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There have been some conflicting statements in the media recently about when Virgin Galactic would begin passenger service. Flight International reported this week that the company is “still a few years away from operations”, in the words of company COO Alex Tai, who spoke a Royal Aeronautical Society event in London last week on the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. That would represent something of a delay over previous statements—understandable given the accident in Mojave in July—although Virgin officials have frequently said in the past that they are driven by safety rather than a specific schedule.
However, Richard Branson has a different schedule in mind. In San Francisco yesterday to inaugurate Virgin America airline service to Las Vegas, Branson said that Virgin Galactic is “still just about 18 months from launch”. Branson added that the White Knight 2 carrier aircraft, which had been named “Eve” in some accounts, would be named “The Spirit of Steve Fossett” after the aviator who went missing last month in Nevada; Branson had sponsored some of Fossett’s record-breaking flights.
The French news agency AFP reports today that a Russian politician may replace Richard Garriott on an October 2008 Soyuz flight. Just a week ago Space Adventures announced that Garriott, an executive at a computer gaming company and the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, would be a passenger on that Soyuz taxi flight to the ISS, spending a week on the space station. However, AFP, citing an article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, reports that Garriott may be replaced by Vladimir Gruzdev, a wealthy politician and adventurer. Gruzdev had been reported last month as a likely candidate to be the first Russian space tourist and certainly has the means to pay for the trip himself, although his political party, United Russia, would reportedly pay for the flight as “our budget contribution to the space program”, according to party head Boris Gryzlov. A Roskosmos official told Kommersant that Gruzdev “takes priority” over Garriott and would be on that mission; it’s not clear what would then happen to Garriott (perhaps train as a backup and fly in spring 2009?)
Update: according to a RIA Novosti article published Friday, apparently in reaction to the Kommersant report, Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov said Gruzdev would not fly before late 2009, not next October. “November 2009 seems a likely date, not the fall of 2008, and I cannot put a final timeline to it since the decision will be influenced by the U.S. and other European Space Agency member countries, Japan, and others,” he told the news service.
I’m in Philadelphia today visiting the new NASTAR Center, the National Aerospace Training and Research Center. This facility is specifically designing to giving people, including potential space tourists, training in some of the aspects of the spaceflight experience. Last night there was a reception at the center in the room that hosts a centrifuge:
Later today there will be tours and speeches by Anousheh Ansari, Greg Olsen, and Buzz Aldrin. I’ll report more on this later today or tomorrow.
Last month, NASA issued a notice to Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) announcing its intent to terminate the $207-million COTS award the space agency made to the company last August. NASA cited RpK’s failure to meet its financing milestones in its agreement. That notice started a 30-day waiting period before NASA would take any action to terminate the agreement; that period expires in less than week.
RpK, as you might expect, is fighting any bid by NASA to terminate the award. NASA SpaceFlight.com reports that the company sent a seven-page letter to NASA associate administrator Scott Horowitz protesting the decision, putting much of the blame for RpK’s financing problems on the space agency itself. Specifically, the company claims that NASA’s decision in the spring to procure additional Soyuz spacecraft, and then the release of an RFI in August for Phase 2 of COTS (one that did not strictly require potential bidders to have demonstrated their capabilities in Phase 1), harmed the company as it was trying to make its business case to potential investors.
Despite those obstacles, RpK claims it was able to raise a substantial fraction of the $460 million it needed (it already had $40 million in hand from a previous round). Interestingly, much of the money came from unnamed Canadian sources, including a “large Canadian investment fund” that was willing to fund up to all of the company’s requirements; that offer was blocked because of NASA requirements that a “sizeable” fraction of the investment come from US sources. By August, a combination of the NASA COTS Phase 2 RFI, as well as the sub-prime mortgage crisis that roiled financial markets in recent months, caused that deal to fall through.
How effective will this protest be? It’s hard to say now, but it certainly appears that much of the industry does expect NASA to terminate the COTS agreement with RpK and conduct a new competition for the remaining money (about $175 million) in that deal, with everyone from the other COTS awardee, SpaceX, to companies large and small lining up to submit proposals.
Forbes.com posted today a review of Michael Belfiore’s book Rocketeers published earlier this summer. Or, at least, the review is time-stamped October 2, 2007, at 3:24 pm Eastern time. The review’s lede: “At California’s Mojave Airport last week, an explosion killed three and critically injured two.” Last week? That accident took place over two months ago, of course. (And they also got the number of people injured wrong; it was three.)
So maybe they’re recycling a review published two months ago. Or maybe not. The start of the next paragraph: “A burgeoning industry was launched 50 years ago today with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union.” Erm, not quite: Sputnik was launched 50 years ago Thursday, the day after tomorrow. So either time is a relatively unimportant concept for Forbes’ traditionally well-to-do readership, or they’re unable to afford an editor.
(For the record, the review is generally favorable to Rocketeers, noting that “Belfiore’s writing is lucid and energetic, and his passion for all things space-related makes even technical discussions of aerodynamics easy reading.”)
Getting accepted by the training staff at Star City was a particular challenge of Anousheh Ansari in her bid to fly in space, she said in an interview with the Collegiate Times, the campus newspaper of Virginia Tech, where Ansari spoke last night. Ansari explained that the staff at Star City was not used to training female cosmonauts, given that there are virtually none in Russia. “Having a woman was a big adjustment for all of them and they were not so welcoming at the beginning,” Ansari said. “All throughout my life I learned that I just do what I think is right and go after what I want and just do my best and usually the people change their minds. They saw my passion and how excited I was, and my excitement finally transferred to them and they were excited for me. I felt welcome after about the first month and a half.” (Presumably, though, the training personnel there were used to female American astronauts like Susan Helms and Peggy Whitson, who both flew long-duration missions to the ISS before Ansari.)
Ansari didn’t offer much in the new of new insights or developments in her interview there. Asked if she would like to go to space again, she said, “I would love to. I loved being in space and I felt at home. If I get another opportunity to do it, I will.”
Since Galactic Suite formally announced their plans in August to develop a space hotel by 2012, generating a burst of publicity as well as unanswered questions about their funding, schedule, transportation options, and the like, they have kept a low profile. ArabianBusiness.com has an interview with project director Xavier Claramunt today with a bit of additional information since the August announcement. According to Claramunt, Galactic Suite has 28 “reservations”, although he doesn’t specify if that involves any sort of down payment or other up-front money from the customer. Claramunt declined to specify the cost of the effort (previous reports pegged the amount at $3 billion, a huge amount to raise privately). Because Galactic Suite is based in Spain, he said the company would meet Spanish regulations “in everything, including liability, insurance, certifications and registration”; that would be done through a “global administrative centre” the Spanish government is establishing to oversee national space activities.
I did, though, get a kick of out of this exchange:
Do you have any competitors that you know of who are offering a similar product to your company’s?
We know about one company which is developing inflatable modules to accommodate guests in orbit.
That would be an apparent reference to Bigelow Aerospace, which has actually flown two prototype modules; Galactic Suite, by contrast, has not flown anything yet nor has it even demonstrated that it has built any flight-quality hardware for ground testing.
When Space Adventures announced that Richard Garriott going to fly to the ISS next October and with some commercial sponsors, some wondered whether his employer, Korean computer gaming company NCSoft, would be helping pay for the trip. Not so, the company told the Korea Times on Monday. “It is a personal affair (of Garriott). We decided not to participate in the program,” a company spokesperson told the newspaper. There had been speculation that Garriott would use the trip to help promote the company’s online games, perhaps playing them while on the station. He could still do that, of course (communications issues permitting), but it would seem that there would be a lot more interesting things to do on the ISS than play computer games…
Space Adventures announced this morning that Richard Garriott will be the company’s next customer to fly to the ISS on a Soyuz mission. Garriott’s flight is scheduled for October 2008, the next scheduled taxi flight with an open seat. Garriott is billed as the first “second generation” astronaut: his father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut who flew on Skylab and the Space Shuttle.
In the Space Adventures press release, Richard Garriott said that he is devoting his flight to science: “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He already has one research partner: ExtremoZyme, a biotech company founded by his father.
Garriott’s selection was not surprising given some of the rumors going around in recent weeks. As noted here earlier this month, the South Korean press had reported that Garriott might be the next space tourist. Garriott is the CEO of the North American division of NCSoft, a Korean gaming company, which had been rumored to bankroll any trip he might take (NCSoft isn’t mentioned as a sponsor in the announcement.)
And, as you might expect, Richard Garriott already has a web site devoted to his trip.
A lucky Dutch radio listener will win a suborbital spaceflight, according to a report by Radio Netherlands. The Dutch station “Q-music” is giving away the suborbital flight, provided by Space Adventures; the winner will be announced Saturday during an event at an aviation and space museum in Lelystad. The article is a bit skeptical about whether the winner will actually get to fly into space, given that Space Adventures has made little progress on its suborbital space tourism plans: “It will take years before they’re able to stage a space flight, if at all.”
The Radio Netherlands piece does devote some time to those who claim that space tourism is detrimental to the environment, interviewing Peter van Vliet, who runs a “foundation that promotes sustainability”. Van Vliet claims that emissions from suborbital spacecraft are particularly harmful to the upper levels of the atmosphere, although he doesn’t cite any specific data on such effects (which, of course, would depend on the composition and volume of the emissions.) He claims that space tourism is “unacceptable” in an era where there is growing concern about climate change and the environment: “It’s a classic case of something you just can’t do anymore, in this day and age.” Dangerous words.
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