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The X Prize Foundation announced late Friday afternoon that the 2008 Lunar Lander Challenge (LLC) will be held at Holloman AFB in New Mexico on October 24-25. Unlike the past two years, the LLC appears to be taking place as a standalone event and not part of an X Prize Cup. The press release notes that “the public can follow the action” via webcast, with no mention of public attendance at the event itself, or any other activities associated with previous Cups.
This would appear to be in line with previous rumors about the event, which indicated that it would be held at Holloman immediately after the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, which will take place in Las Cruces on October 22-23. (Those earlier reports suggested that symposium attendees would be allowed to attend the LLC; there’s no mention of that in the X Prize release.) This has to be seen as something of a step back for the X Prize Foundation, which had touted the Cups as a way to connect the public to the emerging personal spaceflight industry. This approach, though, does allow them to meet the requirement to hold an annual LLC competition while minimizing expenditures.
Space Adventures sent out a media advisory yesterday announcing a press conference planned for Wednesday, June 11, in New York. The press conference will reveal the identity of a “notable future orbital client” as well as “significant announcements regarding new orbital spaceflight planning”, including a “vision for the next decade”. Richard Garriott, currently in training for a Soyuz flight this fall, will be at the press conference, along with Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis.
During the Q&A session of his ISDC speech Thursday, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn was asked about thoughts about XCOR Aerospace, who announced plans for its own suborbital vehicle, Lynx, in March:
XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they’re not building a spaceship. They’re building basically a high-altitude MiG equivalent. They’re building something that you can strap in and go up to 37 miles. You won’t get your astronaut wings but you will see the curvature of the earth. That will be an exciting project, but the problem is that it’s not a space project, and I think it’s been a little bit wrong to call it that.
Whitehorn added that Virgin’s customers are paying $200,000 for a complete experience that includes floating around the cabin and flying beyond the 100-kilometer boundary of space, something that the Mark 1 version of Lynx won’t be able to offer.
Whitehorn did say that XCOR is a “clever” company that is able to build Lynx, and “if the price of it was cheap enough, it’s the kind of thing we would buy.” He added, though, that XCOR’s $100,000 initial ticket price was not cheap enough. “I would say to XCOR to keep on doing what you’re doing, but you’ll have to get the price of that well, well down relative to the SpaceShipTwo launch price for it to work successfully.”
The Personal Spaceflight Federation issued a press release yesterday about a new study with some financial metrics about the personal spaceflight industry. The numbers are surprisingly large: the study found that the industry generated $268 million in revenue in 2007, up from $165 million in 2006, with $1.2 billion in total investment to date as well as 1,227 employees of various firms.
All the release says that the revenue numbers include three categories: “personal spaceflight services; personal spaceflight-related hardware sales, hardware development, and support services; and, non-personal spaceflight revenue of personal spaceflight organizations”. More details will (presumably) be released when the study is presented Saturday at the ISDC; I suspect that much of the revenue comes from that last category, particularly for PSF members like Scaled Composites and SpaceX, which have significant business activity not directly related to personal spaceflight.
White Knight 2 (WK2), the carrier aircraft under development by Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic, will be rolled out on July 28, Virgin’s Will Whitehorn announced Thursday morning at the International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. He didn’t announced the location of the rollout, but presumably it will be in Mojave, as he said test flights of the aircraft would not begin until August or September. (Interestingly, it is the day before Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson are scheduled to appear at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh “with SpaceShipTwo”.) This date had been predicted for a few weeks, such as by Rob Coppinger at Flightglobal.com.
Whitehorn, interestingly, was playing up the alternative uses of WK2 in his talk, noting that, in addition to launching SpaceShipTwo, it could be used for air-launching rockets for putting small satellites into orbit, for science, even for cargo and as a “water bomber” for fighting forest fires. He described these applications in part as a “fallback” should SS2 fall through in some way.
He added that, as noted by Flightglobal.com earlier this month, Virgin had considered flying a version of SS1 first (which he dubbed “SpaceShipOne B”). However, they rejected the idea because SS1B would be too small to allow people to float around the cabin, and that was something their customers were very much interested in. Moreover, he said, there would be few other applications for an SS1B besides tourism. That desire for weightlessness forced them into designing a larger vehicle that could accommodate customers’ desires for weightlessness as well as support additional applications.
Whitehorn had little to say about the status of the SS2 propulsion program in the wake of the accident last summer that killed three Scaled employees. He said there had been “lessons learnt” from the accident and that they were moving ahead, but offered nothing more specific.
Check out RLV and Space Transport News for additional notes about Whitehorn’s talk as well as other ISDC presentations.
On Tuesday night votes in Sierra County, New Mexico overwhelmingly approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to help pay for Spaceport America. The vote was perceived as critical not so much for the money it would generate (only about $2.3 million over 20 years, barely one percent of the spaceport’s $198-million cost) as for clearing the way for the creation of a spaceport “tax district” with neighboring Doña Ana County, which passed a similar tax increase last year. According to state law, at least two municipalities needed to pass the tax for a district to be created, which could then collect and spend the money. Without Sierra County, there was no way to spend any money the more populous Doña Ana collected, which is why that county put off collection of the tax at the end of 2007.
The next step, then, is for Sierra and Doña Ana Counties to create such a tax district. That could be done in the next 60 days or so, although it probably won’t be ready by July 1, the next opportunity to put the tax increases into effect. (According to state law, sales tax increases can go into effect only on January 1 and July 1.) That makes it more likely the tax will kick in on January 1, 2009; any later would jeopardize work on the spaceport.
A third county, Otero, which includes the city of Alamogordo, is next in line to hold a tax referendum. County officials there said they would only hold an election if the tax passed in Sierra County; now that it has, that county is planning to put a smaller tax increase (one-eighth of a percent rather than one-quarter) on the general election ballot in November. Spaceport officials are hoping the tax passes, but said they would still be able to proceed even if Otero does not join the tax district.
As for the spaceport itself, the next major step is completing work needed to receive its FAA license. The major obstacle there is the completion of an environmental assessment, which is now projected to be wrapped up by the end of the year, a little later than previously planned (at the International Symposium on Personal Spaceflight last October, state officials planned to have the environmental assessment done by September.) The license from the FAA is needed before construction can begin.
Speaking of Armadillo’s John Carmack, in his team’s latest update, he provides his own unvarnished assessment of the various companies in the suborbital spaceflight sector. The Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic partnership “is the safest bet for success”, but cautions that Virgin may need the field to itself in order to make a profit on SpaceShipTwo: “If a more highly operable vehicle is competing, SS2 probably won’t ‘earn out’.”
Some other summarized assessments:
- Blue Origin: “It looks like they want to play in the orbital space, and perhaps don’t want to get bogged down competing in suborbital space. I think that is a mistake.”
- Rocketplane Global: “They have burned through tens of millions of dollars of funding, and nothing has ever left the ground. Would another ten or twenty million dollars do it? I doubt it very much.”
- SpaceDev: “I also think the hybrid powered VTHL DreamChaser is about the worst design for commercial suborbital flights. They aren’t going to build it on their own dime, and it looks like it would be a very expensive development project that would end up with quite high operating costs if it was ever completed.”
- XCOR: “I think they can probably do it” with Lynx.
- Astrium: “Oh, please.”
And his own assessment? “I still think there is a chance we might be first, depending on how Scaled chooses to play things.”
[Yup, still at the airport]
To follow up on a posting from during the Space Access ’08 conference, I have an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review examining what it will take to become a “rocket pilot”, and just how interesting an occupation that will be. As many of the speakers noted, there’s little to go on in terms of official guidance or experience in training for flying rocket-powered suborbital or orbital vehicles, so people are building up their flying credentials, gaining experience and certifications in various aircraft.
I also expand in the article John Carmack’s thoughts about how flying these vehicles will be relatively routine and even mundane, rather than glamorous. There will be interesting flying opportunities for those involved in test flights or even rocket racing, but regular commercial flights will be largely automated, so that the experience will be akin to that of an elevator operator. “[O]nce it gets to the point of lots and lots of people flying on these things—elevator,” he said at one point in the panel.
[Catching up on news items while waiting on a delayed flight]
An AP article last week reported that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and spaceport authority executive director Steve Landeene made the rounds in Washington looking for additional federal support for Spaceport America. They met with, among others, NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who said he could not formally endorse the spaceport but “was crystal clear in his support for commercial space facilities,” according to Richardson. The two also met with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, but not with FAA officials.
If the purpose of the trip was to win funding for the spaceport, the trip wasn’t an immediate success. Still, the trip won the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News which, in an editorial, congratulated the governor for his efforts in support of the spaceport. “Richardson is good at telling our story,” the paper argues. “His recent national attention as a presidential candidate probably helps him open more doors in Washington – except maybe Hillary Clinton’s Senate office.” The editorial also points out the trip comes just a couple of weeks before a spaceport tax referendum in Sierra County, similar to the one passed in Doña Ana County last year.
I was contacted by a reporter earlier this week looking for information about Sprague Astronautics, a company that made a splash a few years ago (under the name AeraSpaceTours) but has been quiet since. (Its last press release is dated June 28, 2005.) I haven’t heard anything about them for some time, and assume the company is either defunct or in deep dormancy, but would be curious to know more about what happened to it.
Also, I noticed earlier this week that the web site for Benson Space Company is down. If you go to the site you see this message: “This Website was developed by Rockets Away! Media a service brand of DoubleBill Productions, LLC.”; it then redirects to the Rockets Away! Media site without further explanation. Benson Space was active last year, including a new design for its suborbital vehicle at the ISDC in Dallas last May; there had been little in the way of updates since the summer, though.
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