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An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the spike in sales of space memorabilia in the wake of the Lisa Nowak case mentioned in passing one other sale of interest to personal spaceflight enthusiasts:
Demand for memorabilia has spiked ever since billionaires started dabbling in private space travel and the Chinese government became interested in space. Aurora Auctions, of Bell Canyon, Calif., recently sold a brown M&M that left the Earth’s atmosphere in 2004 aboard the Paul Allen-financed SpaceShipOne. It went for $1,500.
“It was flown on the very first mission,” says Victoria Campbell, Aurora’s founder and chief executive. “That’s very important.”
Hmmm… I’ve got a whole bag of specially-branded M&Ms that were distributed at the X Prize flights in Mojave. Think that’s worth $1,500? Probably not. How about $1.50? It is a big bag, you know…
Microsoft and AMD, the sponsors of the “Vanishing Point” contest conducted online last month, announced Monday the winner of the grand prize, William Temple of Sacramento. Temple will get a suborbital spaceflight provided by Rocketplane Kistler; the date of his flight wasn’t announced although RpK is planning to begin commercial flights of the XP vehicle around 2009. For those wondering about taxes, which tripped up one other prize winner, Temple is also getting $50,000.
An article in the British newspaper The Independent last week about Richard Branson’s new climate prize mentioned that Branson risks being branded a hypocrite because his ownership of a fossil fuel-burning airline and “for setting up a company, Virgin Galactica, that intends to use the aircraft technology that won the X-prize to build up a space tourism industry where individual tickets for a 90-second ride in space will cost £100,000 each – as well as burning thousands of gallons of rocket fuel.” Wait a sec: Virgin Galactica? Must have been a random typo. However, a companion piece by the same author also uses the “Virgin Galactica” name twice in the same paragraph. Has Virgin Galactic changed its name, perhaps in a bid to ride the popularity of the TV show Battlestar Galactica?
The answer is almost certainly no: the company’s web site still uses the Virgin Galactic name, and that’s how the company was identifying itself as recently as last week at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference. Still, it’s amusing to see that the two Independent articles aren’t the only times an “a” has been appended to the end of Virgin Galactic’s name. A search turns up a couple of other examples in the last month: an article in the University of Cincinnati newspaper, The News-Record, about a visit to campus by former NASA Ames director Scott Hubbard, who was quoted as saying “Privately funded rockets are being made … such as Virgin Galactica”; and a Fox News article, since pulled from the web, that mentioned in passing that Stephen Hawking announced “his plans to tour space in 2009 aboard one of Richard Branson’s planned Virgin Galactica space flights.”
When I saw Jim Benson at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in the DC area on Tuesday, he said his company, Benson Space Company (BSC), would have an announcement to make on Wednesday. What would it be about? “You heard about the person recently who had to give up the flight he won?” he said.
It turns out the AP had the story on Tuesday, reporting that BSC had found a way to give Brian Emmitt a flight to space. Emmitt, as reported last month, had to give up a suborbital flight he won in an Oracle contest because he couldn’t afford the taxes on it. BSC, according to the AP article, will hire Emmitt as a consultant. He will be a “test passenger” when BSC’s vehicle, Dream Chaser, is ready for commercial service (as soon as late 2008, Benson says), and will provide feedback to the company in return. Since the flight isn’t being awarded as a prize, Emmitt won’t owe taxes on it—just on what BSC pays him.
NASA announced yesterday that it has signed Space Act agreements with PlanetSpace and t/Space, two companies that competed for COTS awards last year but failed to win any money. The agreements provide neither company with any money, but do involve the sharing of information and the creation of “milestones and objective criteria by which the companies can gauge their own progress”, according to the statement.
T/Space was one of the six finalists for the COTS awards, but reportedly just barely lost out to Rocketplane Kistler and SpaceX. The company said in a statement that they are proceeding with their plans to develop its Crew Transfer Vehicle that would be launched by a scaled-up version of the QuickReach launcher being developed by AirLaunch LLC. A manned orbital flight could take place in late 2010, if all goes well (and an agreement like this can’t hurt, for even though it doesn’t provide the company any money, it does give it additional legitimacy in the eye of potential investors.)
A PlanetSpace statement includes some illustrations of its NOVA booster and Silver Dart vehicle that have not previously been widely circulated. The NOVA launcher is a cluster of seven boosters, each with four Alchemy engines that the company says are derived from the engine used in the V-2 over 60 years ago. The Silver Dart would have a glide range of 40,000 kilometers and a crossrange of about 6,500 kilometers, according to release, which would open up a number of point-to-point transportation possibilities. Indeed, PlanetSpace chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria said earlier this week that the company was looking into flights from New York to Mumbai, India in 45 minutes, an intriguing but certainly very long-term market.
PlanetSpace claims that its first atmospheric test flight of the Silver Dart could occur as soon as late 2008, with the vehicle launching from the company’s planned spaceport on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to an altitude of 6,500 meters and a downrange distance of over 6,000 kilometers. An orbital flight would follow in late 2009. Of course, neither the Silver Dart nor the spaceport exist yet, although PlanetSpace hopes the NASA deal will help them raise $200 million in funding in the form of “private investors and bank loans”.
Today Audi and New Scientist magazine are kicking off a competition to award a suborbital spaceflight. The top prize will go to the person who submits the best essay (not to exceed 250 words) on what he or she considered to be the best patented invention of all time. (The space-related prize is designed to highlight that Audi, the German automaker, has more patents than NASA. But then, Audi has been around a lot longer than NASA.) Space Adventures is providing the flight in around 2009 on a vehicle to be named later. One catch: according to the rules, the competition is only open to UK residents aged 18 or over.
The Anglo-American space tourism venture Starchaser is asking people to full out a space tourism survey. The survey consists of a little over 30 questions that attempt to gauge interest in suborbital space tourism among potential customers. The survey, primarily multiple choice but with a few questions that have free-form answers (“Please list the training activities that you would expect space tourists to undertake”) on topics like cost, training, flight experience, and related issues. According to an article in the Las Cruces Sun-News, the survey is linked to the ESA award Starchaser received earlier this month, which requires the company “to analyze the sustainability of commercial space tourism”.
It’s always good to see new efforts to gauge the potential size of the space tourism market. However, there are a few issues with the survey. One problem is that some of the questions are a little too vague to be useful. An example is this:
How much would you be willing to pay for a sub-orbital trip into space?
- Up to 3 months income
- Up to 6 months income
- Up to 1 years income
- More than 1 years income
- Not interested
The problem is that these figures are not defined; the survey does not ask the respondent to provide his/her income. Three months’ income for a minimum-wage worker is very different than three months’ income for a CEO, making it impossible to translate those estimates into dollar figures. If, hypothetically, a majority of respondents say that they would be willing to pay up to six months’ income for a trip, that provides no guidance to the company regarding what prices it should charge.
A bigger issue is the fact that this is a non-scientific survey: the sample will consist of people interested enough to seek out and take the survey, rather than a controlled sample. Worse, Starchaser is incentivizing potential respondents by offering them a chance to win an iPod if they complete the survey, potentially further skewing the sample pool to include those who take the survey solely to qualify to win the prize, giving little real thought to the questions. I can understand why they’re doing this—performing a more rigorous study would have cost Starchaser a significant fraction of the money they received from ESA—but in doing so they risk running afoul of the old programmer’s mantra: garbage in, garbage out.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson paid a visit to Las Cruces and stumped for Spaceport America, saying that voters should approve tax referenda in three southern counties in April. “I’m asking every citizen to go out and vote yes on the spaceport because it is the future,” Richardson said in a speech at a Las Cruces middle school. The event did attract a “handful” of protestors outside the school who oppose the tax increase. One of them said they plan to organize a formal group to oppose the tax in the upcoming referendum, in an effort to counter the pro-spaceport group People for Aerospace.
On Friday it was death, and today it’s something that is equally inescapable: taxes. The AP has an article about Brian Emmett, who won the grand prize Oracle Space Sweepstakes in 2005, a suborbital spaceflight. Problem is, Emmitt was facing a $25,000 tax bill based on the value of the prize, a bill he couldn’t afford. So, Emmitt had to forfeit the prize.
While the AP article about this hit the wires Sunday, it’s not a new development. In a post on his personal blog from September 2006, Emmitt noted that he gave up the prize back in March after calculating his tax bill and discussions with Oracle. “This was probably one of the toughest decisions I’d made in my life so far. Turning down the ability to realize a childhood dream when it’s so f—ing close you can touch it is really impossible to put into words,” he wrote.
While this is an unfortunate case, it appears to be the exception to the rule. Most other spaceflight prizes, such as the one announced this month by Microsoft and Rocketplane Kistler, include cash awards in addition to the flight to cover the tax bill; that wasn’t the case with the Oracle award. On the bright side, it could have been worse: the prize was valued at “only” $138,000, considerably less than the current going rate for flights on Virgin Galactic and most other suborbital operators.
Some developments at commercial spaceport projects in the US and Europe:
- On Friday the Swedish government officially announced Spaceport Sweden, including an agreement to have Virgin Galactic conduct suborbital tourist flights from the facility near Kiruna. According to SPACE.com, the government doesn’t plan to invest any money into the site, saying that there is sufficient infrastructure there now to support SpaceShipTwo flights. However, the government has agreed to establish a regulatory framework similar to what exists in the US to permit those flights to take place, and will tackle export control issues as well on behald of Virgin.
- New Mexico governor Bill Richardson is scheduled to make an appearance in Las Cruces later today, but not for his nascent presidential campaign. Instead, Richardson will be stumping for the local tax referenda that would, if approved, provide the local share of funding for Spaceport America.
- Officials in Ohio are still in negotiations to lure PlanetSpace to an airport outside Columbus that would be the landing site for the company’s Silver Dart vehicle, as well as host manufacturing. One quibble: the article claims that “According to the most recent study by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, commercial space transportation and related industries accounted for more than $98 million in economic activity in 2004.” In fact, that report put the total at $98 billion. Million, billion, who’s counting?
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