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Richard Garriott is now the sixth commercial passenger to fly into orbit on a Soyuz taxi flight to the ISS. The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft lifted off on schedule at 3:01 am EDT (0701 GMT) and entered orbit nine minutes later. The flight is a realization of a long-term dream of Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who grew up in Houston immersed in spaceflight but unable to directly follow in his father’s footsteps and join the NASA astronaut corps because of his eyesight. Along the way, Richard Garriott has invested in a number of commercial space companies, including Space Adventures, the company that provided him with his flight to space today.
Garriott had this to say in a Space Adventures press release issued this morning after the launch:
“Today, my dream of following in my father’s footsteps to explore new frontiers is being realized,” said Richard Garriott. “Throughout my life, my sense of adventure has taken me to the ends of the Earth to embark on journeys few people have encountered. It’s with honor and appreciation that I launch on my greatest adventure yet, and step into a role assumed by only five private individuals before me.” Garriott continued, “I’ve dedicated this flight to not only scientific and environmental research, but also educational outreach. I’m thrilled to be able to excite students throughout the world and demonstrate how far our dreams can take us.”
There were a number of people who traveled to Baikonur to see Garriott’s launch, including, as Reuters reported, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who himself is planning to fly into space, perhaps on a dedicated commercial Soyuz flight to the station in 2011. Charles Simonyi, who preceded Garriott in the spring of 2007 and will follow him in a return trip to the station next year, was also in attendance.
It has been impossible in recent days to avoid the news about the current financial crisis gripping markets in the US and around the world, from bank failures to government bailouts to stock market plunges. Some have called this the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression or even “the end of American capitalism”. That may just be hyperbole—a near-term overreaction to the crisis—but it is clear that the economic situation is going to be rough for at least the next several months, if not longer.
So what does this mean for NewSpace? With credit tightening and portfolios taking a beating, it seems unlikely that personal spaceflight and other entrepreneurial space sectors will be able to completely escape the current financial turmoil. A quick examination suggests that companies are going to feel it in two ways, involving a somewhat overlapping group of people.
Investors: Earlier this week one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms, Sequoia, sounded the alarm about the current situation in a meeting with the CEOs of its portfolio companies. Sequoia’s message: if you’re not cash-flow positive, you need to get there as soon as possible if you want to have any hope of raising additional funding for the foreseeable future. Getting there may require some drastic cutbacks, but acting now, and quickly, is better than delaying and finding themselves in a “death spiral” where no cutbacks can save the company.
Given that NewSpace companies have, to date, had very limited luck in raising rounds of funding from VCs, this suggests that raising money will be all the more difficult in the near future, especially for those companies developing vehicles or other hardware that require years of work before reaching positive cash flow. Getting money from angel investors, more frequently used by NewSpace companies, may also be more difficult, as these investors, like so many others, have suffered big losses in their investment portfolios in the last several weeks. This could even affect so-called “mega-angels” who put very large sums into ventures, including their own. According to Forbes magazine, Jeff Bezos lost over $1 billion in September as stock market declines devalued his holdings. It’s too soon to say whether this will affect Bezos’s investment in his Blue Origin suborbital vehicle venture, but you could sure do a lot in space with $1.1 billion…
Customers: During Monday’s press conference by Space Adventures to discuss Charles Simonyi’s return trip to the ISS next year, the first question posed to him, from the New York Times, went like this: “Are you the last guy in America with money? Has anything happened in the past, say, two weeks to your assets that makes you think you might want to hold on to cash?” Simonyi responded that “the timing worked out the way it worked out” and that “either we do it now or we don’t do it”.
While Simonyi may still be forging ahead, it’s possible others considering purchasing tickets, a group that includes some angel investors, may have second thoughts now, especially if they’ve lost a significant fraction of their wealth in the stock market’s recent fall. In a healthy economy, spending $200,000 on a suborbital spaceflight might seem like money well spent to realize a dream of going into space; in today’s uncertain economy, the same trip might seem like an unnecessary extravagance. That mindset could be damaging for some space tourism ventures, especially if the downtown lasts for an extended period or if the recovery is slow.
This situation is certainly not catastrophic for NewSpace in general, particularly for those firms that are well-funded, have good balance sheets, and/or can diversify beyond personal spaceflight: think SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and perhaps a few others. However, for other companies, especially those who need to raise significant funds to develop vehicles that will be years away from entering revenue service, it’s going to be much more difficult to make those plans become reality in the near future.
 SpaceDev announced today that its founder, Jim Benson, passed away this morning. Benson had been in ill health since last year, having been diagnosed with a brain tumor that was the cause of his death. That illness led to the dissolution of Benson Space Company, a space tourism venture that Benson founded in 2006 to develop suborbital vehicles, by early this year.
Benson, though, is best known in the space industry as the founder of SpaceDev in 1997. Benson was originally interested in developing a private mission to a near Earth asteroid (called Near Earth Asteroid Prospector, or NEAP). Over time, though, the company moved from that focus to developing smallsats, launch vehicles, and hybrid propulsion systems. That latter work led to the deal with Scaled Composites to manufacture the rocket motors used by SpaceShipOne in its successful bid to win the $10-million Ansari X Prize.
Along the way, though, it’s safe to say that Benson rubbed a few people the wrong way. In public settings, he was a shameless self-promoter and often blunt spoken, traits unlikely to win you Mr. Congeniality in any field. His best-known dispute was with Burt Rutan after the X Prize was won, a dispute so heated that it warranted a front page story in the Wall Street Journal in early 2007. It’s ironic, then, that two months ago a post-Benson SpaceDev signed a deal with Scaled to work on the rocket motors for SpaceShipTwo.
While Benson may no longer be with us, the company he created, SpaceDev, continues to make progress on some of the same goals of commercializing space that Benson had when he created the company. Earlier this week SpaceDev announced it had achieved another milestone in its unfunded COTS Space Act agreement with NASA regarding its Dream Chaser vehicle that, launched atop an Atlas 5, could carry cargo or crew to the ISS.
In a cabinet reshuffle last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown selected Paul Drayson as its new science minister. Drayson, as I noted over on Space Politics, is a strong supporter of human spaceflight, and is clearly in favor of overturning a long-running ban on funding human spaceflight programs in the UK. In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, he discusses that as well as commercial space ventures. “We’re seeing the beginnings of the commercialization of space from the point of view of people like Virgin Galactic and others, exploiting the fact that people are so excited about space they’re prepared to pay to go,” he said.
Drayson, the BBC noted, fits the profile of a potential space tourist himself: he’s a race car driver and a successful businessman with an estimated net worth well over $100 million. Would he go himself?
BBC: Are you going to purchase a Branson ticket?
[laughter]
Drayson: Ah, I haven’t done [that], but I do think it’s a really exciting time.
BBC: You fit his customer profile.
Drayson: I do, do I.
Space Adventures announced today that Esther Dyson will train as the backup to Charles Simonyi for his spring 2009 flighyt. Dyson will pay $3 million for the training, similar to the training that Nik Halik paid for as Richard Garriott’s backup. Dyson, who made her name in the computer industry as the longtime editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter, is now investing in the NewSpace field, among other industries, including Space Adventures and XCOR Aerospace; she’s been attending events like Space Access and the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conferences the last few years.
As it turns out, Dyson herself almost scooped the Space Adventures announcement a couple of days ago. In an interview with VatorNews published Sunday, she said she was training as a backup for an unnamed “commercial space astronaut”. She talks about it in the first few minutes of the video interview below:
Space Adventures will be holding a press conference today with Charles Simonyi, who, as announced last week, will be making a return flight to the ISS next year. If all goes well I will be liveblogging the press conference; check back here around 11:30 am EDT (1530 GMT).
Click Here for liveblog
Saturday is, of course, the 51st anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the canonical beginning of the Space Age. It’s also the fourth anniversary of the winning of the $10-million Ansari X Prize by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the Paul Allen-funded effort by Scaled Composites that resulted in SpaceShipOne and White Knight. This has been a relatively low-key anniversary for both; for the former because last year was the milestone 50th anniversary, and for the latter… well, it’s tough to get excited by the fourth anniversary of most anything. Case in point: there’s no callout of the anniversary on the X Prize Foundation web site, and when I drilled down into the section on the Ansari X Prize to this video, I got the error message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”
One reason this anniversary has slipped by is there there has been little activity in the suborbital spaceflight arena of the same high profile in the four years since SpaceShipOne’s prize-winning flight. In fact, there have been no FAA-licensed piloted suborbital spaceflights in the last four years; there have been a number of low-level test flights since then, but these have been remotely piloted and under experimental permits. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been progress, just not at the scale, or the rate, that we might have anticipated on that glorious morning four years ago.
As I noted in an article at the beginning of this week in The Space Review, Sunday night’s successful launch of the Falcon 1 might be the biggest milestone for the NewSpace industry, or at least the portion of it focused on space transportation, since SpaceShipOne’s final flight. Just as SpaceShipOne’s flights demonstrated that a private venture could develop a piloted vehicle capable of flying into space (albeit suborbitally) for a fraction of the cost of what a large aerospace company or government agency would have spent, the Falcon 1 launch demonstrated what entrepreneurial space companies can do in the realm of orbital space flight. As with SpaceShipOne, though, the issue will be how well both SpaceX and the rest of the industry can follow up on that initial success, so that future anniversaries have greater relevance.
From SPACE.com: “Virgin Galactic Rejects Million-Dollar Offer to Film Sex Video”. Even if you don’t click through to the full article, the headline gives you the gist of the situation. I’m not surprised Virgin turned them down, but I suspect at some point another company will say yes—although whether five minutes of weightlessness would make much of a “sex video” isn’t obvious.
If you live in Maryland, or through some quirk of the airwaves or cable/satellite system manage to get access to Maryland Public Television, you have an opportunity to see me talk about space tourism Thursday night. Earlier this week I was interviewed for a segment of “Your Money and Business” on the topic for the show airing at 7:30 pm Thursday. It’s a brief (about 5 minutes) segment discussing some basic issues of orbital and suborbital space tourism (and arguably a bit dated since it took place before the Simonyi announcement Tuesday), including the seemingly inevitable discussion of the environmental impact of space tourism. I’m not sure when during the half-hour show the interview airs, so you may need to stick around through a discussion of personal chefs, jewelry, and retirement. If you’re worried about scheduling conflicts, the show does air a couple of other times; check the web site for dates and times, which are subject to change.
Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who flew to the ISS in spring 2007, will return again next spring, Space Adventures announced this morning. (The news leaked out overnight in this AP article, although the formal press release wasn’t issued until this morning.) The text of the announcement follows:
Space Adventures’ Orbital Spaceflight Candidate, Charles Simonyi, Plans Spring 2009 Return Flight to the ISS
Will mark his second space mission
Previously flown to the ISS in spring 2007
Vienna, Va. – September 30, 2008 — Space Adventures, the only company that provides human space missions to the world marketplace, announced today that Charles Simonyi, Ph.D., intends to train with the Soyuz TMA-14 crew in preparation for a spring mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Space Adventures became world renowned in 2001 with the launch of client Dennis Tito, the world’s first privately funded spaceflight participant. Since then, the company has launched four other individuals to space, including Dr. Simonyi, who completed his first space mission in the spring of 2007.
“Having a repeat orbital client demonstrates to the world that participating in a space mission is truly a magnificent and awe-inspiring experience. It is also an excellent example that the marketplace is even larger than previously anticipated because of the potential occurrence of clients who fly on multiple occasions,†said Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures. “We congratulate Charles on his continued commitment to commercial spaceflight. We look forward to assisting him in preparation for the spring 2009 mission.â€
Space Adventures’ sixth orbital spaceflight client, Richard Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, is currently scheduled to launch to the ISS on October 12, 2008.
Space Adventures will host a teleconference for the media with Dr. Simonyi on October 6, 2008 to discuss the details surrounding his intended space mission. Please contact Stacey Tearne at stearne@spaceadventures.com or at +1 703 894 2192 to register for the call and to receive dial-in instructions.
No other information is available at this time.
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