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While we wait for more officials details about Northrop’s acquisition of Scaled Composites, I went back to the comments by Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic Saturday morning at the NewSpace 2007 conference. Some additional excerpts from his brief mention of the deal in his address:
We’ve spent a long time looking at this, and it’s not appropriate for a company like Virgin to own a development company. We’re an operating company. What we want to do, as we’ve said for a long time, is to be the operator of spaceships. We love the product that Burt Rutan has at Scaled Composites. But what we want to be able to do is vie this off against the next manufacturer, have other options to compete with them. So it’s not appropriate for us, really, to get involved in the development. We have a position with The Spaceship Company and, again, that creates some problems for us as well…
As far as the agreed position on this stuff, it’s all very good, we’re very, very happy with it. The headlines are that there’s no change to the management structure, no change to the operating policies of Scaled Composites, and no change to the customer base… We’re exceptionally happy…
Answering a question about how the business relationship between Scaled and Virgin will change with the acquisition:
It’s exceptionally positive. We couldn’t ask for a better partner… Northrop Grumman, I don’t think a lot of people realize, have been our partners for the last four years. They’ve had a large ownership position, up to 50 percent, they were the largest shareholder of Scaled anyway. What’s been obvious I think to them and obvious to us is that they’ve got a fantastic asset there, and if you have the opportunity to expand your ownership of that, you do. And what do you expand it to? The maximum you can possibly get; they got 100 percent. We’re really happy. There’s no change to the status quo. If anything, what it’s done is it’s taken out some of the variables, taken out some of the risk. We know now we’ve got someone who doesn’t have any financial issues and will keep the no-change policy in place. We’re very happy, very happy.
Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic gave the keynote address Saturday morning at the NewSpace 2007 conference and briefly mentioned the news that Northrop Grumman is acquiring Scaled Composites. Tai said that a formal announcement is planned for Monday, but that Virgin is “extraordinarily happy” and “extraordinarily positive” about the acquisition. He said that they couldn’t ask for a better company to work with, and that Northrop planned no changes to the status quo, including the management structure and operating plans.
Space News is reporting this afternoon that Northrop Grumman has increased its stake in Scaled Composites from 40 to 100 percent [subscription required]. A formal announcement about the deal hasn’t been made by either company, nor terms of the sale announced. Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic, who is in Washington today to attend the NewSpace 2007 conference, declined to comment about the sale in the article. This is obviously a very interesting deal, but it seems too soon right now to speculate what this means for Scaled and its suborbital spacecraft development plans.
If you are looking for something to do this Sunday afternoon, you can tune into The Space Show at 3:00 pm EDT, where I will be Dr. David Livingston’s guest on the 90-minute show. One thing we will be talking about during the show will be the NewSpace 2007 conference, which wraps up Saturday, but with all that time there will be opportunities to talk about space tourism and other topics. And if, for some reason, you actually have better things to do Sunday afternoon than listen to an Internet radio show, the show will be archived for later listening.
Yesterday’s issue of The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, profiles businessman John Criswick, one of four Canadians who have signed up with Virgin Galactic for suborbital spaceflights. Criswick, the CEO of a mobile software company, has had a long interest in space, and even applied to join the Canadian astronauts corps but didn’t make the cut because, as he put it, “I didn’t have enough PhDs.” “I’m not excited because it’s so far away,” he added. But I’m sure two or three months before [the trip] my level of anxiety and excitement is definitely going to change.”
Meanwhile, an Indian television network, UTV, has announced a contest with a suborbital spaceflight as the top prize. The contest is tied to the launch of a youth-themed channel, Bindass (which presumably doesn’t sound quite so bad in Hindi as opposed to English); the winner will get a flight on Rocketplane’s XP vehicle at some future date. According to the PTI article, the contest is described as “a search for India’s first space tourist”, although one Indian has already claimed that feat as one of Virgin Galactic’s first 100 “Founders”. According to another report, the CEO of the new channel, Zarina Mehta, said, “The idea of presenting the youth with a chance to travel into space is a truly ‘Bindass’ thing to do.” Um, if you say so.
Yesterday Space Adventures announced that they have finalized the contracts for the next two tourists to visit the ISS. The company didn’t disclose the names of the tourists, saying only that more details would be released “in the coming weeks”. That’s not too surprising: the company had been dropping hints for some time that they were in negotiations with a number of prospective tourists. The dates of the flights, fall 2008 and spring 2009, are not surprising either, since those are the next two available flight opportunities (the seats in the next two flights, this fall and next spring, have been secured for guest cosmonauts from Malaysia and South Korea.)
What was surprising, though, was the news as reported by the AP that the cost of a trip to the ISS was going up significantly, to as much as $40 million. (SPACE.com also reported the increase, saying the cost would now be “no less than $30 million”.) Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson said that the increase was due primarily to the weak dollar. However, there are a few factors to suggest that this is not the only factor:
- The dollar has grown weaker compared to the ruble: from about 32 rubles to the dollar in 2002 to 25 rubles today. But that would mean that a flight that cost $20 million in 2002 would cost a little over $25 million now, everything else being equal. (A $25-million price in 2002 would be a little over $30 million now.) It’s tough to get to $40 million on that alone.
- While the dollar was relatively strong compared to the ruble in 2002, it was actually weaker in 2001: about 28.5 rubles to the dollar in April 2001, around the time Dennis Tito made his historic flight to the ISS. (You can calculate historic currency rates here.)
- Russian reports of the price has typically always been quoted in dollars, not rubles, such as this article from May by the RIA Novosti news agency. That article, incidentally, said that the price Roskosmos was charging from Soyuz seats was going up to $21.8 million.
It’s not surprising that currency rates are making Russian spaceflights more expensive, but it doesn’t seem like it can be the only factor to explain the increase. Other factors, such as the increased cost of raw materials for the production of Soyuz spacecraft and launch vehicles (which has affected the price of other Russian vehicles in the last couple of years), as well as the laws of supply and demand, may play a significant role as well.
Earlier this week the Select Committee on Science and Technology of the British Parliament issued a report on UK space policy. What’s noteworthy about this report is that it includes a section about space tourism. This section outlines the recent developments in vehicles and companies to serve primarily the suborbital market, including Virgin Galactic, of course. The report also deals with the potential environmental impact of space tourism (previously discussed here), offering the views of both those who think emissions from suborbital spacecraft is a major concern and those who think it isn’t an issue. (The former UK science minister, Malcolm Wicks, takes a compromise stance, saying, “the environmental impact in terms of carbon emissions might be something that should be looked at most carefully in judging whether this is a societal priority.”)
The report doesn’t conclude that the British government should be spending money to help develop space tourism vehicles specifically, or on the industry in general. However, the report does suggest that the UK should do more to create a supportive regulatory environment, citing in particular current law in the US, which is “leading the world in this area”. (The report goes a little too far when it claims that the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) “created an Office of Commercial Space Transportation under the auspices of the US Federal Aviation Administration that is responsible for regulating the industry.” That office had existed, either as part of the FAA or as a standalone entity, for about two decades before the CSLAA was enacted; the bill simply gave the existing office the authority to regulate commercial passenger spaceflight.) The report recommends that the British National Space Centre “use its consultation on regulation to discuss the establishment of a regulatory framework and responsible body with the relevant authorities.”
How influential and effective this report will be isn’t clear, particularly for an observer like myself on the other side of the Atlantic. The report does suggest that former science minister Wicks wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about space tourism: he’s quoted in the report as saying, “of all the things I am excited about space tourism is not at the top of my list.” It’s not clear what level of interest the new science minister, Ian Pearson, has in space tourism, or space in general, as he’s been on the job since only early this month.
A large fraction of Canadians think that space tourism flights to other planets would be possible within the next 100 years, according to the results of a poll reported by the Canadian Press. A whopping 85 percent thought that such vacations would be possible in the next century “or more”, including 13 percent who believed that such jaunts could be possible in the next 50 years. However, “futurist” Mike Dover of Toronto consultancy New Paradigm tried to put the kibosh on such thoughts in the Canadian Press article: “I don’t see that it would be in the realm of possibilities for amateur or civilian travel for many, many centuries.” Of course, it depends on what’s meant by vacations to other planets—or, for that matter, what a “planet” is. After all, Space Adventures is recruiting passengers for a circumlunar flight that could take place in the next several years, not centuries.
Pratt & Whitney Canada announced today that Virgin Galactic has picked its PW308 engine for use on the White Knight 2 aircraft that will be the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo. The engine, which generated up to 30,700 newtons (6,900 pounds) of thrust, has been used on a number of bizjets; the press release doesn’t indicate how many such engines WK2 will use. The release does state that P&WC will work with Virgin on the potential use of “advanced biofuels” to reduce engine emissions, reducing the system’s overall carbon footprint by up to 50 percent.
As a followup to Benson Space’s announcement of its “low-G” reentry plan, Brian Binnie of Scaled Composites talked a bit about the planned reentry experience for SpaceShipTwo during a talk Saturday at the Heinlein Centennial in Kansas City. According to Binnie, the peak G forces on reentry will be about 7 Gs. However, in a later discussion, he said that the G-force profile during reentry will be shaped like a bell curve, with about 20 seconds where the forces are in excess of 4 Gs. (Taking 7 Gs lying flat, as passengers on SS2 will be doing, is equivalent to taking 3-4 Gs sitting up, he noted.) He added that while Benson Space’s approach could be a way to mitigate G forces, the approach Scaled and Virgin are taking has the advantage of being simpler and thus less prone to failures.
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