|
|
Voters in three southern New Mexico counties are still scheduled to go to the polls early next month to vote on a quarter-cent gross receipts tax that would be used to help finance Spaceport America. The most populous of the three counties, Doña Ana, has now put some conditions on the use of those tax revenues, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. The conditions, approved by county supervisors Tuesday, would allow the county to revoke the tax should three conditions not be met by the end of 2008:
- The projected cost of the spaceport remains no more than $225 million;
- The spaceport obtains an FAA license;
- A lease agreement with Virgin Galactic is signed.
None of the conditions appear to be particularly surprising nor onerous, since the state already has an initial agreement with Virgin Galactic and is working on getting a spaceport license from the FAA. A bigger concern might be the cost estimate, although there’s no evidence any significant cost overruns on the project.
SpaceDaily has an essay today (it actually was posted late last night) by Jeffrey Bell titled “Rocket Plane Roulette”. In it, Bell argues that rocket-powered winged vehicles are inherently unsafe (based on their track record), and that they are likely to be involved in accident(s) shortly after their introduction as space tourism vehicles, which will, in turn, result in lawsuits and regulation that will kill the industry. Not exactly a feel-good article.
I will leave it to other more technically competent to pick apart Prof. Bell’s arguments (IANAAE – I am not an aerospace engineer) but I do see some flaws in his arguments. Much of his belief that rocketplanes are inherently unsafe is based on his examination of “the safety history of research rocketplanes in the US and UK”. Well, there’s a problem right there: experimental vehicles are going to have a much higher failure rate than operational commercial vehicles, because they’re pushing the envelope in terms of speed, altitude, and the like. Bell even concedes this: after going through the history of X-15 and rocketplane failures, he concludes, “Are these safety statistics relevant to the 21st-century commercial operators? Probably not.”
Prof. Bell later argues that “It is unlikely that any tourist rocket operator will be able to afford a comprehensive test program.” But what is a comprehensive test program? He hints at something approaching the much larger number of test flights needed for FAA aircraft certification, but doesn’t spell out the specifics. I will point readers to an article I published Monday in The Space Review that includes a section on when such vehicles will be safe enough for passengers, based on a session at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. These developers are very conscious of safety issues, and none showed any signs of rushing through testing to put vehicles in service. A sample quote from Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace: “Simple economic self-interest is going to force us to do our very, very best to get the vehicle that safe, and to do enough tests to convince ourselves that it is that safe.”
There are some other flaws in the article that suggest a lack of familiarity by Prof. Bell about the industry: at one point he lumps the DC-X in with various rocketplane designs, something the developers of the VTVL wingless DC-X would likely take umbrage with; he also claims that “SpaceShip1 [sic] suffered serious problems on all of its flights above 100km”, even though there were no signs of any serious problems on at least SpaceShipOne’s final flight on 2004 October 4. Prof. Bell is correct that safety is a critical issue for the emerging personal spaceflight industry, whether it’s done by rocketplanes or other vehicles. What’s not so certain is that the future is as dire as Bell makes it out to be.
Last February Space Adventures made a big push to develop a suborbital spacecraft that would compete with Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, and others in the suborbital space tourism arena. The Explorer vehicle would be based on a vehicle designed by Myasishchev Design Bureau in Russia to compete for the Ansari X Prize; the Russian space agency Roskosmos would be involved as well as Prodea, the company founded by Amir, Anousheh, and Hamir Ansari. Around the same time as this announcement Space Adventures also announced that it was involved in spaceport development efforts in the UAE and Singapore. Those announcements, along with Space Adventures’ track record in orbital space tourism, immediately put the company among the leading contenders to develop a successful suborbital space tourism business.
Since those announcements, though, there has been virtually no news about the effort coming out of Space Adventures and its partners. In an article published online on Friday, Flight International reports that those plans “hang in the balance”, following the completion of a feasibility study that had been in the works for months. Space Adventures will make a decision to proceed or not in the next couple of months, according to the article, but Roskosmos has already indicated that they are no longer involved with the effort.
My own angle on this: I spoke very briefly with Anousheh Ansari about this when she attended the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. Her keynote address focused completely on her trip to the ISS, with no mention of any suborbital plans, so I asked her about it during one of the breaks. (To her credit, she didn’t leave after giving her speech, but in fact stayed the entire day, and could be seen leafing through some of the reports distributed at the conference during the sessions.) She said that the feasibility studies were ongoing, and that Prodea had not made a decision whether and how to proceed, nor did she give a timetable for any decisionmaking.
Space Adventures has a very strong brand in the space tourism field because of their work getting various clients to the ISS, so it would seem natural that they would also get involved in the suborbital field as well. It remains to be seen, though, whether they have the ability and interest in continuing with the development of a new vehicle, instead of perhaps partnering with one or more of the existing suborbital players (as they had previously indicated), helping shape the customer experience, selling tickets, and getting a cut of the revenues.
The New York Times and MSNBC report that Stephen Hawking will get to experience weightlessness on a Zero-G aircraft flight on April 26. Hawking, who eventually hopes to fly into space on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight, is looking forward to the experience: “As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience, firsthand, weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment,” he said in a statement.
One particular concern will be his health and the stresses put on his body during both the zero-g phases of the flight and the corresponding high-g portions of the flight parabolas. “I’m not worried about the zero gravity section, but the high-G part will be difficult,” he tells the Times. His flight will “probably” be shorter than a typical Zero-G flight, according to the paper, and he will have doctors and medical monitoring equipment on the flight with him. Zero-G is also donating additional seats on the flight to various charities for them to auction off as fundraisers.
The number of proposed commercial spaceports in the US has now dropped by one. Last night county commissioners in Brazoria County, Texas, south of Houston, voted 4-1 to dissolve the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport Development Corp., a county-chartered organization that had planned to develop a spaceport along the Gulf Coast. The corporation had been commissioned in 2000 but had made only modest progress, such as the development of a small launch pad for high-powered amateur rockets on land leased from the Dow Corporation. To be fair, though, for much of the time since 2000 the industry had been in the doldrums after the collapse of the commercial launch market and the failure of a number of RLV ventures. Still, this effort had been unable to attract much attention from the new generation of commercial space ventures, which have instead flocked to Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California.
Besides the lack of luck attracting business, the spaceport also had considerable opposition from local residents who lived near the site, as well as others who thought its location next to a wildlife preserve was inappropriate (nevermind that the Kennedy Space Center coexists with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.) Commissioners who voted to terminate the spaceport efforts were in the end frustrated with the lack of progress, according to the Houston Chronicle. “They just sat there and sat there and studied it,” said Joe King.
The website for Time magazine has a fairly detailed review article about the emerging space tourism industry. Writer Cathy Booth Thomas talks with a number of the leading companies, including Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Benson Space Company, and also covers the more secretive Blue Origin; there’s also coverage if Bigelow Aerospace and developing spaceports, in particular Spaceport America in New Mexico. If you’ve been following the industry you won’t find that much new in this article, although the visit to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort where he gathered a number of his Founders late last year, is at the very least entertaining (including the obligatory discussion of sex in space, featuring Branson himself.)
Last year I noted BuyMeToTheStars.com, an effort to raise money for a suborbital spaceflight by selling ad pixels, a project modeled on the “Million Dollar Homepage”. Now there’s another entrant in this field. Last week Ben Riecken, a flight instructor in Florida, announced his own effort to raise money for a trip through a pixel-selling scheme. My Trip In Space is more like the original Million Dollar Homepage, with ad logos filling up a grid. (BuyMeToTheStars.com, by comparison, sells “stars” and “nebulae”.) So far Riecken’s site has only a handful of advertisers, just as Michael Halls-Moore has only sold a few stars on his site. Given that few copycats to the original Million Dollar Homepage have enjoyed even a small level of success, it doesn’t seem like this is going to be a tenable approach to raising money for a suborbital spaceflight.
The web site of Smithsonian magazine includes a brief interview with Joe Sutter, author of a new book about the 747. There’s a brief but interesting exchange in the interview of relevance here:
If you were a young aerospace engineer just starting out today, what area would you be most interested in? The private space industry seems quite exciting at the moment, for example.
Space tourism is exciting, all right, but it’s just for the elite few. If you look at the world today, commercial aviation is where flying machines truly benefit humanity.
Sutter is correct: commercial aviation has orders of magnitude greater impact on the world than space tourism, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. However, recall that once commercial aviation was “just for the elite few”. A similar interview 80 or so years ago would have had someone like Sutter saying that locomotives or steamships, not commercial aviation, are transportation systems that “truly benefit humanity”. One must be careful about taking historical analogies too far—commercial aviation grew quickly since it could serve as a transportation system to link up existing destinations, an option not really available for spaceflight—but it does note that one should be careful about dismissing a technology as being just for the elite.
I received an email overnight that had been forwarded from a list of X Prize Cup volunteers indicating that there may be some problems securing some state funding that was intended to support the 2007 event. Here’s the key passage of that message:
The Governor had pushed for $1 million to be allocated for assistance in producing the X PRIZE Cup this year. That money has been removed by an unknown senator. In order for us to have those appropriations returned to the legislation we need “all hands on deck” to call Senate Minority Leader Lee Rawson 505-986-4703 and promote their support of our event. Please contact Senator Tim Jennings (D), Co-Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and ask that he help convince Sen. Rawson to add back the $1 million originally proposed. This money is crucial to our ability to produce the “space” portion of this show. Without the state’s support we are in jeopardy of loosing [sic] major assets of content.
The email asked people to call their state senators in New Mexico, as well as the two listed in the pssage above, by noon today. Given the short notice I have not been able to verify what the exact nature of the problem is, or how firm that noon (MST) deadline is. If I hear anything more I will pass it along.
In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Steven Fawkes discusses the potential impact global warming concerns could have on space tourism. Space tourism activities, even in their most robust scenarios, would make on a very small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, but Fawkes notes that there could be the perception that even that is too much in the eyes of environmental activists. That “is a particularly high risk as space tourism, although small in extent, will be very high profile and it will be seen as an activity for ‘the rich’, which adds to its negative image in some environmental circles.” Fawkes’ recommendation is that space tourism operators make every effort to be “carbon neutral”, offsetting any impact through emissions trading programs or similar measures.
Virgin Galactic has been noting that their flights will have limited environmental impacts for some time, such as at the SpaceShipTwo cabin unveiling in New York in September. But that has not insured Virgin from criticism, even as Richard Branson announced a climate change prize earlier this month. “But what is the use of a trip that takes you nowhere but 70 miles above ground – with the “space” bit of the ride lasting just a couple of minutes?” asked Steve Connor of The Independent earlier this month in an article titled “Saviour of the planet – or a space-hopping hypocrite?” (This is the same article where Connor calls the company “Virgin Galactica”, so weight his comments accordingly.) Branson climate change prize, writes Connor, “is a commendable gesture in that direction. But how does he square that with his desire to turn us all into an army of carbon-crazed space cadets?”
|
|
What is common was once elite
The web site of Smithsonian magazine includes a brief interview with Joe Sutter, author of a new book about the 747. There’s a brief but interesting exchange in the interview of relevance here:
Sutter is correct: commercial aviation has orders of magnitude greater impact on the world than space tourism, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. However, recall that once commercial aviation was “just for the elite few”. A similar interview 80 or so years ago would have had someone like Sutter saying that locomotives or steamships, not commercial aviation, are transportation systems that “truly benefit humanity”. One must be careful about taking historical analogies too far—commercial aviation grew quickly since it could serve as a transportation system to link up existing destinations, an option not really available for spaceflight—but it does note that one should be careful about dismissing a technology as being just for the elite.