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Indian television network NDTV posted a transcript of a recent interview with Richard Branson. (The transcript is very rough; perhaps it has gone through multiple translations, such as from English to Hindi back to English, given the odd language found in it.) In the interview, Branson appears to indicate that SpaceShipTwo will be rolled out at the end of the year, followed by ninth months of test flights before beginning customer flights. He also says, puzzlingly, “In July of this year, we will fly them over ship for the first time”—a reference to the first flights of White Knight Two?
As for those occasional reports that William Shatner was offered (or had accepted) a flight on SS2, Branson said, “He definitely made it clear that he was quite frightened to go into the space and I got a feeling that he will never actually go into the space.” Regarding the risks of human spaceflight, he added, “anybody going into the space will have to accept that there are more inherited risks in the space travel than the airline travel. But we hope that within three years or so, it will be no great a risk.”
A press release yesterday by a company called Broadway Media (whose founder, Mitchell Schultz, also recently started Xtraordinary Adventures, a space tourism company) announced the unveiling of a new publication: Space Cruise News, billed as “the who, what, where, when and how in the race to suborbital space” (I guess you’ll have to go elsewhere to find out the “why”). “In today’s world of constant media frenzy, it’s often difficult to separate credibility from clutter,” the press release states. And certainly it would be helpful to have another source of information on top of the existing one that could help distinguish the two. So far, though, the product is not promising.
The site is claiming an “exclusive first”: that Robert Bigelow and Donald Trump are “close to a deal” to put Trump’s name on Bigelow Aerospace’s current and future expandable spacecraft. Sounds intriguing, except when you get into the details, like this: “…the TRUMP name on Bigalow’s [sic] Genesis I and II and perhaps III and more that will host the weary space traveler for the night.” Besides the misspelling of Bigelow’s name (which is consistently misspelled throughout the article), there is no Genesis 3 spacecraft planned (the company is moving ahead with Sundancer around 2010). Moreover, Bigelow and other company officials have emphatically stated on a number of occasions that they are nor in the hotel business, although they would be willing to lease their modules to companies that would operate them as tourist destinations. And, of course, neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 2 are designed for human habitation.
A commenter on RLV and Space Transport News got a comment from Bigelow spokesman Chris Reed, who said that he had “heard nothing on my end about any negotiations between our company and Donald Trump,” and also reiterated that there would be no Genesis 3 mission.
“Lots of details to be worked out but it sound [sic] pretty spacey to us!” the report notes. Spacey? Maybe spaced out, instead. In its quest to separate “credibility from clutter”, this new publication is in danger of falling into the latter category.
A Reuters article last week led with the news that Virgin Galactic planned to order additional SpaceShipTwo vehicles, with an initial order of five. That, though, has been what the company has been saying for some time (although the option for seven more, also mentioned in the article, isn’t as widely known). Virgin’s Alex Tai added that he expected the company to be profitable “inside the first five years”.
The Reuters article was filed in Singapore, where Virgin Galactic and other companies were for an aerospace expo. A local publication, Today, reported that Virgin’s plans to expand beyond Spaceport America could breathe new life into proposals for Spaceport Singapore. The proposed spaceport was announced two years ago by Space Adventures, which proposed to use a Russian-designed suborbital vehicle to operate out of there as well as a new spaceport in the UAE. However, Spaceport Singapore has stalled out; the web site’s sole press release dates from the original announcement in February 2006. Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson told Today that they have managed to raise only half the funding required for the project, although he remains hopeful that the rest can be found by the end of the year. Singapore officials appear to be indifferent to the project; the city-state’s trade minister told the publication that the spaceport was a private, not public. venture.
Last week Interorbital Systems, which is developing the Neptune orbital vehicle, announced that it was partnering with DestinySpace Enterprises (DSE) to sell flights on the vehicle. Who is DestinySpace? The press release describes the company as “the world’s leader in space tourism retail”, which no doubt comes as a surprise to Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic, since it appears DSE hasn’t sent anyone to space or racked up much sales for tourist flights. The company’s web site describes it as “The Official Retailer Of The Space Tourism Industry” (official according to whom?) and it describes its mission as “a company working within the space tourism industry designed to act as a portal for all faucets of commercial space travel.” Obviously they hope to tap the latent demand for spaceflight and thus open the spigots of cash flow.
Actor Dennis Quaid is starring in a new movie, but he is eyeing a much higher vantage point, according to one report. Quaid, a pilot, tells the World Entertainment News Network that “The ultimate would be to fly in space”. The $200,000 ticket price for Virgin Galactic is “almost getting to be reasonable”, he said, but wants something more than a simple suborbital hop at that price: “They should have at least two orbits with an in-flight meal and all that stuff.”
I didn’t receive the original email blast from Scaled Composites about the health of Burt Rutan, but, like no doubt many readers, wanted to pass along my best wishes for a speedy recovery to him after undergoing open heart surgery earlier this month. Rutan was suffering from something called “constrictive pericardium”, which meant he suffered from “extreme fatigue” for five months—so much so, he tells MSNBC, that his participation in the Virgin Galactic design unveiling in New York last month was “real dicey”. (I last saw Rutan in person six months ago when he spoke at the Univ. of Alabama; at that time he appeared healthy.)
The latest Armadillo Aerospace project update has the usual detailed technical descriptions of engine and other vehicle work. At the end, though, John Carmack includes some illustrations of a proposed single-person suborbital vehicle, using a “six pack” of modules. Carmack talked about this concept last year at Space Access ’07, including the transparent bubble where the passenger would lie (and float around at apogee). Here’s one illustration:
Carmack warns not to “read too many technical details into these concept renderings”, but it still looks pretty interesting. Half the Armadillo team will be at Space Access ’08 to provide more details on this concept and their other work.
Also in Monday’s issue of The Space Review I discuss some of the issues that are emerging with the screening and training of space tourists, as well as their crew members, based on a panel during the FAA’s annual commercial space transportation conference earlier this month. The highlight of the panel upon which most of the article is based was a presentation by Julia Tizard of Virgin Galactic, who revealed that 65 of 70 of the company’s customers have passed centrifuge training at the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia. Those who were involved in the training ranged in age from 22 to 88, and included people with less-than-perfect medical histories, such as heart bypass surgery.
There is a concern, though, by some in the industry that regulators could move too quickly to establish rules for spaceflight participant training: Jeff Greason of XCOR said he is “living in fear” of such a move since there’s little known about what kind of training is appropriate, and that the training requirements could be different for different operators. “Codifying our mistakes early,” he said, “is one of the biggest errors we could make.”
Monday’s issue of The Space Review features an interview with Richard Garriott, who is currently in Russia training for a flight to the ISS this fall. Garriott describes the not-uncommon issues associated with living and training there (learning Russia, the less-than-gourmet food) as well as his plans to perform experiments on the ISS and even do “the first art show in space featuring the art of my mother”, in Garriott’s words. The ultimate goal of his flight:
I hope to learn how to better make space a viable reality for everyone. To do that, I think it needs to be shown that the investment in space is worth it. That is why I hope that at least some of my experiments pay off. If even one does, it will mean that there are more that can be done, and thus justify further flights by private individuals and companies.
[Another catchup post.]
About a week ago ABC News published the results a poll about space tourism, among other space-related topics, with the key takeaway point that four in ten people woule be willing to fly in space for at least some amount of money. ABC also published the complete poll questionnaire and detailed results.
Unfortunately, the poll itself is not that useful for determining actual levels of public interest in space tourism. For example, the poll makes no effort to discern among suborbital, orbital, and other (like circumlunar) forms of space tourism; it merely asks, “If you had a chance in your lifetime to travel in outer space, would you do so, or not?” The various price points selected are also highly unrealistic, with the lowest (excluding zero) being “$1-499″ and the highest being $20,000+”. Given that even the biggest proponents of space tourism see those prices coming down to the $20,000-30,000 range only after several years—at least—of operations, those price points need to be recalibrated. Also, there’s no evidence that the polling firm tried to restrict the respondents to those wealthy enough to be reasonably able to afford such flights (not surprising given the price points they selected.)
Still, there are a few nuggets of information in the poll, in part because these questions have apparently been posed in previous surveys. Here, the responses are mixed for space tourism proponents. The poll found that 65 percent believed that it was definitely or probably likely that “in the years ahead ordinary people will travel in outer space”, compared to 33 percent who answered “probably not” or “definitely not”. That compares to 57 percent who answered in the affirmative and 41 percent in the negative in a 1999 poll (which asked about the chances for such flights “in the next 50 years” versus “in the years ahead”). However, the results show a declining trend in terms of people who would actually want to fly themselves: the 39 percent who said they wanted to fly in 2008 is down from 41 percent in August 1999 and 47 percent in April 1998.
The results also provided some demographic breakouts. The poll found that 54 percent of men said they wanted to fly in space, but only 25 percent of women. (It would be interesting to compare this with the statistics of actual customers signed up by companies like Virgin Galactic.) Only 19 percent of those over 65 years old want to fly, but 56 percent of those in the 18-34 age group said yes. And people with higher incomes were more likely to say yes.
I have a clear bias here, since I was involved tangentially in the original Futron-Zogby survey in 2002 that many in the industry still consider to be the gold standard for space tourism market research. However, as much as I would like to see another survey done to see how levels of interest in space tourism have evolved over the last six years, this ABC poll isn’t it.
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