The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press reported this week that organizers of a charity auction have removed a suborbital spaceflight trip out of concerns it was too dangerous. The auction, part of the Naples Winter Wine Festival, would have included a spaceflight on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. However, in the wake of last July’s industrial accident at Mojave Airport that killed three Scaled Composites employees, the organizers dropped the prize from the list, deeming it too dangerous. “I just didn’t think it was a good idea,” festival chairman Don Gunther told the News-Press. Auction bidders will have to settle for less dangerous prizes like a pair of motorcycles, a Maserati, or trips to China, South America, Dubai, Morocco, and South Africa.
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Rocketplane Global vice president and chief test pilot John Herrington has left the company, according to an Associated Press report, which refers to a press release issued by the Chickasaw Nation, of which Herrington is a member. Herrington left the company on December 21, although his departure was announced only this week. Herrington gave no reason for leaving the company, saying only that his decision “was a difficult one”. The company also didn’t respond to a request for comments from the AP, although Herrington is no longer listed on the Rocketplane Global web site. Herrington didn’t go into specifics about future plans, but he did say that he wants to remain involved in the commercial space industry because “commercial space is the next great adventure in aerospace.” Update 1/4: Herrington tells the Oklahoma newspaper The Journal Record that while he was impressed with Rocketplane’s technology, the difficulty the company has had raising money was “most frustrating point for me.” Leaving the company, he said, allows him to pursue “some really great opportunities that have come up for me in the near future,” although he didn’t specify what those are. Wednesday’s Huntsville Times describes something that sounds at least mildly quixotic: an effort to recreate John Glenn’s historic 1962 spaceflight on the 50th anniversary, using private funding. The project is the brainchild of retired pilot Craig Russell, who has created a nonprofit organization to raise the money needed to refurbish a Mercury capsule and launch it with an astronaut on board. Russell estimates he need to raise $35 million for a Falcon 9 launch, but thinks that either refurbishing an unflown Mercury capsule or building one from scratch could be done for as little as $10 million because all the R&D needed to build the capsule was done decades ago (also, apparently, student labor would be involved.) Russell is trying to raise money for the project now, but said he would abandon the project if he can’t raise “significant interest and funding” during the course of this year. NASA doesn’t appear to be interested: Russell met with an unnamed NASA associate administrator last June to brief him on the effort but did not get a positive response. “He was not very enthusiastic,” Russell said. Today’s Las Cruces Sun-News reports that problems conducting an environmental assessment have led to another delay for New Mexico’s Spaceport America. The report is vague about what exactly the problem is, but apparently it involves some sort of potential conflict of interest with New Mexico State University Physical Science Laboratory and some transfer of data being used for the environmental assessment. “There were some balls dropped” during that data transfer, in the words of Spaceport Authority chair Kelly O’Donnell, requiring the work to be redone. Groundbreaking for the spaceport is now planned for November 2008. While the article states that groundbreaking has previously been planned for the first quarter of this year, during the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in Las Cruces in October officials were talking about a groundbreaking around October 2008: either this does not appear to be that significant a delay, or that delay had been factored into their schedules for some time. In an article on its web site posted Thursday, famed insurer Lloyd’s of London looks at the potential business of insuring commercial human spaceflight. “Lloyd’s brokers and underwriters say there is capacity in the market to provide insurance cover for the commercial flights if underwriters are convinced about their level of exposure to passenger liabilities,” the article states, summarizing the developments by Virgin Galactic and then talking with a number of people in the insurance business, particularly in the small but established niche of space insurance. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of questions about the level of risk and, thus, the availability of coverage and the rates for such insurance. “[A]t present until the design and construction of the craft itself is finalized then insurers will not be in a position to give any rating to the risk,” said Roger Bathurst, CEO of International Space Brokers. He adds that, if such insurance is provided, “the risk will be extremely specialist and the Lloyd’s market would be viewed as a natural home for what may be the final frontier for aviation risk.” One area of concern for insurers is that the target market for suborbital spaceflights will be people of high net worth, creating a high degree of exposure for insurers in the event of an accident. “An aircraft which would be regularly full of very high net worth passenger would cause some concern for underwriters in terms of their exposure should any accident occur,” said Chris Gibbs, a space underwriter for Brit Insurance. That’s no surprise for people in the industry who have raised concerns about the availability and cost of insurance for commercial human spaceflight. As Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets has said on a number of occasions, “Amateurs talk propellants, professionals talk insurance.” AFP reported yesterday that Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov suggested the end was near for tourist flights to the ISS on regular Soyuz taxi flights there. According to Perminov, the planned increase in the ISS crew size from three to six—expected by the end of the decade, when ISS assembly is complete—will leave no room on Soyuz taxi flights to the station for tourists. “I’m afraid that from 2009, tourism as we see it today may be discontinued,” Perminov said, according to the report. Perminov did indicate that there is strong demand for such flights, enough that “we cannot satisfy all requests”. However, the article doesn’t address the possibility that additional Soyuz spacecraft could be manufactured, perhaps for dedicated tourist flights to the ISS (not to mention plans for circumlunar tourist flights). Space Adventures has reportedly been looking at what’s needed to increase the Soyuz production rate, so this report may be a little premature. A follow-up to our earlier coverage of the re-launch of Space Access LLC: A Corpus Christi, Texas TV station reports that the company’s plans include an “an economically-friendly community on roughly 25,000 acres of land” on Kenedy Ranch south of the city. That development is said to be similar to Celebration, Florida, the Disney planned community near Orlando. The article doesn’t indicate why the company wants to undertake a major real estate development on top of a suborbital vehicle project—the vehicle project alone would appear to be challenging enough for a startup company. Back in July I noted here that a new Indian TV channel was planning a contest with a suborbital spaceflight as the top prize. Indiantelevision.com reports that the televised portion of this contest is ready to begin, with four episodes starting Sunday. According to the article:
I’m not sure what a “great combination commentary” is, but overall this series sounds pretty crazy even without the contest so named. The winner will be “India’s first space tourist”, according to the article, but as previously noted here at least one Indian is among Virgin Galactic’s Founders, and probably has an inside track to be the first in space. It’s almost like a flashback to the 1990s. Space Access LLC, a company that dates back to the mid-1990s, formally announced its plans Thursday to provide suborbital space tourism flights starting in 2011. Back in the 1990s Space Access was proposing a spaceplane that could launch satellites or carry cargo to the ISS. The company is still pushing a spaceplane, now with a current focus on suborbital commercial human spaceflight, although the company does plan to provide orbital flights starting in 2014. One thing that sets Space Access apart from other companies in the business is its technology: it eschews rocket engines for something called an ejector ramjet that uses liquid hydrogen fuel but oxygen from the atmosphere. The company claims that the ejector ramjet is seven times more efficient than a rocket engine because the vehicle doesn’t have to carry its own oxidizer. The company also claims that this approach is more “environmentally conscious” since liquid hydrogen doesn’t create carbon emissions and can be generated from renewable energy sources (it does admit that hydrogen today primarily comes from petroleum refinement). The “Skyhopper” vehicle will also be fast: flying up to Mach 7, compared to the Mach 3-4 peak speed announced by other suborbital spaceflight ventures. Another unique aspect of Space Access is that it is inviting prospective customers to South Florida for a series of seminars starting in January where they’ll “participate in the development of a revolutionary vehicle” by attending seminars about the vehicle development. All this will be at an “exclusive private resort” on Key Largo, south of Miami, near where Space Access has offices (although the company’s mailing address is Huntertown, Indiana, a suburb of Fort Wayne.) The cost? $7,200 per person [adjusted on Friday to “only” $3,600] for the three-day event (based on double occupancy). The company’s FAQ features some more details about Space Access and its plans. The company proposes to build up to eight of the Skyhopper suborbital vehicles and performing 15 flights a day. Flights will take place from facilities the company calls “SpaceGateWays”, with the first to be built south of Corpus Christi, Texas (as reported last week). It’s an interesting new venture, but it’s entering a crowded market with a new set of technologies: a difficult challenge for any company in any field. |
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Year-end space tourism wrapup
A few odds and ends from the last week of 2007: