Marketing Week reports Thursday that Virgin Galactic will be unveiling more than just the design of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo during an event at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on January 23. “We will be unveiling the entire design and structure of the project, and it looks nothing like what we’ve had before,” said Will Whitehorn. Among the additional details to come out at that event: the use of the system to launch small satellites and how the research that has gone into the project “can benefit other airlines”. Also to be revealed: a new branding scheme for Virgin Galactic. “The eye [in the Virgin Galactic logo] will remain, but it will have new branding around it and a new color scheme.” (Perhaps more use of Virgin’s distinctive shade of red?) Whitehorn also said that, in their current plans, the first commercial suborbital flights could take place “by the end of 2010.”
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Another company is making an effort at developing a reality TV show with a space theme and prize. Isthmus, a paper in Madison, Wisconsin, reports that a pair of Univ. of Wisconsin alums are promoting a proposed reality TV series: “Geeks in Space” (featuring a trailer produced by Bo Ryan, the men’s basketball coach at UW). The concept: put a bunch of, well, geeks, in, um, space. Actually, a simulated spaceship here on Earth, where the contestants, in a bizarre array of costumes, would live together while competing in challenges. (Losing competitors are, humanely, not ejected out the airlock but instead put into a “freeze chamber” for the remainder of the show.) The space tie-in comes from an agreement the producers have with Space Adventures. “They are willing to partner with us when the show sells and will provide many challenges and the ultimate prize,” said Megan Kaiser, one of the show’s creators, “a trip to the edge of space.” Since Space Adventures is not actively pushing suborbital spaceflight, one wonders how this would work if some network gives the show a green light. Right now, though, the show is still a concept, despite pitches to some of the major broadcast networks and cable networks like, logically, the Sci-Fi Channel. “So far, every network has loved our show, but for one reason or another, has yet to make us an offer,” said Kaiser. However, if that writers’ strike drags on, you never know… In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I provide an overview of spaceport developments in New Mexico and elsewhere. As you’ve read here, there have been a wide variety of developments in spaceports in various locations, even as the commercial ventures seeking to use them have found it harder than expected to get funding and overcome technical obstacles. Despite those concerns, many still see spaceports as a driver of economic growth, bringing high-tech space industry jobs to new regions. As if the current crop of space tourism ventures, and the spaceports they plan to operate out of, aren’t enough, come a couple of developments. KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi, Texas, reports that Space Access is planning to offer suborbital tourism flights out of the city in the next future. If the name Space Access sounds familiar, it’s the same company, run by the same person, Steven Wurst, that was trying to develop a suborbital vehicle back during the RLV boom of the late 1990s. (I wrote an article about Space Access and other companies presenting at the Space Access ’99 conference in Phoenix for the now-defunct online publication SpaceViews in May 1999.) Space Access was then primarily pursing satellite launch, but it now appears focused on space tourism, although the report gives no information about the vehicle design other than the impression it is aircraft-like in some manner. While the online KRIS-TV article claims that flights “could begin as soon as January”, the actual video report, linked to from the article, indicates a 2011 start date for suborbital flights, which seems more realistic (or, at least, less unrealistic). Meanwhile, Brian Feeney is pressing ahead with plans to develop a suborbital vehicle, also to serve the space tourism market. According to the Canadian Press, Feeney plans to select a site to build and launch his suborbital vehicle by the end of 2008. Several Ontario sites are mentioned, although an earlier report by the Toronto Sun put an emphasis on the Niagara region. This effort would presumably for the DreamSpace Group, announced last year but with little reported development since then (indeed, the company’s web site, which once had illustrations and other information, has reverted to a placeholder page from Network Solutions.) The CP article gets commentary from Doug Welch, identified as a professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is skeptical about timelines for space tourism ventures in general. “2011 sounds very unrealistic to me,” he said. “I’d be surprised if it would be before 2015, and if I had to put my own $20 on it, I’d say 2020.” Welch’s expertise in and knowledge of space tourism isn’t specified in the article. One wonders whether this is a case where a reporter picked an astronomy professor in the belief that he or she must therefore be knowledgeable about commercial space efforts; that’s like asking an electrical engineering professor to weigh in on the viability of Web 2.0 ventures… The attorney general of New Mexico has concluded that a local tax increase passed this spring should not be collected starting January 1 as originally planned because of a lack of a mechanism to spend the revenues. Voters in Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces, passed the quarter-cent gross receipts tax increase in April; at the time the tax was set to take effect on January 1. However, county officials had asked that the introduction of the tax be delayed because the money can’t be spent until a spaceport tax district is created, and that district can’t form until at least one other county also approves a similar tax. Two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, also plan to hold tax referenda, but not until spring 2008 at the earliest. Apologies for the short notice, but Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and his latest client for a Soyuz flight to the ISS, Richard Garriott, will be on WAMU-FM in Washington DC at 12 noon today on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, talking about space tourism. If you’re not in Washington and/or can’t listen at noon, archives of the show should be available on the web site later today. That’s the designation that Virgin Galactic is giving to the coming year, according to a Flight International article that reports on a speech given by Will Whitehorn on Thursday at a space conference in the UK. Virgin anticipates a busy year, highlighted by the first test flight of the White Knight 2 carrier aircraft in July. The airplane is 60% complete now and is scheduled to be fully assembled by June; the aircraft’s “last” engine will be delivered in January. Virgin is also planning to publicly unveil the designs for White Knight 2 (which Whitehorn says resembles the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, also built by Scaled Composites) and SpaceShipTwo on January 23. The report doesn’t indicate where or how that will take place, but previously Virgin officials had said they were planning an event in New York in January. The report doesn’t provide a schedule for the development of SpaceShipTwo, other than to say that the first vehicle is currently 50% complete. (Also no word on what Burt Rutan, who is notorious for not releasing vehicle development schedules, thinks of all of these announced plans.) Whitehorn added that Virgin is considering also using White Knight 2 or a larger successor, White Knight 3, as the first stage for an orbital launch system. That system, which would also involve a two-stage rocket, would be intended to put smallsats into orbit for $3 million. This week’s issue of Newsweek magazine includes an essay by Charles Simonyi on his flight to the ISS earlier this year. Simonyi described how he started down the path of being a “Spaceflight Participant” on a Soyuz flight to the station:
Simonyi said he went through a series of medical tests he passed without problems, and then got a surprise:
The rest is a fairly abbreviated, high-level discussion of his training and the flight itself (he does reveal that he didn’t get spacesick at all during the flight; he would simply recall his training on Earth when he felt “any unease”). If there are questions about his flight that he didn’t answer in his essay, you can pose them to him in a live chat Thursday, December 6 at 2 pm EST. Think “space” and “Florida” and what immediately comes to mind? Almost certainly it’s Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. However, if in effort elsewhere in the state comes to fruition, the Space Coast won’t have a monopoly on spaceflight in the state. Earlier this week a public hearing was held in Jacksonville on plans to turn Cecil Field, a former Navy air base, into a spaceport for suborbital spaceflights, according to reports by First Coast News. The Jacksonville Aviation Authority (JAA) is pursuing a spaceport license for the airfield to allow for horizontal-launch, horizontal-landing vehicles to operate from the airfield. The report makes reference to “Concept X” and “Concept X” vehicles that would be in the airport’s license application; although the reports don’t go into this in any detail, the Concept X vehicle is a single-stage vehicle that takes off under jet power (illustrated by the new Rocketplane XP design) and the Concept Z vehicle appears to be a two-stage vehicle (illustrated by Andrews Space’s Gryphon Aerospaceplane design.) The video report also shows a “Concept Y” design that looks like XCOR’s Xerus, which takes off under rocket, not jet, power. The JAA plans to submit its spaceport license application to the FAA by June, according to the report, and hopes to get a positive response by the end of 2008. What isn’t stated is what spaceflight companies, if any, have expressed interest in flying out of Jacksonville (whose residents aren’t necessarily lining up to buy Virgin Galactic tickets). Virgin Galactic has been signing up travel agents around the world to help it sell its suborbital spaceflights. So what’s in it for the travel agents, besides some publicity and a chance to be on the cutting edge of what could be an emerging market in the overall tourism industry? Money, as Australia’s The Daily Telegraph reports in a profile of “up-market travel agent” Penny Spencer:
Looking at the prices above (which are in Australian dollars), it appears they may need to recalibrate given the US dollar’s recent fall: A$260,000 is now nearly US$230,000, compared to the US$200,000 price that’s usually been associated with a Virgin Galactic flight. |
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