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…has been selected, but hasn’t been announced yet, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said during a luncheon speech at the ISDC Friday. “The next [tourist] flight is next year,” he said. “We have the person who is going to go but we haven’t yet disclosed their name. But it will be another exciting one, it will be another first.” Anderson also said that the current cost of an orbital flight is $25 million, in line with earlier reports about Simonyi’s flight but more than the $21.8 million price quoted by Roskosmos this week.
Anderson was also revealing few details about Space Adventures’ suborbital flight plans. The company has kept a low profile about those plans since a flurry of publicity back in early 2006. “I prefer not to comment on that too much right now,” he said. “We are still working on it. Everything costs more and takes longer, so we’ll see.” At the other extreme, he said there is still strong interest in the company’s circumlunar space flight proposal. “I have a few people who are interested,” he said, adding that he plans to work with them over the next few months to get them to formally sign up.
Ad Astra/SPACE.com reports that Benson Space Company and SpaceDev plan to release a new design for their Dream Chaser suborbital spacecraft during the ISDC this weekend here in Dallas. The design drops the HL-20-based lifting body approach for the vehicle in favor of a more conventional rocketplane approach that bears similarities to the X-15, albeit with a cockpit studded with portholes like SpaceShipOne. This vehicle is intended to be “safer and more aerodynamic” that the earlier design, Benson said. The article has only a few other details, but Benson is scheduled to speak Friday afternoon during a panel session at the ISDC, which may be his opportunity to talk more about the new design and its implications for the company’s space tourism plans.
Update: Just after I posted this Benson Space issued a press release announcing the new design.
An RIA Novosti article today reports that “more than 10 people” are interested in buying seats on Soyuz flights, following in the footsteps of the five orbital space tourists to date. “We are holding preliminary consultations with them, and there are no Russians among them,” said Roskosmos spokesman Igor Panarin. He also confirmed past reports that the cost of s Soyuz flight was going up from $20 million to $21.8 million, although many news reports of Charles Simonyi’s ISS flight pegged the cost as high as $25 million.
Yesterday’s Space Venture Finance Symposium didn’t devote much attention to space tourism itself, focusing instead on the state of financing (from angels through VCs to private equity and corporate deals) in the entrepreneurial space industry. One item did catch my eye: German consultant Joerg Kreisel described several types of space ventures. There was space-to-space (S2S) businesses (borrowing from the commonly-used business-to-business, or B2B, class of ventures), such as a number of on-orbit servicing ventures in the works. There are also the more common S2E (space-to-earth) businesses, like communications and navigation. Then there’s S2R. S2R? Space-to-rism, Kreisel explained. (Groan.) So what does he think of S2R, er, space tourism? “I think we will see many people die on the way, but that was the same in the early days of air flight.”
Earlier this week I ran across an article titled “Space tourism still distant” in The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper of UCLA. Reading this, you’d think the prospects for space tourism were pretty dim indeed, based on these misconceptions included in the article:
- A suborbital spaceflight “has a price tag of about $20 million”;
- Orbital flights not only cost even more but are “restricted to astronauts and researchers”;
- A suborbital spaceflight “does not allow for the floating-in-air experience that a flight orbiting the earth permits”;
- A hurdle to orbital spaceflight is that “just the logistics of getting their bodies fit is alone another barrier”;
- Large-scale space tourism may never happen because “we will run out of petroleum before we can get off the planet in any large numbers”
Yikes. Although you can quibble with some of the opinions above, there are clearly some major errors in the article. The biggest flaw, though, is that the article relies on “experts” who are actually professors and grad students in the physics and astronomy department at UCLA. While these are smart people who know a lot about space science, they’re not automatically going to be experts about space tourism or related applications. Unfortunately, many people assume that just because you study the universe, you know everything that is going on in space.
Fortunately, this story should soon have a happy ending. I contacted the author yesterday and pointed out some of the most egregious errors, and suggested some alternative sources in the LA area. I got an email back saying that my corrections had been passed on the paper’s managing editor and a correction would run in Friday’s issue of the paper (although it’s not been posted yet to the corrections page of the paper’s web site).
I’m in Dallas right now for this year’s International Space Development Conference, which gets underway today with the Space Venture Finance Symposium, featuring a number of companies in the personal spaceflight or related fields. Some highlights from the rest of the conference, which runs through Monday morning:
- Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic will speak during a plenary session on Friday morning;
- Eric Anderson of Space Adventures will be the luncheon speaker on Friday, talking about his company’s proposal for circumlunar spaceflights for tourists;
- A “Space Business” track Friday afternoon features, among others, John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jim Benson of Benson Space Company, Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane, David Gump of t/Space, and Rick Tumlinson of Orbital Outfitters;
- A “Frontier Transport” track, also Friday afternoon, includes talks about space tourism and spaceports;
- Another Friday afternoon track on “Spaceflight Law and Insurance” covers some related issues, including “Insuring Space Tourism: It Isn’t Rocket Science – Is It?”;
- There will be a session on NASA’s COTS effort Saturday afternoon, with speakers from NASA, Rocketplane Kistler, and SpaceX;
- The COTS session will be followed by talks by Brett Alexander of the Personal Spaceflight Federation and Rick Homans of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority;
- A session Sunday afternoon will be devoted to NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and the X Prize Foundation;
- There will be two space medicine tracks, on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, with a particular focus on space tourism medical issues.
There’s actually a lot more, but those are (some of) the highlights. I’ll post updates from these sessions as time permits. There will be plenty of other reports from other outlets, as well: Alan Boyle of MSNBC has already posted a preview article about the conference with a nice overview of the status of a number of companies in the field.
An effort to establish a commercial spaceport at Cecil Field, a former Navy air base near Jacksonville, Florida, has taken a step forward with an FAA review of an environmental assessment. According to the Florida Times-Union article, “no major issues” came up during the review, although there were a number of unspecified issues that the local aviation authority, which operates Cecil Field, has to address, and doesn’t anticipate completing the spaceport licensing process until some time next year.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, they’re thinking big about the future role Spaceport Okahoma might play. Noting that there is a statue of an Irish immigrant to America in both an Irish seaport and Ellis Island, an op-ed in the Edmond (Okla.) Sun suggests:
Within the next several centuries, when colonization of other planets begins, there may be a similar monument situated at the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority’s facility in Burns Flat in Washita County to commemorate those who left earth to begin new lives on other planets.
Odds are that, when you travel, especially to exotic, out-of-the-way locations, you’ll be charged with bringing back souvenirs for friends and family who didn’t get to go. That’s true even for space tourists. Only problem: there’s no gift shop on the ISS. So Charles Simonyi had to improvise when he brought “a plastic shopping bag bearing artifacts” to Seattle’s Museum of Flight on Wednesday. Inside the bag was a glove from the spacesuit he wore on his flight and the drogue parachute from the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft, in which Simonyi returned to Earth last month after his stay. Sure beats something like “Charles Simonyi went to the ISS and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”…
The trade publication High-Performance Composites offers this news about the development of SpaceShipTwo:
Advanced Composites Group Ltd. (ACG, Heanor, Derbyshire, U.K.) will supply a new generation of out-of-autoclave prepregs for the project, featuring MTM45-1, a variable-cure temperature, high-performance, toughened epoxy matrix developed for resin film infusion and prepreg processing. It was designed for low-pressure vacuum bag processing and, in addition to resin film and prepreg formats, is available in partially or selectively impregnated formats to reduce layup time, surface defects and internal voids. After a freestanding postcure, the system is capable of 150°C (302°F) wet Tg and reportedly exhibits good damage tolerance. Initial cure can be as low as 80°C/176°F, which ACG says allows for the use of lower cost tooling materials.
But you all knew that already.
While Virgin Galactic got a lot of publicity in the Middle East last week when it announced its first customer from the UAE, not everyone is impressed. In an article in ArabianBusiness.com, Anil Bhoyrul sees the announcement, and Virgin Galactic itself, as little more than a publicity stunt designed to further the overall Virgin brand. Bhoyrul acknowledges that Virgin Galactic has attracted a lot of attention and customers to date (although it’s not clear they have really signed up 400 fully-paid customers yet, and even if they did, the $80 million in revenue would not be nearly enough to break even). However, “the real point here is that, whether it made a dollar or not, this is going to be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, and executed by one of the world’s greatest marketing men.”
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Desert skepticism
While Virgin Galactic got a lot of publicity in the Middle East last week when it announced its first customer from the UAE, not everyone is impressed. In an article in ArabianBusiness.com, Anil Bhoyrul sees the announcement, and Virgin Galactic itself, as little more than a publicity stunt designed to further the overall Virgin brand. Bhoyrul acknowledges that Virgin Galactic has attracted a lot of attention and customers to date (although it’s not clear they have really signed up 400 fully-paid customers yet, and even if they did, the $80 million in revenue would not be nearly enough to break even). However, “the real point here is that, whether it made a dollar or not, this is going to be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, and executed by one of the world’s greatest marketing men.”