|
|
The Seattle Times has the first interview with Charles Simonyi since his return to Earth on Saturday. He calls the trip “absolutely worthwhile”, full of “rich, fascinating stuff”, although he didn’t call it a particularly spiritual event. He said the future of commercial spaceflight depends on making the experience less complex: “We also have to remember there’s nothing inherent in the spacecraft that makes all these preparations [mandatory]. These are not laws of physics that require preparations. It’s just a stage in technology.”
Simonyi is asked if he’s interested in investing or otherwise getting involved in commercial space ventures after his trip. Simonyi says no: “I think on the supply side there are great entrepreneurs [such as Amazon.com Chief Executive] Jeff Bezos, who has much more experience in understanding of that side.” Instead, he said, “What I feel I ought to do, given that I had this privilege of having done it, is just to communicate what it’s like. If it generates demand, that’s great.”
And for those reports that Bill Gates will be following Simonyi into space? “That’s typical. The Russian press is notorious for their fabrications.”
The fifth commercial visitor to the ISS, Charles Simonyi, is safely back on Earth, landing in Kazakhstan a few hours shy of two weeks after his launch from Baikonur. “It’s good to be back, to be back on Earth,” he said after landing, according to SPACE.com. Earlier, when he was leaving the ISS with NASA astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, he called the departure a “bittersweet moment”: “We are very sad leaving the station but we are looking forward, all of us, to continuing our work on Earth.”
Simonyi will be the last commercial tourist to visit the ISS for some time: the seats on the next two Soyuz taxi flights, in fall 2007 and spring 2008, will be occupied by guest cosmonauts from Malaysia and South Korea, meaning the next tourist flight opportunity won’t come until the fall of 2008. Despite various rumors, there’s been no announcement about who would fly next, although Space Adventures has hinted it would make an announcement in the next several weeks.
Today’s Wall Street Journal features a discussion on space tourism safety issues between Patti Grace Smith, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA; and Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation. (This is one of WSJ.com’s free features today, so no subscription should be required to read it.) It should be little surprise for people who have been following this topic that the two are essentially in total agreement on the issue: there is some risk to passengers, but that the safety of the uninvolved public is paramount. It is a good summary of the thinking on the topic, and Diamandis makes some interesting comments towards the end on economics and the need for advanced technology for “airplane-like ‘care-free’ transport in space”.
SPACE.com reports that the stepdaughter of Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson was among those injured at Virginia Tech Monday in the shootings that killed more than 30 people. Kristina Heeger is in stable condition and doing well, a company spokesman said.
A few minor items of note in the news the last few days:
- The Washington Post profiles Space Adventures and its role in shaping the space tourism industry. The article includes a quote from current ISS tourist Charles Simonyi, who contacted the reporter “in an e-mail from space”. Not a description you see in any ordinary Post article…
- Speaking of Simonyi, he calls the ISS both “cozy” and “complicated” in a video broadcast. He has made a number of amateur radio contacts, including one with a ham in Honolulu who got to speak with both Simonyi and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
- The Washington Times provides a breezy overview of the current state of the space tourism industry, from Simonyi to Virgin Galactic to future plans. The article claims that there is a “space tourism office at the United Nations”, but I have never heard of an office specifically devoted to space tourism there (there is the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, but that is not devoted to space tourism per se.)
- In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I review last week’s Bigelow announcement. Bigelow states, “We consider ourselves wholesalers of destinations that we build and we don’t consider ourselves as space hotel folks.” He does go on to say, however, that he would be willing to lease his facilities to companies that operate space hotels, including Virgin Galactic; Alex Tai of Virgin later said, “We can certainly look into that.”
The head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos hinted this week that the next commercial passenger on a Soyuz ISS flight might be a Russian politician. According to an article today in the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov hinted that “several” governors of various regions of Russia have expressed an interest in the trip. The question, the newspaper reports, is how they would pay for the trip, since the highest-paid government official in Russia, president Vladimir Putin, makes a mere $90,000. However, the article adds, “Several governors have been investigated on suspicion of corruption recently, including on how their trips to foreign countries were financed.” No Russian billionaires are interested in signing up for a flight, said Perminov. “Perhaps they are afraid of leaving their fortunes unattended.”
Charles Simonyi has been on the ISS for nearly three days now, and in space for nearly five, but, surprisingly, he has been overshadowed in many of the media reports about the flight. The Daily Telegraph notes that, in the days leading up to the launch, he was overshadowed by his friend, Martha Stewart, who helped select a gourmet meal that the ISS crew will enjoy tonight. The article adds that before Simonyi returns to Earth “he may have confirmed media predictions by proposing to Miss Stewart from space.”
And then there’s the prospect of Simonyi’s former boss taking a similar trip. According to media reports, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin said during a video linkup from the station, “Charles said that Bill Gates is also preparing to visit space… So the next time someone will be with Bill Gates. For me this is the biggest surprise of our flight.” (A SPACE.com article, citing Interfax, has a somewhat different version of the quote, but the gist remains the same.) The next tourist flight opportunity won’t come until late 2008, since seats on the next two Soyuz flights are already planned for use by Malaysian and South Korean guest cosmonauts. A Space Adventures spokesperson said that the company plans to announce its next customer for an ISS flight within the next eight weeks.
If you are curious about what Simonyi is doing on the ISS, his web site features updates, including video of Simonyi on the ISS. However, an editor’s note in the blog section notes that he is also busy replacing hard drives on computers on the ISS, and has thus been too busy to write new posts.
Yesterday, as expected, Bigelow Aerospace announced details about its business plan. Some of those details were released in the earlier Aviation Week article, although company founder Robert Bigelow issued for the first time some pricing information: a four-week trip for a “sovereign client”—an astronaut from a national space agency—would cost $14,950,000 (in 2012 dollars), including transportation to and from the outpost. Bigelow will also lease half or full modules to “prime clients”—large corporations—for up to $88 million a year for a full (300-cubic-meter) module. (He also made it clear—again—that they are not a “space hotel” company, although he said he would be happy to talk with companies like Virgin Galactic interested in using the modules as such.)
One big question about his plans is what sort of transportation will be available to and from the modules. By 2015, Bigelow estimates that his company will need up to 30 launches a year to ferry passengers to and from the modules (as well as launching new modules). Bigelow admits that transportation is “the long pole in the tent” with a lot of uncertainty about who will be able to provide that level of activity: he did seem willing to work with any potential providers, provided that they meet his preferences, such as flying 6-8 people at a time and have a dry landing versus a splashdown. A second question is just how big the market is for this, particularly for prime clients: how many companies are interested in leasing a space lab? Bigelow admitted that they’re just now ramping up their sales and marketing efforts, and have yet to start talking with potential customers. What other major obstacles do you think are out there for Bigelow’s plan?
Recently, the Space and Advanced Communications Research Group at George Washington University issued a report titled “Space Planes and Space Tourism: The Industry and the Regulation of its Safety”. The report is primarily a regurgitation of existing information about companies developing suborbital and orbital vehicles, the spaceports existing or under development to host those vehicles, and some general information about the emerging personal spaceflight industry. There’s not much new in the report in that regard, and some of the information looks to be a little stale.
One area where the report makes an original contribution, however, is in its assessment of what it considers potential “showstoppers” for space tourism. “At this stage, our studies suggest only that these are serious issues requiring urgent attention and perhaps creative problem solving so as to avoid these concerns becoming barriers to the development of the space tourism industry,” the report explains. The report identified three such showstoppers: environmental concerns caused by the effects of high volumes of vehicles passing through the stratosphere and ozone layer, orbital debris, and the weaponization of space.
However, are these concerns really showstoppers? Orbital debris is a real concern, although it touches upon all uses of space, not just tourism; moreover, it would have virtually no effect on suborbital spaceflight, given the likely altitudes and flight durations of such vehicles. Why space weaponization would be that big of a concern isn’t fleshed out in the report: it merely states that “the policy issue could well have an adverse impact on the development of space tourism as well as on the safety concerns of future passengers.” Yet, people rarely think about the weaponization of land, sea, or air when they take terrestrial vacations (unless, say, they’re venturing into war zones or are worried about terrorism).
That leaves the environmental issue. Here, the problem is that the effects of hundreds or thousands of suborbital and orbital passenger flights a year will depend on their method of propulsion: what sort of exhausts are they spewing into the stratosphere and what effect would it have there. The report recommends: “It would therefore seem to be a subject of some urgency for a regulatory agency to immediately investigate the implications of the environmental impact of such space plane flights to very high altitudes on a recurring basis—and just as soon as possible.” Such a study would probably be of interest, although not necessarily with the degree of urgency requested in the report given the low levels of flight activity in the immediate future and the uncertainty about what environmental impacts, if any, such flights would have.
In an article in The Space Review a couple weeks ago, I discussed the challenges companies in the personal spaceflight and related industries were experiencing getting insurance, particularly for liability coverage for passengers. An article in last week’s Space News notes that the topic also came up, fittingly, at a space insurance conference in Milan last month. Attendees warned, in the words of the article, that “the creation of a viable, affordable insurance regime for future space tourists remains an unresolved issue that could ultimately scuttle the space-tourism industry before it has a chance to prove itself.” Much of the article discusses concerns about liability insurance in the event of an accident involving passengers, and the likelihood that in the event of such an accident, waivers and other measures to limit exposure would not deter lawsuits.
Some of the more interesting comments came from Brian Binnie of Scaled Composites, who spoke at the conference. He said that the insurance premiums on SpaceShipOne were “exorbitant”, but didn’t discuss what exactly that insurance covered. (Since SS1 never carried passengers, the liability insurance discussed above wouldn’t apply here—perhaps he meant third-party maximum probable loss insurance, required for an FAA license?) Another company, he claimed, “paid more in insurance premiums than it spent on developing its vehicle”, although he didn’t specify which company and what kind of insurance: a tidbit that is both tantalizing and puzzling.
|
|
Recent Comments