NewSpace Journal

NM spaceport tax update

The Las Cruces Sun-News reported Monday that a state legislator has asked the New Mexico attorney general’s office for a legal opinion on delaying a spaceport tax that voters on Doña Ana County approved earlier this year. While the tax is scheduled to take effect on January 1, the money collected can’t be spent until a “spaceport tax district” is formed—and that can’t happen until another county approves the tax. That won’t happen until some time next year, when two other counties, Sierra and Otero, plan to hold referendums. County officials would prefer to wait until the tax district is in place before starting to collect the quarter-cent gross receipts tax.

Psychics can’t foretell future of space tourism

The newspaper Irish Independent has a profile of businessman Tom Higgins, best known for making millions with a psychic hotline. At the end of the piece Higgins discusses his other major claim to fame: being one of the first two Irishmen to sign up for a suborbital spaceflight for space tourism. It looks like, though, he needs his staff to clean their crystal balls or reshuffle their Tarot cards: “Next year will probably (he can’t say for certain — even the psychics aren’t sure) see Higgins in space.” In fact, next year is very unlikely, unless Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites have made far more progress on SpaceShipTwo than they have let on in public.

Higgins is vying with Bill Cullen to be first. “According to Higgins, he had his name down first and has paid, but Cullen is mates with Richard Branson, who owns Virgin Galactic, which is sending the spaceship into space,” the article notes. “Higgins, ever with an eye to publicity, wanted there to be a space quiz on the Late Late Show to decide the owner of the seat on the first space ride but Cullen apparently would not agree to this and now a draw is supposed to take place.” Shouldn’t those psychics be able to tell Higgins if he’ll go first?

Garriott’s backup selected? Not quite yet

News reports out of Melbourne, Australia over the weekend indicated that Space Adventures had selected an Australian-born millionaire to be the backup to Richard Garriott on his trip to the ISS next October. “Self-described ‘thrillionaire’ Nik Halik has been named as the back-up crewman for next year’s October commercial flight to the International Space Station,” reported the Herald Sun. Another paper, The Age, also reported that Halik said that he had been selected as the backup for the trip, putting him in “a good position to lead the next flight in 2009″.

There’s just one problem with all this, as you might imagine upon reading this far: Halik hasn’t been selected yet by Space Adventures to be the backup. According to company spokesperson Stacey Tearne, Halik is indeed one of the candidates to pay $3 million to be Garriott’s backup, but no decision has been made. A selection will be made in January “at the latest”, she said in an email this morning.

Little details like that aren’t stopping Halik from dreaming big, though. According to the Herald Sun he said he wants not only to go to the ISS some day, but also “be one of the first to colonise the moon”. “By 2018, the Japanese want to colonise it and have a moon base and use it to explore the galaxy,” he told the paper. (This may be news to the Japanese.)

It appears that Halik, who made his money through investments and investment seminars (“over 31,178 people have already attended his Mastery Educational Events”), has been pursuing this goal for some time, according to this 2006 article:

In 2003, Nik commenced his training through the Russian Orbital Space Program. Having completed his Edge of Space supersonic flight and Zero Gravity training flight just recently in Moscow, he will be the first recorded Australian civilian to fly Sub-Orbit soon, qualifying him the status of being certified as an astronaut. The next adventure after this will be his ultimate mission and destiny to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) for a fortnight orbital stay. Nik, alongside his sponsors is planning on executing the first history making stock market trade in SPACE.

Bezos: “My passion is for space”

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Charlie Rose Show Monday night, primarily to talk about the new electronic book reader that Amazon unveiled earlier in the day. However, at the very end of the show Rose did ask Bezos some questions about Blue Origin, Bezos’s spaceflight venture. A lot of the interview covered familiar ground for those have followed what limited information that the company has released, but there were a few new insights:

Blue Origin has moved on from its original demonstration vehicle, Goddard, to a second vehicle currently under development. At least one more demo vehicle will follow that second one.
Bezos said that they’re in no rush to bring a vehicle to market “because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle.”
He believes that there is a market for suborbital space tourism, but is skeptical of market studies that have been performed to date because “you don’t really know until you do it.” (That skepticism is not unique to Bezos: Eric Anderson of Space Adventures has expressed similar sentiments in the recent past.)
Bezos not only had Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who went to the ISS in April, speak to his Blue Origin employees, Bezos talked with Simonyi while on the station.

The video of the show is available online. (Skip ahead to about the 50:30 point of the interview; the Blue Origin portion takes up the last three minutes or so of the show). I’ve included a rough transcript below as well:

Rose: You own 200,000 acres of land in Texas?

Bezos: Yes.

Rose: What are you going to do with it?

Bezos: Well, when you’re building rockets and launching rockets, it’s nice to have a bit of buffer. [laughter]

Rose: Yeah, what is that that just landed in our yard? [laughter] So, tell me what your dream is.

Bezos: Well, we’re building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing spacecraft that will take three or more astronauts to the edge of space — it’s a suborbital journey, so it’s like what Alan Shepard did. The program’s called New Shepard, paying homage to Alan. So it goes up and you have a few minutes in zero gravity, you can look out and see the limb of the Earth, how thin the atmosphere is of the Earth. People tell me, who have been in space, tell me that it’s a transformative experience. You get up there and, then, this vehicle is going to come back down and land on its tail — it’s reusable, which it very unsual for space vehicles, they’re almost all expendable rockets — and it’s going to come and land on its tail, sort of like a Buck Rogers rocket.

Rose: So what’s the stage of development today?

Bezos: Well, we have flown our first development vehicle. We flew it several times. We’re now working on —

Rose: It went up and came back safely.

Bezos: That’s right. It was this low-altitude demonstration vehicle. We’re now working on our second development vehicle. There will be at least one more development vehicle after that — at least, maybe there will be more. We’re not in any hurry because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle. We don’t see any reason to rush on this.

Rose: Where does the revenue come on this from?

Bezos: Our motto is “Gradatim Ferociter” [Rose laughs.] It stands for “step by step, ferociously.” So we’re just going to do it one step at a time.

Rose: And so what’s the market for this?

Bezos: Well, this is basically kind of a tourism market.

Rose: Yes, I know.

Bezos: People would pay to go up into suborbital space. I don’t know how big the market is. People have done studies that have tried to size this market, but I’m highly skeptical of such studies, because you don’t really know until you do it. People, well-intentioned people, when they respond to the surveys, will say, “Oh, yeah, I will do that” but they don’t really know.

Rose: But are you more interested in space or more interested in the business?

Bezos: My passion is for space, for sure. But I do think this can be made into a viable business. I think that you have to be very long-term oriented. People who compained that we have invested in Amazon for seven years would be horrified by Blue Origin. [laughter]

Rose: Did you ever talk to Charles Simonyi?

Bezos: Yes, in fact, he came and spoke at Blue Origin and spoke to our employees.

Rose: What did he say about his experience?

Bezos: Actually, I called him while he was up there and talked to him on the phone while he was up there, while he was space shuttle, space station.

Rose: He loved it.

Bezos: He loved being in the International Space Station.

Rose: So why wouldn’t you do that?

Bezos: Well, I want to go on a Blue Origin vehicle, and that’s what we’re working on. I like to build, I’m into building the vehicle. I will go. I definitely will go. I can’t wait, actually.

Looking back at two would-be space tourists

In this week’s issue of The Space Review I have an article about Lori Garver and Lance Bass, who tried to be orbital space tourists in 2002. Most people in the space industry are familiar with Garver, and her talk at the ISPS last month in New Mexico didn’t have much in the way of new insights about her “AstroMom” bid to go to the ISS. Bass, on the other hand, while attracting all the media attention when his plan came forward (and later collapsed), has talked little about his attempt to fly in space in any detail. The former *NYSNC star does go into some details in his new book, Out of Sync, which I recap in the article, ranging from his surgery to correct an irregular heartbeat to the difficulty he had raising money (including being forced to pay for the rest of his training out of pocket, to the tune of nearly a half-million dollars, to stay on track for his planned fall 2002 launch.) Bass doesn’t say in the book if he has any desire to try to fly in space again, either on a suborbital or orbital flight; Garver, by contrast, says that “I guess I feel like I will still go to space”, although she has no immediate plans for a spaceflight.

For $3 million, be an understudy

Space Adventures announced today that, for the first time, it is selling the opportunity to be the backup crew member for one of its Soyuz space tourists. For $3 million, that person would go through the same six-month training program in Russia as Richard Garriott, the company’s next orbital customer; they are particularly interested in someone who can not only afford the training but also “is able to be an active participant in Richardâ€™s mission, to include being featured in a documentary TV series,” according to Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson. (The press release also points out that Anousheh Ansari was originally training in 2006 as a backup to Daisuke Enomoto, but got to fly when Enomoto suffered some kind of medical problem.) And, yes, that $3 million can be “credited in-full” towards a future orbital or even lunar spaceflight, Anderson added. Time would appear to be of the essence, since Garriott plans to start training in Russia after the first of the year.

An unlikely list of customers

An article in The West Australian reports that a Virgin Galactic seat will be auctioned off Saturday night during the Chinese Chamber of Commerce annual ball in Perth. Curiously, the article claims that “Bill Gates, Warren Buffet [sic], Oprah Winfrey, Sir Richard Branson and Donald Trump have already signed up for a space flight”. Branson, of course, has “signed up” for a flight: he owns Virgin Galactic. The other names, though, should be treated with a heavy dose of skepticism. After all, does the Oracle of Omaha strike you as someone who would spend $200K on a suborbital spaceflight? Although perhaps he and Bill could convince Oprah and The Donald to play a round of zero-g bridge…

Another company enters the terrestrial space tourism market

For a number of years companies like Space Adventures and Incredible Adventures have offered terrestrial analogues to spaceflight, including zero-g airplane flights, high-altitude jet flights, and cosmonaut training. Now another company, G.A.P Adventures, is entering the market, offering a similar suite of experiences. The company, which already offers a wide range of adventure tourism, sees space as a natural extension: “For G.A.P Adventures it was never a question of if we could provide our travellers with the experience of undertaking space travel, but when,” said the company’s CEO, Bruce Poon Tip.

Space tourism not so popular in Jacksonville

Richard Branson spoke at an event Tuesday night in Jacksonville, Florida, talking about his various ventures, including Virgin Galactic, which led to this exchange as reported in the Florida Times-Union:

Branson began building his business empire in the 1970s when he established Virgin Records, initially as a mail-order record outlet and later a record label. Virgin then expanded into a host of fields, including mobile phones, aviation, animation and, in one of Branson’s most high-profile endeavours, space travel, with Virgin Galactic planning on sending tourists into space two years from now – for a price.

“How many people out there are willing to spend $200,000 to fly into space?” [host Howard] Kelley asked, a question that elicited a lone clap from the back of the hall.

“Well, one,” Branson said with a chuckle, and then pointed out into the audience. “I’ll see you later.”

Private human spaceflight conference call for papers

Reader Garrett Smith passed along a note about the call for papers for the IAA Symposium on Private Manned Access to Space, to be held May 28-30, 2008 in Arcachon, France. The conference will focus on the technical, legal and regulatory, financial, and other issues associated with human suborbital and orbital spaceflight. The deadline for submissions is December 5. And, as the call for papers notes, “Arcachon in May should be terrific!”

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