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To follow up on yesterday’s report where the cofounders of a social networking startup announced they were going to travel to the ISS, I received a response to some questions I posed the company from one of the cofounders/would-be space tourists, Cherry Mendoza. According to her, while they would start training in preparation for the flights this fall, formal training (presumably meaning actually starting training in Russia) would not begin until next spring. The two (Mendoza and Jennifer Bellofatto) would not fly together on the same flight since “such arrangements more than triple the cost of flight,” according to Mendoza. (Which makes sense given that typically only one seat is open per taxi flight.) One of them would fly in fall 2008 and the other in 2009, she said.
Although a Space Adventures spokesperson told me yesterday that she was not aware of their plans, Mendoza said that they have been talking with the company, but have yet to sign any contracts. The key point here is that, while they said in the press release yesterday that they plan to pay for the flight with money raised from venture capitalists, they are still working on getting the money: “Once we close VC funding we anticipate traveling in fall of 2008,” Mendoza said. And why spend $40 million of VC money—assuming they can raise it—on a pair of ISS trips, when that money could go into building up the business in more concrete ways? “We want to show that women can accomplish great things by supporting each other and working together.” We’ll have to see if that’s convincing enough for VCs to open their wallets…
The polls open in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, later this morning for a special referendum on a gross receipts tax to help pay for the development of Spaceport America. According to today’s Las Cruces Sun-News, local officials expect a close election, although there’s been no published opinion polling on the proposal and election officials said they didn’t have “the faintest clue” just how many people would turn out to the polls. Over four percent of county voters have already cast their vote through absentee ballots or early voting. The polls are open in the county from 7 am to 7 pm MDT (9 am to 9 pm EDT).
There was a surprising press release this morning claiming that the two co-founders of an online social networking startup had signed up to fly to the ISS. Cherry Mendoza and Jennifer Bellofatto of HerOrbit.com will start training in Russia in the fall of 2007 for a future unspecified flight or flights to the ISS (the press release isn’t clear if they’ll fly together on the same mission or on separate flights, the latter being more in accordance with past practice and the use of Soyuz taxi flights for ISS crew rotations.) The $20 million per person price would be paid by VCs who, the company claims in its announcement, “as with MySpace and YouTube, are eager to back promising Internet social networks.” (Are they really that eager to back such companies that they’ll blow $40 million on some space flights?)
Perhaps I’m being overly skeptical, but it’s hard to take this announcement at face value (indeed, had it come out yesterday, I’d assume it was an April Fool’s joke.) Space Adventures has brokered all the previous space tourists to fly to the ISS, yet as of midday today there was no corresponding announcement from them. Also, it looks a little odd to see them posing in blue jumpsuits with NASA patches on them – why would tourists working (ultimately) with Roskosmos be wearing NASA-logoed apparel, unless it was the only thing available for a last-minute photo shoot?
I’ve sent some inquiries to both HerOrbit.com and Space Adventures to try and learn more about this; if/when I hear anything I will post an update.
Update: According to Space Adventures, they have had no dealings with HerOrbit.com. This is looking more and more like a poorly-timed April Fool’s joke (it is, after all, April 2) – hardly a good way to build trust and goodwill in your company.
The Orange County Register gave Sunday a travel agent working with Virgin Galactic an opportunity to talk about the suborbital spaceflight experience. Tom Jackson has the basics of a suborbital spaceflight down, but he hasn’t captured all of the details. A few examples:
The technology is proven with the successful winning of the X-Competition [sic] at Mojave in September of 2004.
[…]
Once at 350,000 feet the power is dissipated and the craft powers upward and then slowly returns to earth in a glide controlled by its wing configuration and the two pilots. [The “power is dissipated” and yet it “powers upward”?]
[…]
The satellites that circle our Earth today circumnavigate the planet in 45 minutes at the speed of 17,500 miles per hour as there is no resistance at those altitudes. [Er, more like 90+ minutes]
Hardly egregious errors, but it makes you wonder…
With Doña Ana County all set to hold a special election tomorrow on the spaceport tax measure, spaceport supporters got a mixed message over the weekend from the state legislature: it approved $10 million of the planned $25 million in road improvements for the spaceport. The money, though, is enough to start work on the spaceport provided county voters approve the tax proposal tomorrow. State officials said they will work to get the remaining $15 million in road money next year.
New Mexico governor Bill Richardson visited Las Cruces Thursday, less than a week before voters there go to the polls to vote on a tax to help fund development of Spaceport America, and his message was blunt: if voters don’t approve the tax, the spaceport won’t be built. “It’s dead,” Richard said if Tuesday’s referendum is defeated. “We’ll lose it to another state, to California, to Texas.” That doesn’t seem likely in the near term, at least, given the lack of state-led efforts to develop new spaceports, or support existing spaceports, in either state. One could see scenarios, though, where Virgin Galactic would extend their stay in Mojave and perhaps build up some infrastructure there if the New Mexico spaceport fell through while looking for options in other states. The Las Cruces Sun-News also has the text of Richardson’s comments about the spaceport, including a comment that he’s “been sending letters and making phone calls to voters” about the vote.
Rick Homans, the secretary of economic development for the state, didn’t endorse the governor’s doomsday scenario if the referendum failed, but did say that if the tax wasn’t approved it “causes us to slam on the brakes” and introduces uncertainty both in the state legislature and with Virgin Galactic. “I can’t predict what a negative vote from Doña Ana County would do to the state Legislature coming up with $25 million” for spaceport road developments currently under consideration,” he said. “I can’t predict how Virgin will respond to a negative vote on Tuesday.”
As has been widely reported, the state of New Mexico and Virgin Galactic signed a lease agreement Monday afternoon for Spaceport America. Technically, the agreement is not a full-fledged lease but instead a memorandum of understanding between the two regarding the terms of the real lease agreement, which will be worked out over the next few months. The Las Cruces Sun-News provides a list of details about the agreement, including the planned Virgin Galactic rental payments ($1 million a year for the first five years, gradually increasing to $1.5 million for the remaining 15 years of the agreement, plus rent on the land occupied by Virgin’s facilities at the spaceport) and that Virgin will be granted “preferred status” for the use of spaceport facilities for an unspecified length of time.
Flightglobal.com, meanwhile, finds an interesting development about spaceport funding: the state has agreed to release $33 million in previously-approved funding for the project even though one key criterion for that money—an FAA spaceport license—has yet to be attained. A press release from the state’s Economic Development Department, dated March 17th. notes that the governor and legislature made the decision to keep the spaceport on schedule to open “by late 2009 or early 2010″ even though it now appears that the spaceport license won’t be ready until early 2008.
A few minor updates about Charles Simonyi’s upcoming trip to the ISS:
- Simonyi will perform a series of tests for the Japanese space agency JAXA during his stay on the station. He will test several high-definition camcorders currently on the station to see how radiation exposure has degraded the performance of their CCD sensors.
- Simonyi will carry on his flight an unusual memento: a paper tape from an old Soviet-era computer, the Ural-2. Simonyi first learned computer programming on a Ural-2 while a student in Hungary.
- Reuters describes a day in the life of Simonyi during training, noting that he wakes up each morning before dawn “ready to build a tent in sub-zero temperatures, hover weightless in a plane or, worse, conjugate Russian verbs.”
- The Dallas Morning News reports that Anousheh Ansari, who flew to the ISS last fall, will be on the Martha Stewart Show on Friday. Stewart, of course, is usually described as the “special friend” of Simonyi, so the timing of Ansari’s appearance, just over a week before Simonyi’s launch, is no coincidence.
Apologies for the late notice, but tomorrow morning the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington will be hosting a presentation on “Space Tourism Regulations”, featuring Patti Grace Smith of the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). From my understanding it will be a fairly high-level discussion of the topic for those unfamiliar with AST’s licensing, permitting, and other regulatory activities.
Today’s Washington Post has a front-page story about Spaceport America and the upcoming tax referendum in three southern New Mexico counties. The article is a straightforward overview of the spaceport project and those who both support and oppose the local tax. Most regular readers won’t find many new insights in the article, but it is a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the project.
In other news, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the state and Virgin Galactic have scheduled an announcement later today, which many people assume to be that they have reached a deal on a lease agreement for the spaceport. Last week the newspaper reported that negotiations on a lease agreement were nearing completion.
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