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Last month Space Florida and the Andrews Institute announced the creation of a new training program for potential space tourists. Project Odyssey, based at Andrews’ facilities near Pensacola as well as nearby military facilities, would provide medical screening and training for prospective spaceflight participants.
 Now, the Orlando Sentinel reports Saturday, the creation of the state-supported project may not have been on the up-and-up. According to the article, Brice Harris (pictured at right), an employee with Florida’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development (OTTED), a state agency that provided half of the $500,000 in state money to establish the project, was heavily involved in the development of the project. However, around the time OTTED signed off on the grant, Harris left the agency, only to reappear as the “Director of Defense and Aerospace Programs” at the Andrews Institute when the project was announced in December: an apparent violation of state ethics laws. The Sentinel reported that Florida Governor Charlie Crist has asked the state inspector general to investigate the matter.
A secondary issue mentioned in passing in the article: Project Odyssey is not the first time someone proposed to Space Florida that they get into the business of training spaceflight participants. Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, with a campus in Daytona Beach, proposed a similar concept in 2006, as did others later, but Steve Kohler, the president of Space Florida, was won over by the Andrews Institute’s focus on “wealthy, ‘high-value’ clientele”—the same type of people who would be space tourists—during a visit there in late 2007. When Space Florida approved the Project Odyssey proposal in the middle of last year, “Embry-Riddle immediately protested that Kohler had, in effect, stolen its proposal,” the Sentinel reported.
If you got Issue 12 of Virgin Galactic’s email newsletter earlier this week, you might have seen this tidbit subtly included in the text: “Excitement was running high for the high speed taxi runs in December and a succession of rocket motor fires”. (The online version of the newsletter has a slightly different wording: “but nothing could compare to the anticipation of the Rocket Motor Fires which brought the project one step closer to Richard Branson’s and Burt Rutan’s dream of making space more accessible to everyone.”) Still, it appears to indicate that the SpaceShipTwo team finally started test-firing rocket motors.
Flight International confirms that milestone with Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn. The “Rocket Motor Two” (RM2) program, in Whitehorn’s words, is working “to mirror rapid progress on the [WK2] flying programme and SS2 final construction, but we are saying no more than that,” including no information on the duration of the tests, the propellants used, or even where the tests took place. “We don’t give out details like this for potential competitors beyond what is said on the newsletter website,” he explained. Other companies in the field, by comparison, tend to see the first hot-firings of rocket engines as a newsworthy milestone, but, of course, the Scaled team tends to be a bit more secretive than others.
The commercial space community was atwitter (figuratively and literally) over a Russian news report that Russia planned to end taking space tourists to the ISS after this March’s return trip by Charles Simonyi. The implication was that there wouldn’t again be any other means of visiting the ISS.
However, this report is hardly the breaking news some made it out to be. Almost a year ago Flight International reported that Russia wasn’t planning to offer additional flights after this spring as it geared up for supporting six-person crews on the station. Yesterday’s statement by Roskosmos director Anatoly Perminov is consistent with this.
What’s changed since then, though, was the announcement last June that Space Adventures had arranged with Roskosmos a dedicated Soyuz flight to the ISS in 2011 that would carry two passengers, one of whom is likely to be Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Does Perminov’s statement yesterday mean that this deal is off? There’s been no comment on this statement by Space Adventures, but even back in June there was conflicting statements from Roskosmos officials about the mission. When I talked with Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson after that statement, he said the confusion resulted in part because there had been no formal notification that Brin would be flying to the station (since no firm commitments had been made yet).
Another factor to take into account is that statements like Perminov’s have a political dimension as well, particularly within Russia. A statement like Perminov’s can show that Russia’s space program is strong enough not to have to rely on income from foreign space tourists, and/or press for more financial support from the Russian government. It certainly doesn’t mean that the airlock is sealed permanently for commercial visitors to the ISS.
The city of Las Cruces and the Rocket Racing League have salvaged a lease agreement for property the league is developing at the New Mexico city’s airport. The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the city council approved an alternative lease agreement Monday that requires the RRL to prepay its leases in the next 45 days and complete construction on the six hangars it plans to build there by the end of September. The previous lease agreement required that two of the hangars be completed by January 15, a deadline unlikely to be met because of a dispute with building inspectors on firewalls within the hangars, which are 80 percent complete. The article adds that the RRL waited until last week to make $12,000 in lease payments on the property that had been due on May 1. A “contrite-sounding” Granger Whitelaw, RRL’s CEO, apologized to council members by phone and promised better communications between his company and the city in the future. The article doesn’t give any updates on the RRL’s plans for exhibition or competitive racing in 2009, but does note the pledge made last October by the state to provide $3 million to develop infrastructure at the airport for the suborbital vehicles Rocket Racing will be developing in a joint venture with Armadillo Aerospace.
The final obstacle to the beginning of construction of Spaceport America in New Mexico has been overcome. On Wednesday the state announced that it signed a long-term lease agreement with Virgin Galactic, who will be the anchor tenant of the spaceport. The agreement had been in the works for some time, and earlier this month, when the spaceport got its FAA license, state officials said a lease agreement would be completed this month. The exact terms of the lease weren’t disclosed, other than it runs for 20 years and requires Virgin Galactic to establish its world headquarters in New Mexico.
Completing the lease agreement was one of three major milestones that needed to be achieved before state money could be released to allow construction of the spaceport facilities to begin. The FAA license was one of the other two, and the third, the creation of a local tax district, was achieved earlier this year.
After weeks, if not months, of anticipation, WhiteKnightTwo made its first flight Sunday morning. According to a SPACE.com report, the aircraft took off from Mojave Air and Space Port at 8:17 am PST (11:17 am PST, 1617 GMT) and landed back at the airport exactly one hour later. Flight International has video of a portion of the flight, when WK2 appears to make a low, slow flyby over the airport:
The flight had been expected for quite some time. When WK2 was rolled out in late July at Mojave, flight tests were said to begin by this fall. By late October, with the aircraft still on the ground, word came that the first flight would happen in two to three weeks. By early December, the flight was planned for later this month; Friday the 19th was one date passed around in recent days, and the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) went so far as to issue a press release titled “ISPCS Congratulates Historic WhiteKnightTwo First Flight” even though high winds kept it and other aircraft on the ground that day.
Now that this first flight is out of the way, we can look forward to many more appearances of WK2 in the skies above Mojave—while anticipating, of course, when we might first see SpaceShipTwo…
The Las Cruces Sun-News reported Monday that Spaceport America officials expected the FAA to issue Monday an environmental impact report associated with the spaceport, one of the final steps before the FAA would issue a spaceport license (officially a “launch site operator’s license”) for the planned commercial spaceport. Well, Spaceport America not only got the report, they also got their FAA license. The issuance of the license was one of three major milestones required as part of the funding package state legislators approved in 2006. One of the other two, the creation of a local tax district, has already been accomplished, while the other, the signing of a lease with anchor tenant Virgin Galactic, could be wrapped up as soon as this week, Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, said in the Sun-News article.
With all of those issues about to be resolved, construction of the spaceport facilities is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2009 and be completed “as soon as possible”, Landeene said in the statement announcing the spaceport license; the release later pegs late 2010 as the completion date for the completion of the terminal and hangar facilities at the spaceport.
A medical institute best known for rehabilitating athletes now wants to get into the space tourism field. The Andrews Institute, in Gulf Breeze, Florida, near Pensacola, has established “Project Odyssey” in partnership with Space Florida. The effort will provide a “first-of-its-kind” program for training prospective customers, which would include medical screening as well as centrifuge training at nearby military facilities. The effort is being started with a $500,000 grant. Prices for customers have not been set but will be “appropriate” for people paying anywhere from $95,000 to $200,000 for a suborbital flight.
Left unanswered in the report, though, is exactly who would use the service. Virgin Galactic already has had its medical screen and training program in place for some time. XCOR and its new partner, RocketShip Tours, haven’t announced specifics about their training plans, but since their efforts appear to be based in Phoenix, incorporating a Florida screening and training element may not mesh well. Rocketplane Global appears to plan to do their training in Oklahoma, while the Armadillo Aerospace/Rocket Racing joint venture hasn’t announced its training plans. The Andrews Institute may have a good facility, but they may have problems, at least in the near term, attracting customers.
- Rob Coppinger of Flightglobal.com covered a speech this morning by Will Whitehorn of Virgin Galactic at a UK space conference. Whitehorn said that the first flight of WhiteKnightTwo will be “soon” (but we’ve heard that before) and that SpaceShipTwo is “almost finished”. Virgin Galactic is now putting its second group of 100 customers through centrifuge training and had taken in $40 million in deposits, Whitehorn added that Virgin Galactic planned on brining in external investors in late 2009 and has already been approached by potential investors.
- The British media reported that Formula 1 champion driver Lewis Hamilton has purchased tickets on Virgin Galactic for himself, his girlfriend (Nicole Scherzinger, a member of the group Pussycat Dolls) and three other family members. That report, though, has been denied by a spokesman for Hamilton’s racing group. Nonetheless, it seems to have brought out the worst in some Spanish racing fans.
- The Conrad Foundation will be hosting a webcast at 5 pm EST (2200 GMT) Thursday with Pat Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, to discuss “current efforts in the personal spaceflight industry” with a focus on Spaceport America.
- Discovered in the software section of the local computer store: Symantec is holding a contest with a suborbital spaceflight as the grand prize. Also up for grabs are zero-gravity flights by ZERO-G, all intended to emphasize that the Norton 2009 suite of software is the “fastest and lightest” in the industry. The suborbital flight is being provided by Space Adventures, which is currently not emphasizing suborbital flights; the contest rules state only that the flight “will depart at a date and time and from a location to be determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion”.
The XCOR press conference Tuesday largely confirmed the details that had previously leaked out in the days leading up to the announcement (the XCOR press release includes links to the full press conference video as well as the promotional video shown during the press conference), but there were a few interesting details to come out of the event:
- Although Tuesday kicked off formal sales of Lynx tickets, XCOR COO Andrew Nelson said they had pre-sold 22 tickets in advance of the announcements, thanks primarily to word of mouth.
- As described by Jules Klar, founder of RocketShip Tours, the training for the Lynx flights will be separate from the flights themselves. Customers will undergo a five-day training program, staying at a luxury resort in the Phoenix area, and topped off by an aerobatic aircraft ride to test for g-force endurance and claustrophobia. There would be additional medical screening and orientation immediately before the flight.
- Although XCOR is loathe to talk much about future plans (Greason admitted this but said that this was “too big to announce all at once”), current plans call for beginning test flights in 2010. That test program will last “as long as it needs to last”, although Nelson said he hopes to fly their first customer, Per Wimmer, in 2011.
- Although Wimmer didn’t mention it in the press conference, he’s also a customer of Virgin Galactic. I was told after the event that Wimmer still plans to fly on Virgin Galactic despite being Lynx customer #1; it’s not clear which company will fly him first.
- Greason said there have only been “tweaks and tuning” to the Lynx design since the vehicle was announced in March, and that construction of elements of the vehicle is already underway. In particular, the Lynx engine prototype will be on the test stand soon.
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