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I’m in the media building at Holloman AFB, having gotten out of a press conference a little while ago about the X Prize Cup and related announcements. A few highlights:
Rocketplane Global, as expected, unveiled its new design for the XP suborbital spaceplane. The company is no longer using Learjet hardware for the vehicle, deciding instead to use a new design that is superficially similar in shape to the old one (with the exception that the V-tail has been replaced with a T-tail, and with more windows in the fuselage), but able to accommodate five passengers plus a pilot. They’re using a different jet engine, the J-85, but the same AR-36 rocket engine under development by Polaris Propulsion. The vehicle also features new landing gear similar to that used by the F-5 fighter. The interior will be designed by Frank Nuovo, a designer who has worked with clients ranging from Nokia to BMW.
While the new XP cabin is bigger, Rocketplane vice president and test pilot John Herrington said that the passengers, at least initially, won’t be allowed to float around the cabin once in weightlessness. His concern is that people will become disoriented trying to move around and could injure themselves and others. Down the road, it may be possible to remove a couple seats and allow the rear two passengers to float, he said.
Rocketplane officials, including Herrington and program maanger Dave Faulker, said that they believe they will be able to raise the money needed to develop the vehicle by the end of the year. They did not, though, disclose how much money they’re looking for. Current schedules call for flight tests to begin in 2010; AR-36 engine tests are scheduled to begin in the near future.
Rocket Racing League officials did announce three new teams, bringing the total number of teams to six. CEO Granger Whitelaw also confirmed rumors that their prototype X-Racer flew three times yesterday in Mojave, although he declined to offer many technical details regarding the flights, including their length and the turnaround time between flights. Whitelaw said that “exhibition” flights would begin at air shows in spring 2008, with actual competitive flights slated to begin in 2008-2009, depending on when they secure a TV contract and other sponsorships.
Teachers in Space announced that it wll soon start collecting applications by teachers for suborbital spaceflights. There will be two competitions: one for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers, and one for K-12 teachers in general; both will have to submit either lesson plans or proposed experiments they would perform during their flights. (In an interesting twist, all the lesson plans submitted by will be posted online in an wiki.) The project has no application deadlines right now. The effort has commitments from five companies (Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Global, and XCOR) to carry flights; Ed Wright’s company, the US Rocket Academy, has purchased a number of flights from XCOR Aerospace that is in the “double digits”.
The X Prize Cup gets started today with an education/media day at Holloman AFB that’s not open to the general public; the full event (open to the public and with free admission) is Saturday and Sunday. There’s a press conference scheduled for late this morning with several announcements planned:
- An unspecified announcement by the Teachers in Space project;
- An announcement by Rocketplane Global (the suborbital arm of Rocketplane Inc.) and Launch Magazine; this is expected to be the unveiling of the new Rocketplane XP design that is a move away from the modified-Learjet design the company had been pursuing in favor of something that is bigger and/or more affordable;
- An announcement by the Rocket Racing League. The league did announce this morning that three new teams had joined the league (one of which is led by former da Vinci Project founder Brian Feeney), but the expectation is that the announcement will be something bigger. RRL CEO Granger Whitelaw was a no-show during a panel session he was supposed to be a part of Thursday afternoon at ISPS; his replacement, another RRL official, said that Whitelaw was “off seeing his rocket fly”. There have been rumors that the cup might feature a video feed of an X-Racer test flight in Mojave; we’ll see…
Like with the ISPS, as time and technology permit I’ll post updates here and on Twitter during the day.
US-Canadian space transportation company PlanetSpace appears to have found an unlikely benefactor to help fund development of a planned spaceport for the company in Nova Scotia, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported Friday. Lockheed Martin is reportedly offering to contribute $45 million over six years to help pay for the development of a spaceport on Cape Breton, about a third the cost of the overall project. It’s part of a complicated transaction that starts with a deal by the Canadian government to purchase 17 C-130 cargo planes from the company; as part of the deal, Lockheed has to invest the purchase price, $3.2 billion, in “the form of regional benefits”, according to the paper, and the spaceport showed up on Lockheed’s proposed list of investments.
The particular form of Lockheed’s contribution would be “to invest the money on Athena rockets that would propel the PlanetSpace craft into space”; as noted here earlier this week, PlanetSpace is studying the use of Lockheed’s planned-but-never-built Athena 3 rocket as a launch vehicle for PlanetSpace’s COTS proposal. PlanetSpace has hired a lobbyist, Fred Doucet (described by the paper as “former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff and political troubleshooter”), to help the company secure the investment.
Bigelow Aerospace is reportedly planning to offer $760 million to any company that can provide crew transportation services to and from its planned orbital habitats, New Scientist reported Thursday. The offer is not in the form of a prize, like Bigelow’s earlier effort, America’s Space Prize, but instead a contract that would pay $760 million for eight flights. The article doesn’t have much in the way of further details, including how Bigelow would select the winning provider (or providers), and there’s been no formal announcement of the effort by the company itself. However, Robert Bigelow has talked on a number of occasions about the difficulties in finding transportation for his planned habitats, a concern he reiterates in the New Scientist article.
Speaking of Bigelow, the current issue of Wired magazine has a feature article about Bigelow Aerospace (which I read on the flight to New Mexico earlier this week and subsequently found online). The article doesn’t have much in the way of new insights on the company or Bigelow himself, and focused a lot on things like his fascination with UFOs and company secrecy (nevermind that the company is a lot less secretive now than a few years ago.)
Above: a panel of space travelers discuss the spaceflight experience on Thursday afternoon. From left: Jeff Hoffman, Jay Buckey, Michael Lopez-Alegria, Anousheh Ansari, Dan Barry, Janice Voss, and John Herrington.
The second and final day of the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight started off with a focus on spaceports (actually, it started off with a flamenco dancing demonstration, but that’s another story), and later turned its attention to the financial issues associated with NewSpace and closed out with a panel of government and commercial space travelers. Some highlights:
- Olle Norberg of Spaceport Sweden, in what was billed as the first public appearance (at least in the US) from an official of that planned spaceport, said that they are currently in the midst of a feasibility study for the facility, located at the Esrange sounding rocket launch site in northern Sweden, that is scheduled to conclude at the end of next year. If all goes well the spaceport could be open to Virgin or other operators in 2011-2012. One challenge: working through a tangled regulatory landscape that is not as well-defined as in the US.
- Turning to local spaceport issues, work is underway on the environmental assessment for Spaceport America in New Mexico. Officials here hope that the assessment is completed by September, which would allow a groundbreaking perhaps at next year’s conference. (The assessment is also required for the spaceport to get an FAA license.) The current schedule calls for Spaceport America to open in April 2010.
- Many communities in southern New Mexico, from Las Cruces to small towns like Hatch, are looking to the spaceport as a big driver of economic development for the area. One speaker said the spaceport was going to be the biggest economic benefit for southern New Mexico in 20 years.
- One issue in the area has been a sales tax (officials, “gross receipts tax”) that will help fund the spaceport. (Those taxes will contribute $60 million to the spaceport, with the state paying the rest of the $200-million cost of the facility.) Doña Ana County, which includes Las Cruces, passed the tax earlier this year, but two other counties, Sierra and Otero, have yet to hold their own referenda on the tax. Lori Montgomery, mayor of Truth or Consequences, NM, said Sierra County will likely hold a referendum on the tax in March or April of next year, after “educating” the citizens about the tax.
- A search for a new executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority is winding down, and the office plans to make an announcement by early November. Kelly O’Donnell, the current acting executive director, said the office plans to ask the state for a four-fold budget increase in 2008 to help staff up the office.
- Alex Tai, at the end of a general presentation about Virgin Galactic, said that the company had booked $31 million in sales so far, the largest figure announced by the company to date.
- Lov Levin of t/Space said he wanted to challenge the “myth” that this was a new market: instead, he argued, we are in the midst of a transition from a government-dominated market to a commercial one, which may make it easier for potential investors to better grasp the opportunities.
- Janice Voss, who left the astronaut corps a few years ago to work on NASA’s Kepler mission (she plans to return at the end of this year, but not in a flight capacity), said when she left she looked at the opportunities in the commercial market when she left but couldn’t see where the market was going. If she was leaving now, she said, it would be a different situation, with many more opportunities.
- John Herrington, a former NASA astronaut now working for Rocketplane, said that he expects a wave of retirements from the astronaut corps when the shuttle program ends, particularly among those who don’t expect much of a chance to get the limited flight opportunities once Orion comes online. These people, he said, will certainly look at opportunities in the commercial sector.
- Understatement of the day: Chuck Lauer, filling in for George French on a panel about how NewSpace companies have adapted to the changing market, about the K-1 saga: “Obviously there are challenges we are working through.”
(The picture above doesn’t have anything to do directly with the conference, it’s just a nice view of the Moon rising around sunset Wednesday as seen from the conference site in Las Cruces.)
Yesterday’s sessions of the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight didn’t have any groundbreaking revelations, but there were still some interesting developments and news from the various conference sessions, which I’ll summarize below:
- One of the most informative presentations during the day was the first, by Valin Thorn, deputy program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew & Cargo Program. He addressed head-on the recent decision to terminate the funded COTS agreement with Rocketplane Kistler, saying that they had missed milestones not only for their financing, but also a cargo module critical design review. He called the K-1 concept “outstanding” and said he wouldn’t be surprised to see them resubmit a revised proposal in the new round of COTS bidding.
- John Herrington, filling in for George French in the same morning session (French was at the conference but called away to a board meeting), confirmed earlier reports that the company had lined up commitments from investors for $300 million of the sought-for $450 million (not $500 million as reported elsewhere), but those plans fell through because of a variety of reasons, including NASA’s agreement to buy Progress and Soyuz flights from Russia as well as comments by unnamed NASA officials that appeared to be disparaging towards COTS.
- Herrington did say that work was proceeding with the XP suborbital spaceplane, and the company plans to announce a revised design of the vehicle on Friday. From what I understand, this will be more than a minor tweak to the existing modified-Learjet approach. Herrington said that some of the investors who has expressed an interest in the K-1 may also be interested in investing in the XP (which is done by a separate subsidiary company, Rocketplane Global), but didn’t have anything specific to say about XP financing.
- Thorn’s talk also revealed some new developments by other companies that have unfunded COTS agreements. SPACEHAB is working on a concept called ARCTUS to develop a cargo spacecraft based on the Centaur upper stage. PlanetSpace, in addition to their work on their Nova booster and spaceplane, is also working on a less-ambitious concept that would use a launch vehicle called the Athena 3 (a Lockheed Martin Athena 2 augmented with two shuttle SRB segments) for carrying cargo to the station.
- SpaceDev CEO Mark Sirangelo said his company is continuing work on its Dream Chaser design for both orbital and suborbital applications, including working with NASA on an unfunded COTS agreement. The company’s operations have been disrupted because of the San Diego wildfires that forced them to evacuate their Poway, California headquarters; he said their team is working on their new COTS proposal from a trailer on a beach near San Diego.
- Sirangelo added that SpaceDev may work with Benson Space Company on engine technology for BSC’s suborbital vehicle, but plans no additional involvement on that project.
- Hugues Laporte-Weywada, senior vice president of EADS Astrium, didn’t offer a lot of new details about his company’s suborbital space tourism vehicle. That effort started in early 2006 with market and design studies; the Rocketplane-like spaceplane won out over rocket-and-capsule and air-launched spaceplane approaches. The company is continuing work on both technology and financing, and hopes to have all the money lined up to develop the vehicle as soon as possible in early 2008.
- The government-commercial synergy panel was a crowded mix of familiar topics (operationally responsive space, the Marine Corps’ SUSTAIN concept, and other RLV technology development work), without a lot of new developments announced.
- Two afternoon panels featuring past and expectant space travelers were combined into one, with Anousheh Ansari and two NASA astronauts (Michael Lopez-Alegria and Dan Barry) discussing what their orbital flights were like, as well as expectant or would-be space tourists Reda Anderson (Rocketplane), Craig Willan (Virgin Galactic), and Lori Garver (who tried to arrange a trip to the ISS in 2002) discussing their expectations. One theme that emerged: when you’re in space, take time to simply soak in the experience rather than get caught up in tasks or taking pictures.
Thursday’s sessions appear focused on spaceport development, financing, and more discussions with astronauts. I will continue, as schedule and technology permits, to microblog some insights from the conference on Twitter during the day.
One of the big topics that will likely come up during the ISPS and X Prize Cup will be the future of Rocketplane Inc. given its loss of its funded COTS award earlier this month. (Rocketplane president George French and VP of business development Chuck Lauer are both scheduled to be on the first panel of the day Wednesday at the ISPS). An article that appeared this past weekend in The Oklahoman suggested that the company would turn its attention back to suborbital space tourism, which had received far less attention over the last 18 months or so as the company focused on the K-1 orbital vehicle. Rocketplane Global, the subsidiary focused on suborbital flight, will unveil a new design of the XP suborbital vehicle this week; the reports haven’t indicated if this is a design tweak or a substantial redesign, or the reasons behind the change.
At the same time, though, there’s signs that Rocketplane Kistler is not going to give up that funded COTS award without a fight. Space News reported this week that the company is already starting its appeal process within the agency, a three-step process that works its way up to NASA associate administrator Rich Gilbrech, who previously agreed to the decision to terminate the award. (That seems to suggest that RpK’s odds of success are low.) The company does have the option after that to file suit in federal court; that, though, would cost the company more time and money, and probably not create a lot of goodwill with NASA. One consolation: RpK is free to submit a proposal in the new competition by NASA to award the $175 million that was freed up when NASA terminated the original RpK contract.
I’m in Las Cruces, New Mexico for what is arguably the marquee week this year in the space tourism field: the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight this Wednesday and Thursday, and the X Prize Cup Saturday and Sunday at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo (where the event is billed as the “2007 Holloman Air and Space Expo Featuring The X Prize Cup”.)
The conference will be a good opportunity to get updates on the progress of various ventures (not the least of which being Rocketplane Kistler, now that the company has lost its funded COTS award), while the Cup will be headlined by the Lunar Lander Challenge, with Armadillo Aerospace likely to be the only team flying, unless Acuity, who has been developing their entry largely out of the media spotlight, has made more progress than publicly recognized. There are a number of other announcements by various companies expected at the Cup, primarily during a media day on Friday.
I will be posting updates from both the ISPS and the X Prize Cup, Internet connectivity permitting, as well as get caught up on some other recent developments I haven’t had an opportunity to post here. Also, as an experiment in up-to-the-microsecond microblogging, I’ll attempt to post some quick updates during the events on a newly-created Twitter feed.
Some brief items in recent days associated with space tourism:
- Virgin Galactic is making inroads in India, establishing relationships with travel agencies there. Virgin is charging 8 million rupees for a suborbital flight, which works out to just over $200,000 at current exchange rates.
- Back in the US, how is one travel agency selling Virgin Galactic flights? “Everybody’s been to Iceland,” said travel agent Angie Lepley of Tangerine Travel, one of Virgin’s accredited agents. “This is all unknown.” (For the record, I haven’t been to Iceland or space.) As for the risks of spaceflight, “She never considered that selling space flights could have a downside,” the Seattle Times reported.
- It’s hard to believe, but Richard Branson actually oversells the suborbital spaceflight experience in a speech in Boston. “You’ll go from (zero) to 4,000 miles an hour in 10 seconds – which will be quite a ride,” he said. The acceleration required for that change in speed is a bit beyond the likely capabilities of SpaceShipTwo—and that’s a good thing for the health and comfort of the passengers.
- If you’re looking for a way to make a space flight affordable, Russian banks may be willing to give you a good deal on a loan. Just make sure the loan is in dollars or euros or rubles, and not QUIDs, possibly the most inane idea associated with space for quite some time.
Getting voters in southern New Mexico to approve a sales tax increase to help fund Spaceport America—something Doña Ana County narrowly approved this spring—was supposed to be the hard part. It turns out actually enacting the tax and collecting the money is proving more difficult. County officials found in recent weeks that while they could collect the tax money, they could not spend it (including the share devoted to educational activity), until two neighboring counties, Sierra and Otero, pass their own tax referenda and create a “spaceport district”. Since neither county has immediate plans to approve a tax, Doña Ana county commissioners voted last week to delay implementation of the tax, scheduled to go into effect on January 1.
Not so fast, say state officials. On Friday the state’s Taxation and Revenue Department notified the county that it has to start collecting the tax as scheduled, district or no district. According to latest reports, county commissioners held a closed session Monday to discuss their options, which could include legal action, but declined to talk about the session afterwards.
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