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It will happen, sooner or later: a commercial suborbital passenger spacecraft will have an accident, injuring or killing some or all of the people on board. What sort of reaction will the accident trigger among the general public and members of Congress? How should the industry and its regulators, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST), react? The Space Frontier Foundation announced last night that it is working with FAA/AST to solicit ideas on how to respond when such an accident occurs. “Nobody wants to think about it, and yet we must be prepared to deal with the consequences,” said Space Frontier Foundation executive director Jeff Krukin in an email message last night. The Foundation has created a five-question survey to collect ideas for the messages, audiences, and methods of communication in the event of an accident. The surveyis open through 5 pm EST January 30th.
[Disclaimer: while my employer performs work for FAA/AST, we are not involved in this survey.]
That was the request of domestic doyenne Martha Stewart to members of the International Space Station crew she interviewed earlier this week, USA Today reported. “Suni, please take care of Charles while he’s there,” Stewart said to NASA astronaut Suni Williams, one of the three members of the current ISS crew. The “Charles” in question is Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft exec who, besides being Stewart’s significant other, is in training in Russia at the moment for an April flight to the ISS as the fifth tourist to visit the orbiting outpost. “We’ll take care of him, don’t you worry,” Williams replied.
So how eager are Russians to fly tourists on their Soyuz missions to the ISS? One answer comes from Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov, who invited Indians to buy rides to the ISS as tourists while on a trip to India. “You could be a space tourist, if you have the money,” Ivanov said, according to the Indian newspaper The Hindu.
Other Russians aren’t so fond of flying tourists on such flights. In a commentary published by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Andrei Kislyakov criticizes the practice, saying that the Russian program “badly needs experienced and practiced professionals rather than amateurs.” the money such tourists provide, at about $20 million each, helps the Russian space agency, Kislyakov admits, but the small number of tourists means that the money “cannot be viewed as a sizeable contribution to the Russian space effort.”
Kislyakov, however, is much more supportive of suborbital space tourism, calling it “safer and cheaper” than orbital flights, and complementing the US for passing laws to clear the way for such flights. “We therefore see that Russia needs only American wisdom to rid its space research program of deadwood, and spare space tourists from excessive G-loads.”
The Saipan Tribune reported last week that the local government has approved a plan by a Japan “space adventure company” to lease space at an island airport. The company, Space Japan, plans to use the airport for high-altitude aircraft flights and likens itself to Space Adventures, although it appears that Space Japan doesn’t offer anything else at the present time. (See earlier coverage of Space Japan’s Saipan plans.)
The January issue of Reason magazine includes a feature article titled “Space Travel for Fun and Profit”. The article appears based primarily on coverage of the NewSpace 2006 conference in Las Vegas, including a tour of Bigelow Aerospace’s factory that took place during the conference. (Best line, from the introduction where author Katherine Mangu-Ward and others were traveling by van to the Bigelow facility: “They couldn’t have been more excited if the van had been on its way to a Star Trek-themed strip club.”) The version of the article that appeared in the print edition also included a sidebar on the “sex in space” session of the conference, a feature that appears to be missing from the web version.
The article misses on a few of the facts: at one point it states that “NASA recently awarded SpaceX, in partnership with Rocketplane, a $500 million prize to build a vehicle that will deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station by 2010.” SpaceX, of course, is competing with, not partnering with, Rocketplane Kistler on COTS, and “prize” would be an inaccurate description of the program. However, the article does a good job conveying the spirit and atmosphere of the event, such as describing a session of the conference when Ken Davidian of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program opened the floor to suggestions for future prizes as a “nerd orgy” (which, I assume, is meant as a compliment.)
Bigelow Aerospace announced this week that the launch of its Genesis 2 spacecraft will be delayed by two months until approximately April 1 because of launch vehicle issues. “Naturally, we are all disappointed because the spacecraft was and is ready to ship out to meet the original Jan. 30 launch date,” Robert Bigelow said in a statement. “We now expect to ship the spacecraft for flight sometime in the early part of March for a launch on or about April 1.”
While Bigelow said that the company had been “recently” notified of the launch delay, it had been clear for some time that Genesis 2 would not launch at the end of January as previously planned. Back in November Bigelow Aerospace’s Mike Gold said that the launch would take place at “the early end” of the first quarter, which seemed to suggest some time in March. The launch had been postponed because of a late-July failure of a Dnepr booster (on the launch immediately after the successful Genesis 1 launch), requiring an investigation. Kazakhstan just gave its approval to resume Dnepr launches from Baikonur this month, lifting a ban enacted after the July accident. While this probably does not directly affect the Genesis 2 launch (which will presumably take place from the Yasny base in Russia, as was the case for Genesis 1), the ban on launches has created a backlog in Dnepr launches. At least two Dnepr launches are ahead of Genesis 2: a launch of multiple small satellites later this month, and a late February launch of the European TerraSAR-X radar imaging satellite.
Today is the official release of FreeSpaceShot.com, a free version of the online skill game launched last year by SpaceShot that awards free spaceflights to winners of its weather prediction game. The free version is funded through advertising, such as Google AdSense ads, and offers a wide range of prizes, from a zero-g flight and $2,250 scholarship to a trip for two around the Moon plus $100 million. (Needless to say, the former will be much less difficult to win than the latter.)
SpaceShot’s founder, Sam Dinkin, describes his thinking about the formation of FreeSpaceShot in an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review. The ad-supported model is based, he said, on the “forced listening” technique used in radio contests. The focus here is on children, even though they might be too young to immediately take part in the flights, in order to both maintain their enthusiasm for space and perhaps rekindle the parents’ interest. (Another reason to keep parents interested and involved is to comply with federal regulations like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.)
FreeSpaceShot still has some rough edges to work out; I noticed this morning some dead links, including to the FAQ and a free lesson plan for those in grades 3-8. It also remains to be seen if children will find a competition like this worth playing on a regular basis, so that FreeSpaceShot can build up the traffic and advertising revenue needed to award the prizes.
UK-based Starchaser Ltd. announced Friday that it has won a study contract from ESA. The award, worth €150,000 (US$194,000), will be used to perform a detailed technical assessment of Starchaser’s Thunderstar/Starchaser 5A suborbital vehicle. Starchaser hopes to have the vehicle ready to begin commercial operations from Spaceport America in New Mexico “as early as” 2009, although that might be overly optimistic, given the level of development and funding the company has disclosed to date.
The award was part of ESA’s Survey of European Privately-funded Vehicles for Commercial Human Spaceflight, announced in July 2006. At that time ESA said it planned to award up to three such contracts, although there’s been no announcement regarding whether any other European firms also won contracts.
The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) sent out a notice to the media earlier today inviting them to attend the “inauguration” of Spaceport Sweden in the Arctic city of Kiruna on January 26th, and the announcement of a partnership with Virgin Galactic. Kiruna is already home to the Esrange Space Center, used for sounding rocket flights, but the site’s supporters now want it to become known as “Europe’s first and most obvious place for personal suborbital spaceflight.” It would appear that Kiruna has won out over sites in Scotland, such as RAF Lossiemouth, as Virgin’s first European spaceport. Flight International has some more details, and there is already a placeholder site for Spaceport Sweden that will go live on January 26.
(While I’d love to attend, I don’t think I can spare the time and money to do so.)
You may have heard the news earlier this week that the grand prize for Vanishing Point, an online “puzzle challenge”, is a suborbital spaceflight provided by Rocketplane Kistler. (Microsoft, which is co-sponsoring the competition as a way to promote its new Vista operating system, cleverly calls the grand prize “a trip to see the ultimate vista”. As opposed, of course, to Windows Vista Ultimate.)
This competition (announced this week at the gigantic CES trade show in Las Vegas) provides some good publicity for Rocketplane. However, though, this is not the first time a suborbital spaceflight has been offered as a top prize of a competition. Oracle teamed with Space Adventures for the Oracle Space Sweepstakes, targeting software developers, a constituency with a disproportionate share of space enthusiasts compared to the general population. Two people, one in the US and one in South Korea, won reservations on an unspecified future suborbital spaceflight through Space Adventures. And, back in 2000, Dole, the fruit company, had an “Outer Space Trip Sweepstakes”, with a grand prize being a suborbital spaceflight provided by Zegrahm Space Voyages (since acquired by Space Adventures) and Vela Technology. The grand prize winner, an elderly person from the Midwest, reportedly elected (wisely, no doubt) to take the alternate prize of $50,000.
There was also a hubbub this week when the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that Stephen Hawking plans to fly on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight. This has been a pretty persistent story, which I last noted here a little over a month ago. (Unlike some other celebrities that have been reported to be Virgin Galactic customers, Hawking does appear to be really interested in going.) MSNBC digs a little deeper into reports that Hawking will first take a zero-g flight some time this year, suggesting that opportunity could come as soon as April, when Hawking is scheduled to visit the US.
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