|
|
I was able to make it down to Alabama this weekend to attend the symposium where Burt Rutan spoke this morning. His prepared remarks did not directly address recent events (either the accident last month or the acquisition of Scaled Composites by Northrop Grumman, which closed yesterday). However, I was able to talk with him for a few minutes after his speech. Some highlights:
- They have yet to determine a cause for the explosion last month, which remains under investigation.
- Work on the propulsion program remains on hold at the moment, with future plans uncertain, but work in other areas, such as the carrier aircraft, continue
- The accident had been tough for both Rutan and the company, because this is the first time they’ve had a casualty in any of their programs. They have received considerable support from the community, though.
- The acquisition will not have any material changes on Scaled or how it operates, something Northrop specifically requested.
I will write up some more notes on his speech when I have a chance (I’m using a public Internet terminal during a brief lunch break), including, most likely, a detailed article in Monday’s edition of The Space Review.
Is Rocketplane Inc. in dire financial straits, or are they make progress on financing? Conflicting messages about the health of the company have been published this week. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) first reported Tuesday that the company had yet to close a $500-million financing round for the K-1 orbital vehicle that had been due at the end of July, and reported that the lead contractor for the K-1, ATK, had suspended work on the project. The Journal followed that up on Thursday with news that the company was laying off employees and issuing stop-work orders to subcontractors because of the financing problems.
A report Thursday in Rocketplane’s hometown newspaper, The Oklahoman, paints a more optimistic picture of the company’s circumstances. Company CEO George French blamed recent problems in the stock market for the company’s difficulty in lining up financing, but said Rocketplane was “making headway” in its financing. (Thursday’s WSJ article also suggests that Rocketplane was affected by investors who became jittery after the Scaled Composites accident last month.)
Without that financing, Rocketplane’s COTS award is in jeopardy (the company has to raise the $500 million to meet its next milestone). The Journal claims that a failure by Rocketplane to raise that money “creates significant policy and budget uncertainties” for NASA, although the agency is, in the worst-case scenario, only out the money it awarded to date to Rocketplane, and there are other companies, like SpaceDev and t/Space, waiting in the wings should NASA terminate its existing deal with Rocketplane. A failure in the K-1 development could bode ill for the XP suborbital vehicle, which has languished to some degree while the company has put most of its resources towards the K-1.
Burt Rutan is scheduled to be a keynote speaker tomorrow at the Blackburn Institute 2007 Academic Symposium at the University of Alabama, part of an event titled “Responsibility for the Future Exploration and Development of Space”. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be that newsworthy of an event, but it will be one of the fist public speaking engagements by Rutan since the accident last month that killed three Scaled Composites employees. (I checked with the university’s public affairs department yesterday and confirmed that he is still scheduled to speak.)
Both Scaled and Virgin Galactic have kept a low profile since the accident, something discussed in an online article from an unlikely source: KOLO-TV in Reno, Nevada. One item of note: Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn said that the accident had not caused any existing customers to back out, and, in fact, four new customers have signed up.
The satirical publication The Onion has its own take on space tourism today where friends of a space tourist ridicule him for taking a boring trip:
Despite having never visited outer space before in his life and being completely free from the everyday demands of work, family, and gravity, space tourist Dick Knowles spent his entire 19-day, $7 million vacation holed up inside the space shuttle Atlantis, sources reported Monday.
Among his sins: staying in the shuttle, never leaving orbit, not “sampling the local cuisine”, and, perhaps worst of all, failing “to meet or interact with anyone during his vacation who was not also from Earth.” As one “friend” put it, “He didn’t even visit the moon, for Christ’s sake. Who goes to space and doesn’t visit the moon?”
By know you’ve probably read about the venture, first reported Friday by Reuters, that is planning to develop a space hotel by 2012. I had held off on commenting about this development, in part because I’ve been on travel the last few days, but also because I’ve been trying to find out more about the “Galactic Suite” effort.
In general I have been disappointed with some of the uncritical reporting on this, not only from Reuters, but also from other sources, like The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail in the UK and even SPACE.com. (One refreshing departure is MSNBC, which notes that “it’s not yet clear exactly how much backing is behind the design concept”.) I am skeptical about the claims that this venture will have a space hotel flying in 2012—or any time in the foreseeable future—for at least a couple major reasons:
- The original Reuters article claims that “a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.” “Most” would imply an investment of well over $1 billion, perhaps over $2 billion, which is very difficult to accept at face value. There are people putting tens or hundreds of millions into projects (Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Robert Bigelow, for example), but billions? Look at all the trouble Rocketplane Kistler is having trying to raise $500 million, for something that is a lot more realistic.
- It’s not at all clear how people will get to and from this space hotel once it’s in orbit. Artists depictions in the news reports and on the web site either show a winged vehicle, not like any orbital vehicle under active development, at the station; one even shows a space shuttle (!!) being used to assemble the hotel. A space hotel is no good if the guests can’t get there.
The conceptual design of this facility is certainly intriguing, and it’s clear a lot of thought has been put into this design. It is not at all clear, though, that this is anything more than a design project at this point in time. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Carl Sagan once said. Galactic Suite has certainly satisfied the former condition, but not yet the latter.
(Note: I have contacted Galactic Suite with some questions about this project, but have not received a response yet. If I do get any information from them that clarifies these issues I will pass it along.)
The Russian space agency Roskosmos is reviewing applications from several Russians reportedly interested in flying to the ISS as space tourists, the Russian publication Kommersant reported. Space Adventures has reserved the available seat on Soyuz taxi flights to the ISS in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, so it’s not clear from this article what role Roskosmos is playing here; the article states that Alexey Krasnov, head of Roskosmos manned flight programs. “appeared never doubting Roskosmos ability to agree with Space Adventures on the issue.” Space Adventures announced last month that it had finalized contracts with Roskosmos for those two flights and would announce who would go on those flights in the “coming weeks”.
It shouldn’t be surprising that an event like last week’s explosion in Mojave has resulted in its share of both good and bad reporting. However, an article in ArabianBusiness.com is a particularly egregious example of poor reporting on this topic. The article argues that Richard Branson’s “entire commercial space tourism dream is in tatters” because of the explosion, “and nobody can guarantee whether Virgin Galactic will ever make it into space.” True, but few things in life, as the saying goes, are guaranteed.
So lets look at some of the facts and statements in the article. An example: “Branson has invested US$600m into the venture and taken a staggering US$200m in advance ticket sales.” Both are, by any estimate, wild exaggerations. Virgin officials have previously stated that it will spend $225-250 million by the time it begins commercial operations. As recently as last month, at the NewSpace 2007 conference, Virgin’s Alex Tai said that the company has taken in about $25 million in deposits.
Another howler: “The company’s investigation into the incident could take nearly two months, but before then, a separate inquiry by NASA may decide to revoke Virgin Galactic’s licence to develop rockets at the base.” Where to begin? First of all, NASA isn’t involved in this process at all, in granting licenses or otherwise. It’s also unclear what sort of license you would need “to develop rockets at the base”, short of, perhaps, some sort of permits regarding the use or storage of particular chemicals and the like.
And another, right after the previous: “Given the growing speculation that some parts of SpaceShipTwo were based on the same design as the doomed Challenger Space Shuttle, that remains a strong possibility.” All you can say to that is, huh?
Part of the article is based on comments made by an unnamed “senior Virgin Galactic executive”, including this quote: “if NASA steps in then obviously that kind of decision is out of our hands.” This ignorance about NASA’s (non-)role in regulating the industry suggests that this person is not a senior exec with the company, or even affiliated with the company at all.
There’s more, but at this point it would be piling on. (Although perhaps George French of Rocketplane Inc. will appreciate the promotion to “billionaire”, not to mention Geoff Sheerin to “tycoon”.) The main question is: do we ascribe this article to ignorance or malice?
On Wednesday the New Mexico Spaceport Authority announced the design team for Spaceport America: URS Corporation, a San Francisco-based design and engineering firm, partnered with UK company Foster + Partners. The two firms won the design competition for the spaceport’s primary terminal and hangar facility, beating out 10 other firms, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. The winning design itself wasn’t released: that will come around the middle of the month, once a contract between the state and the design firms is finalized.
If you have the chance to watch The Martha Stewart Show today (and I’m sure you’re a regular viewer), Anousheh Ansari is one of the guests, talking about her trip to the ISS. (It’s not clear if this is a new segment or perhaps a rerun of a previous interview.) In the 30-second preview on the web site Ansari isn’t even mentioned at all, getting elbowed out by a fashion designer and a New York cheesecake. Really.
On Tuesday shareholders in Russian aerospace company RSC Energia, which includes the Russian government, officially named Vitaly Lopota as the company’s new president. Lopota replaces Nikolai Sevastianov, who was effectively ousted last month. Sevastianov got into trouble in part by making bold pronouncements about plans to return to the moon, ranging from far-fetched proposals to mine the lunar regolith for helium-3 to proposals to fly Soyuz missions on circumlunar missions around the Moon. The latter, of course, has been something that Space Adventures has been trying to line up paying passengers for, at $100 million for each of two available seats.
Lopota appears to be distancing himself from those lunar mission plans. For example, Itar-Tass noted that Energia will coordinate its announcements with the Russian space agency Roskosmos because, previously, “Sevastianov often declared plans for manned space flights that disagreed with the official position of the agency and the federal space program for 2006-2015.” RIA Novosti reported that Sevastianov “has been repeatedly criticized, primarily for his daring projects relating to lunar exploration, branded “lunacy” by the Space Agency”. (The irony of branding lunar exploration plans as “lunacy” is apparently lost on Novosti’s editors.) These comments suggest that proposals to modify Soyuz spacecraft for circumlunar missions may be shifted to the back burner under Energia’s new leadership.
|
|
Recent Comments