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The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston hosted a session yesterday titled “50 Years of the Space Age: Looking Back, Looking Forward”. The session an eclectic panel: space historian Roger Launius (as moderator), former Soviet space scientist and advisor Roald Sagdeev, former astronaut Kathy Sullivan, and Andrew Aldrin of Boeing/ULA. With a panel this diverse, you could expect to discuss a wide range of topics. Interestingly, they focused a fair amount of time on space tourism, and they did not have the most optimistic assessment.
Sagdeev provided a little bit of history. In 1987 he accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev to a summit meeting with Ronald Reagan. During the summit there was a reception where various Soviet and American dignitaries and other famous people mingled. At the reception, Sagdeev recalled, he was approached by someone interested in flying into space on a Soyuz: singer John Denver. Sagdeev helped broker negotiations between Denver and the Soviet space program (which was just then beginning to be open to commercial arrangements like this). They settled on a final price for the flight—$10 million—and Denver tried to raise the money. He failed, as some people familiar with the pre-history of space tourism recall, and tragically died a short time later in an ultralight accident.
Sagdeev said Denver told him that he had been a “finalist” to fly on the ill-fated Challenger flight, a claim that Sullivan found dubious. “I can’t tell you how many, at least scores, of people who I have met—journalists, musicians, others—who are absolutely, positively convinced that they were on the short list to get on Challenger,” she said. “I never saw any of them in any training. John Denver never went through any simulations, let me tell you that.”
Launius, noting that despite the long interest in space tourism, “the reach has exceeded the grasp” in terms of actual accomplishments in the field, asked the panel what they thought about the prospects of space tourism. Sullivan declared herself a skeptic. “I don’t see what they’re doing,” she said, referring to suborbital vehicle developers, “that is going to enable us to fundamental changes in technologies that fundamentally change the cost equation or the safety equation.” The work she does see involves taking known technologies, making incremental improvements to them, and then “cobbling them together into new systems.” (She undercut that argument a bit later when she said the airline industry took off in the US after World War 2, built on surplus aircraft and former military pilots; that, certainly, did not require new technology, and we are beginning to see a similar shift from the government to commercial world as astronauts leave NASA to take positions with entrepreneurial space ventures.)
Sagdeev said that he believes a Soyuz flight to orbit could be as cheap as $10 million (although the going rate is now close to three times that figure.) The current passenger flight rate for those missions, one or two people per year, is a “miserable figure”, in his words. (Of course, those flight rates are constrained by ISS servicing requirements as well as competition for those seats from the Russian government.)
Aldrin, who said that “in most space communities I’m regarded as kind of a skeptic on this issue”, was actually more optimistic than his fellow panelists. argues that the suborbital space tourism market, based on existing market studies, is probably too small to interest big aerospace companies. The number of vehicles needed to service the market is small, so you can’t set up a big production line and get economies of scale as you can with airliners. “For publicly-held companies, it’s going to be tough to justify the expense and risk of getting into that business,” he said. “It really is going to require entrepreneurship and, perhaps from a shareholder’s perspective, irrational investment, to make this happen.”
[Apologies for the long delay in posts – I’m catching up on a lot of other work.]
Last week Flightglobal.com reported that there will be no more seats for paying passengers on Soyuz flights to the ISS after April 2009 because of the increase in the station’s crew size from three to six. The article cited ESA officials, who said that the increase in crew size means that all the seats will be filled on the taxi flights, despite the increase in flight rate needed to support the larger crew.
I happened to talk for a moment with Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson after a speech he gave last Wednesday at the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Crystal City, VA. I asked him about the report and he said they had reservations secured for the April 2009 and were in negotiations for flight opportunities beyond that. (Something that was later added to the Flightglobal.com report.) [As Mr. Coppinger notes below, that statement was in the original article, and I simply missed it the first time I read the piece.] Asked if he would be interested in doing business with one of the commercial ventures planning to provide crew resupply services to the ISS under NASA’s COTS program, he said that he would be happy to talk with “whoever can provide safe and effective transport” to the station.
Space Adventures announced today that Australian entrepreneur Nik Halik will be the backup to Richard Garriott on Garriott’s fall 2008 flight to the ISS. Halik is paying $3 million for the privilege of being the backup; that money can be used later towards the cost of his own orbital or other spaceflight. Halik, 38, is described in the press release as “the CEO and founder of several companies including Financial Freedom Institute and Money Masters”. He is also an adventure tourist with plans to climb Mount Everest in 2009. He’s also an author of an upcoming book, The Thrillionaire, which the release describes as “an autobiography that also provides astute investment strategies.” Enough to make you feel lazy, no matter how busy you are.
Readers might recall that Halik claimed to have been selected as the backup two months ago, according to accounts in the Australian media. At that time Space Adventures said that no selection had been made but that Halik was one of the candidates. Evidently that premature announcement didn’t spoil his ultimate selection.
…hijinks ensue, the Daily Mail claims:
The gents toilets are the last place you’d expect to find a princess who’s fifth in line to the throne.
But that’s exactly what happened when feisty Princess Beatrice was caught following her beleaguered boyfriend into the toilet to give him a right royal tongue-lashing.
The 19-year-old lambasted her man, Dave Clark, when she followed him into the gents at the launch party of the Virgin Galactic spaceship in New York.
You’ll have to read the article to find out what prompted the contretemps. Oddly enough, you never see this happen at, say, an AIAA conference or the National Space Symposium…
Many of the news reports about the SS2/WK2 design unveiling cover just the basics, repeating a lot of information that was already known about the effort. There are a few nuggets tucked away in the articles, though:
- Perhaps the biggest questions are when SS2 will fly, and what the status of investigation into the July accident at Mojave Airport is. MSNBC’s Alan Boyle devotes a post to those questions, but finds no firm answers. Burt Rutan told MSNBC that the exact cause of the July accident is still unknown, and that has obviously delayed work on SS2’s propulsion system. Virgin is also sticking to its belief of not stating a specific schedule for flights, with company president Will Whitehorn telling the New York Times, “We don’t want to make promises that we can’t meet. We’re in a race with nobody, apart from a race with safety.”
- The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] plays up one aspect of the WK2 design that had been previously hinted at: its use as a platform for launch small satellites into orbit. The specifics of such a launch system, including the type of rocket that would be used and the cost, aren’t mentioned. The WSJ article states, “Known as an ardent environmentalist, the British billionaire apparently was attracted to the notion that an alternative satellite-launch system would produce less pollution that today’s massive liquid-fueled or solid-fueled rockets.” Pollution, though, is not a major concern for satellite launches, and also depends on the type of propellant used.
- Scaled hopes to build 40 SS2 and 15 WK2 vehicles over the next ten years, according to SPACE.com; the current contract with Virgin calls for five SS2 and two WK2 vehicles. Also: SS2 will feature large (45-centimeter) windows for passengers to look out at the Earth.
- The current economic turmoil hasn’t affected sales, Reuters reports. Whitehorn said Virgin just had its best month of sales: “Clearly a lot of people want to get away from Planet Earth at the moment.”
- There are other design tweaks and features that Scaled is not disclosing for the time being to avoid tipping off any competitors. Rutan: “There are unique, new ideas scattered throughout the spaceship.”
- Virgin has put 80 of its customers through a high-G centrifuge test and only two could not take the G-forces. Among those who passed included James Lovelock, the scientist of “Gaia” fame, who is 88 years old.
Here’s an artist’s impression of the new design of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two:
Perhaps the biggest change not previously hinted at is the dual cabin design of WK2; the number of engines on the aircraft as well as the changed wing location had been previously reported. Skimming through the press release (available, along with many more illustrations, here) and the various media accounts, I did not see much in the way of other new developments and insights, but not being at the event, I may be missing something that will come to light later as other accounts are published.
Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites will be formally unveiling the design of SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, at an event in New York today. Interesting, there hasn’t been much buzz leading up to this event: a preview in the UK newspaper The Telegraph yesterday is one of the few advance stories about the event. Attendance at the New York event appears to be very limited as well. I was unable to secure an invitation to the event despite considerable effort, and one company official said they were “heavily oversubscribed” (which begs the question of why they simply didn’t secure a bigger venue, but, oh well…)
This design is thought to be somewhat different than the artist’s conceptions that Virgin has been showing off for over a year. In a speech in Alabama last August, Burt Rutan said SS2 would have a low wing instead of the high wing on SpaceShipOne, and that WK2 would have four jet engines instead of two. We’ll see later today if that’s accurate, and what other design changes are in store.
Space Adventures announced Monday that its latest orbital spaceflight client, Richard Garriott, has started training for his October flight to the ISS. Garriott is in Star City, Russia, where his training, including Russian language lessons, have kicked into high gear, he tells SPACE.com. “This year is definitely where all my priorities and schedules have rotated to where space becomes the top priority and terrestrial activities become secondary,” Garriott, a computer game developer, said.
Neither the SPACE.com report nor the Space Adventures press release, though, said anything about the selection of a backup for Garriott. Back in November, Space Adventures announced it was offering the backup flight opportunity for $3 million, which could be credited for a future flight. After one Australian claimed to be that backup candidate in late November, the company said no selection had been made, but that someone would be picked by January “at the latest”.
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (aka Cal/OSHA) has fined Scaled Composites for safety violations identified in the aftermath of the July accident that killed three employees at Mojave Airport. Cal/OSHA fined Scaled $25,780 for failing to properly train its employees about the dangers of nitrous oxide, the chemical that is used as the oxidizer on its hybrid rocket engines. Although the summary of the accident has not been completed (nor is any information about the fines posted on the Cal/OSHA web site, as far as I can find), Cal/OSHA officials confirmed to the AP that the July 27 accident was a nitrous oxide explosion.
The report should allow Scaled to help close the door on the accident (although it’s unclear if the company faces any additional government action or lawsuits from the injured or the families of the dead). It also comes less than a week before Virgin Galactic and Scaled unveil the new designs of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo in New York.
Now that Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign has wound down, the New Mexico governor is focusing on state issues again. On Tuesday he delivered the annual “State of the State” address to legislators, in which he gave a brief shout-out to the state’s planned commercial spaceport: “Our investment into Spaceport America will open the heavens to brave adventurers, and will mean thousands of jobs for southern New Mexico. I believe the Spaceport will also inspire many of our kids to study math and science.” Richardson is backing up that statement with a bit of money as well: a capital improvements measure proposed by the governor includes $10 million to construct a road to the spaceport.
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