper. Thomas has suggested that the Australian government spend A$150 million (US$110 million) over ten years to upgrade the site’s infrastructure so it can support orbital and suborbital launches. Thomas appears to be insprired by New Mexico’s plans to build a spaceport: “It just takes an investment, a will to do it and a commitment like New Mexico has done,” he told the paper. And to say he is fond of space tourism is a bit of an understatement: “Space tourism will be running into the billions of dollars in the years to come,” he said. “It’s amazing how many people have got that cash lying around.” That leading publication of the space industry, Insurance Journal, follows up a report on the web site of Lloyd’s of London that the insurer, famous for taking on risks conventional insurers shun, is considering providing coverage for Virgin Galactic. The insurance would cover the “hull value” of Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo vehicles; the cost would depend on “the safety and reliability of the venture established through its testing phase”, expected to feature up to 100 test flights. The reports add that “third party liability cover may also be required” in the event of a crash or other damage to people living near the launch site. In fact, such coverage will be required if Virgin is going to operate under an FAA/AST launch license. Fortunately, that should not that expensive since the maximum probable loss should be small: after all, there aren’t that many people living near the New Mexico Spaceport. As for insurance for the passengers? Don’t bother, at least for now: “initially passengers may have to travel at their own risk as insurers could be reluctant to provide personal accident cover until a safety record for the flights is established.” Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, many “Kremlinologists” were forced to divine changes in the Soviet government and policy by keeping track of who was on the podium to review parades in Red Square, and just what was being shown on parade. That’s an easy task compared to figuring out what Blue Origin, the highly-secretive space startup funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is up to. Alan Boyle of MSNBC was able to pry out of a Blue Origin spokesman (who knew the company even had a spokesman?) that the company is “right on track” to begin tests at its West Texas facility starting late this year. What sort of tests? Blue Origin wouldn’t say. Will the public be notified about the tests? Blue Origin said probably not. The company is in the process of moving into a new facility in the Seattle suburb of Kent that Boyle cased last week. Another, smaller, space tourism venture that has also been quiet in recent months has offered an update. Flight International reported in this week’s issue that a “corporate regroup” by Sprague Astronautics has delayed the first flight of its Altaris vehicle from late 2006 to the first quarter of 2007. According to the report, “Investors demanded that prospective space tourism company Aera be merged with its sister companies, which include Sprague Astronautics”, hence the delay. Sprague says that its RLE-40 LOX/kerosene engine, designed to produce 178,000 newtons of thrust, will be tested in the next 60 days at either NASA’s Stennis Space Center or an unspecified private facility in Texas. Given the lack of detailed information about Sprague’s progress on Altaris (and given the difficulties in developing reliable rocket engines, something that companies like SpaceX know a thing or two about), that 1Q2007 date still looks awfully optimistic. An investment column in Wired News focused yesterday on the emerging space tourism industry. The summary of the column is that opportunities for regular investors are pretty limited: few companies are publicly traded, and others rely on either a single wealthy individual (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack) or have investment requirements beyond the reach of typical angel investors. As I noted in a quote at the end of the article, the VC community hasn’t warmed up to space tourism yet: “Because the capital costs are pretty high, it makes it difficult to get the attention of venture capitalists who are still trying to figure it out. Is this a real market? Is this a real business?” (The one quote I provided the reporter that I wish had been used was something along the lines of, “The best way people can financially support these businesses is by being customers.”) As it turned out, yesterday the USC Center for Technology Commercialization held a forum in LA titled “Space Billionaires: Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs”. The focus of this event was on the entrepreneurial space industry in general, but one suspects much of the discussion centered around space tourism. The only article I have seen about the event is this SpaceDaily report by Brad Bartz, the “VP Sales – Space.TV Corporation”. Unfortunately, while Mr. Bartz may be a great salesman he’s not much of a writer: this is only a partially-coherent account of the event with an odd fixation on sex in space and impressing “the billionaire next to me.” Hopefully a better account of the event will emerge elsewhere. Virgin Galactic has been in discussions with Bigelow Aerospace about the possible development of space hotels using Bigelow’s inflatable module technology, according to an article in Hotel Magazine. Richard Branson said in Dubai last week that Virgin Galactic is considering using Bigelow’s modules and unspecified space transportation systems to develop an orbital hotel:
The unanswered questions here are when Virgin might pursue a space hotel, and how it would ferry passengers there and back. An orbital spacecraft (SpaceShipThree?) has been in the long-term plans for Burt Rutan, but it seems unlikely this would be ready until well after 2010, given the current focus on SpaceShipTwo and the technological challenges of developing an orbital version. Of course, it will take some time for Bigelow to develop full-scale inflatable modules, although the company is planning the first launch of subscale test modules later this year. The Seattle Times scores an interview with Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft developer who signed a contract yesterday to fly to the ISS as a space tourist. While some people might be content to float around in weightlessness and spend the day looking out the window, Simonyi wants to play a more active role on the station: “I’m technically capable, so I’m sure I can make myself useful,” he said. “I want to go all the way in terms of learning everything.” As the article notes:
I think this makes him a certified space geek. Not that that’s a bad thing. Simonyi added that his flight is a “small step” toward the further commercialization of space. “We all think that when you listen to ‘Star Trek’ and they say it’s the final frontier, how are you going to conquer space if you’re not taking steps to get more kinds of people into space?” The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported Monday that Roskosmos has signed a contract for the next orbital space tourist to visit the ISS: former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi. The Hungarian born Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 and oversaw development of some of the software giant’s most famous applications, Word and Excel. He left Microsoft in 2002 a very wealthy man, and has donated tens of millions of dollars to various organizations, so he certainly has the money to pay the estimated $20 million for an orbital spaceflight. Simonyi would fly on the spring 2007 Soyuz taxi flight, after this fall’s flight of the next orbital space tourist, Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto. (Reuters has a few more details about the agreement.) The announcement is a little surprising, since most speculation regarding who would be next to fly after Enomoto centered around Anousheh Ansari, who is in training in Russia right now as Enomoto’s backup. A RIA Novosti article from Saturday, announcing the formal signing of Enomoto’s contract, did quote a Roskosmos official, discussing plans to fly “another American” tourist in 2007, as saying “We have signed a preliminary contract with him for the spring of 2007 but he may decide to fly later.” The “him” appears to be Simonyi, and would of course have ruled out Ansari. Space Adventures, which has brokered the three orbital tourist flights to ISS to date, plus Enomoto’s upcoming mission, has yet to issue a formal release. That could mean that Simonyi made his deal through an alternative arrangement, or that they’re simply preparing to make an announcement. (UPDATE: Space Adventures issued a press release late Monday afternoon confirming the deal but setting no timetable for the flight.) Speaking of Rocketplane, I have an article about the company’s first microgravity research customer, a Japanese organization called HASTIC (Hokkaido Aerospace Science and Technology Incubation Center), in this week’s issue of The Space Review. This got a little attention back in February when HASTIC officials were honored by the Oklahoma legislature, but after talking with both Rocketplane and HASTIC officials at the FAA/AST Commercial Space Transportation Conference a short time after the Oklahoma event, I found a very interesting story. The president of HASTIC, Ryojiro Akiba, has been working on Japanese space efforts since effectively the very beginning, with sounding rocket flights in the mid-1950s. And the Rocketplane connection was made almost literally by accident: Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer was a last-minute addition to a symposium HASTIC was organizing last summer, at which he discovered their need for microgravity research flight opportunities. While the initial agreement between HASTIC and Rocketplane is devoted to microgravity research, Rocketplane wants to extend that to include space tourism flights from Hokkaido. That’s “a long-term proposition”, Lauer admitted, in part because Japan does not yet see space as something for the private sector, and among other things lacks a regulatory infrastructure like that in the US. Rocketplane, Japanese officials suggested, might be the 21t century equivalent of the “black ships” of Commodore Perry that opened Japanese ports to Western trade 150 years ago. |
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