The AP reports that Xavier Gabriel, owner of a popular lottery office in Spain, wants to be the first Spanish space tourist and has signed up for a flight on Virgin Galactic. As part of a charity he sponsors, he has collected wishes from people across the country; he plans to make the “most interesting one” come true, while carrying the rest in a digital recording on his spaceflight. “We’re land-bound, and can’t appreciate how beautiful the Earth is,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to seeing it from space, and thinking about how the planet is too beautiful to be treated so badly.” He added that he hopes his flight takes place on December 22nd, the date of the annual world-famous “El Gordo” lottery in Spain.
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Anousheh Ansari came in at number 9 in the Dallas Morning News’s list of top ten Texans of the year. Ansari cracked the list because of her Soyuz flight this fall, and for what she did during and after the flight: “…what makes Mrs. Ansari’s journey all the more amazing is how generously she shared even personal moments like that one with people from around the world.” Metro, the free British daily, had a brief interview with former astronaut Charles Bolden last week. Among the questions asked of Bolden was whether he was “for or against” space tourism. His response:
He did caution, however, that potential tourists need significant amounts of training before they fly:
“As much training” as government missions could be a significant obstacle down the road for tourism, given that those flying on Soyuz flights have to spend six months in Russia. The size of the market for those who want to fly into orbit and have up to $20 million available is small enough as it is; it gets smaller when you tack on the six months’ worth of training. Tonight’s episode of the CBS TV series “NUMB3RS” will feature a guest appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, playing himself (of course), according to a press release issued by Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation, a personal spaceflight advocacy organization. That release, as well as companion release, indicates that Aldrin’s appearance is timed with the relaunch of the ShareSpace web site, although as of this writing the ShareSpace site is just a placeholder with the message “our full site is coming soon!” The new ShareSpace site, according to that placeholder, will be “a clearinghouse of resources that will help people of all ages to enjoy, prepare for and literally fly into space.” I got a call over the lunch hour from someone who said that CNBC, the financial news cable network, was providing some coverage today about space tourism. It wasn’t clear whether it was an isolated segment or a recurring feature today; apparently one segment was about Benson Space Company (which would make sense given the news yesterday that it was hiring former astronaut Hoot Gibson). I don’t have access to CNBC during the day, and I couldn’t find anything on the subject on the network’s web site, so take this with a grain of salt… Remember the Million Dollar Homepage, an effort by a British student to raise $1 million by selling ad space, one pixel at a time, on a web page. That effort was wildly successful (even if the page looks like a pointillist’s nightmare), netting Alex Tew his $1 million and spawning countless similar, if generally less successful, efforts. One of the latest efforts is BuyMeToTheStars.com, by Michael Halls-Moore, a grad student working on a PhD in hypersonics at Imperial College London. Halls-Moore is trying to raise £1 million to help pay for a ride into space, either on SpaceShipTwo or its orbital successor. (He acknowledges in the site’s FAQ that he only needs a little over a tenth of that £1 million for a suborbital flight on SS2, but he’d really like to save up for an as-yet hypothetical SpaceShipThree flight.) Unlike the original Million Dollar Homepage or many of its clones, the site is not filled with a garish collage of tiny ads. Instead, advertisers buy stars or larger nebulae or galaxies. A handful of advertisers have signed up right now, so that most of the constellation Orion is clearly visible, netting Halls-Moore a total of £170. He’s also gotten a little bit of media attention, including a press release from his university this week. The Wall Street Journal reports that former astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson will join Benson Space Company as its chief operating officer and head test pilot. (Subscription required) The official announcement may come as early as today. Gibson has been listed as an “advisor” to the company since the company’s launch in late September. Since then, Gibson retired from his post-astronaut career as a pilot for Southwest Airlines when he reach the FAA-mandated retirement age of 60. The WSJ article states that Gibson had been working with Benson since last year, when Benson, then running SpaceDev, was pursuing the NASA COTS demonstration competition. Benson said that Gibson will be able to fly the company’s Dream Chaser spacecraft “as much as he wants and we can afford” once it’s built. Hiring Gibson certainly gives Benson Space come addition cachet and credibility, although it’s hardly unprecedented. Rocketplane Ltd, prior to its merger with Kistler Aerospace, hired former astronaut John Herrington as a vice president and test pilot for the XP suborbital vehicle. And just last month Andrews Space announced it had hired former astronaut Wendy Lawrence as a “senior advisor for human spaceflight and crew safety”. The Las Cruces City Council decided earlier this week to draft a resolution that calls for a voter referendum next spring on a tax that would help pay for the development of Spaceport America, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. The resolution, which would have to be approved by the council in January, would call for a special election in early April for a quarter-cent sales tax, the proceeds for which would go to helping pay for the spaceport. Doña Ana County, where Las Cruces is located, is also planning a similar resolution, and two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, are expected to follow suit. The taxes would cover the local contribution to the costs of the spaceport, in addition to funds approved by the state legislature earlier this year and possible federal funding. The article indicated that while there is support in general for the spaceport, the tax could face some opposition from residents who want more information about the spaceport before voting for a tax increase. One person attending the city council meeting noted that an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the spaceport has yet to be released, as well as additional technical and financial details about the spaceport. A Doña Ana county commissioner said that passage of the tax in Las Cruces and the rest of the county is crucial to getting similar tax resolutions passed in the other two counties, and to the spaceport in general. “If we don’t do this, the outlook for the spaceport is extremely grim.” A new poll conducted for CNN and Time by market research firm TNS finds strong interest in space tourism among many people in the Asia-Pacific region, provided you don’t bring up minor issues like price. The poll, conducted last month and tied into the “CNN Future Summit” in Singapore that included a discussion of space tourism, found that two-thirds of respondents “would be interested in taking a trip into space”, although it’s not clear from the press release whether the poll referred to orbital or suborbital flights, or if even any distinction was made. “If money were no object,” the release stated, “49 per cent of Indians said they would be very interested in becoming a space tourist, alongside 46 per cent of Thais, 44 per cent of Singaporeans and 43 per cent of Hong Kong citizens.” The lowest levels of interest in space tourism were in the Philippines and Japan. An article earlier this week in the Alamogordo (N.M.) Daily News indicated that Otero County’s economic development board wanted nearly Holloman Air Force Base designated a spaceport. Huh? With Spaceport America just on the other side of the mountains from Holloman, why promote developing another spaceport? It turns out there was some confusion on the part of the Daily News, which has since corrected the original article. In a followup piece, county officials tell the paper that what they’re interested in is a piece of the annual X Prize Cup activities. County officials said that it’s possible that the Cup might “unite with the Holloman Air Force Base Air Show on a temporary basis”, with the implication that the Cup might move from Las Cruces International Airport to the air force base before finally going to Spaceport America. An X Prize Foundation press release Thursday said that the organization is considering an expansion of the X Prize Cup that could include activities at Holloman or White Sands, although keeping the event based primarily in Las Cruces. |
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