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An article in the current issue of Travel Weekly (“The National Newspaper of the Travel Industry”) has a lengthy article about the emerging space tourism industry. (free registration may be required) Much of the article is a basic primer about some of the major companies in the industry, including Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic, and how travel agents are adapting to this new market.
So far, so good. The first warning sign about this article by David Cogswell comes early on, with this passage:
In the last year, entrepreneurial commercial enterprises have snatched a ball that since the days of Sputnik have been carried by a handful of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations. In a matter of a few months, they have begun generating crucial momentum for establishing a fledgling space-travel industry.
Of course, the real progress in this industry has taken years, not months: it’s hardly an overnight success. However, it’s a pretty harmless statement. It gets worse, though.
“Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) already lists 24 space tourism companies,” says Cogswell. Wikipedia-based research? Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! (A quick check of Wikipedia didn’t turn up such a list; the “Space tourism” entry lists far fewer than 24 companies.) Then, he adds, “But in reality, there are just four players with advanced business plans, and only two of those are already selling seats on spacecraft:”
So whose are those four leaders?
- Space Adventures (well, duh)
- Virgin Galactic (of course)
- Blue Origin (makes sense, once they become less secretive)
- AERA Corp. (WTF?)
So how did AERA Corp. (now Sprague Astronautics) make the cut? “This private space tourism firm, based in Temecula, N.M. [sic], plans to launch civilians on suborbital flights from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Base through an agreement with the Pentagon.” A check of the web site, though, shows that the California (not New Mexico) company hasn’t made any announcements in nearly a year and a half, a long silence for a company that once planned to begin flights from the Cape at the end of this year.
If you had to pick four companies, there seems to be any number of other companies that would make the cut in place of AERA/Sprague: Rocketplane Kistler, SpaceDev/Benson Space, Armadillo, XCOR, and others. It would seem that the overall tourism industry still has a lot to learn about this emerging market.
In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman addresses the potential threat to the emerging space tourism industry in the US posed by Rep. James Oberstar. The Minnesota Democrat is poised to become the chairman of the House Transportation Committee in January when the 110th Congress convenes. Oberstar led an effort two years ago to try and get more stringent passenger safety requirements included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, requirements many in the industry thought could kill the industry before it could get started. Oberstar submitted similar legislation early last year, but the legislation was referred to the House Science Committee, where it never saw the light of day. Some fear that with the power of a committee chairmanship, Oberstar would have the power to give his proposed legislation a better chance at passage.
The saving grace may be in Dinerman’s last sentence: “One hopes that the new Congress will have enough to do so that it just leaves space tourism alone, at least for the next five years or so.” Oberstar’s own committee has a broad purview, and commercial space transportation would presumably have a low priority compared to aviation, highways, and the like. We will find out soon enough just how important this issue is to both Rep. Oberstar and supporters of the existing regulatory system in Congress.
The Stanford Daily has an article about Anousheh Ansari’s speech in a “packed” auditorium last Friday night at Stanford University. There aren’t too many insights in the article about her speech, which appeared to be more inspirational than anything else. She does tell that paper that she believes that the price for space tourism flights “will come down” over time, although she doesn’t specifically discuss what her company, Prodea, is doing supporting the Russian Explorer suborbital vehicle.
You can say one thing about Virgin Galactic: they’re good about generating press (and good press, at that), even when they have little new to report. On Friday SPACE.com runs an article about the company’s business plans, based on an interview with company vice president Alex Tai. There are some interesting items in here, including Tai’s statement that he anticipates Virgin Galactic spending $225-250 million by the time the company begins commercial operations. And as for what they’ll be offering: “We’ll be giving them a really sexy training experience… I don’t think we’re in danger of under-delivery.”
The Guardian has an extended article on Virgin Galactic and its Founders, its elite initial group of customers. (The reporter has a rather extreme fascination with one of them, Victoria Principal. “Perhaps it’s my age. I can’t get the picture out of my mind of the former Dallas beauty, three decades on, a few husbands down the line, floating in space.” As you might guess, this will not end well.) The article is primarily a series of character portraits of a number of Founders.
While many of the Founders are wealthy enough to easily afford the $200,000 ticket price, others aren’t: the article profiles one, Lina Borozdina, who (with her husband) remortgaged her house to afford the price of the trip. “Virgin has always had an eye for a great story. Despite the fact that there were more than 13,000 applicants, they were determined that Lina would be a founder. Now she faces the next 30 years mortgaged to the hilt. Does she ever think she’s made the wrong decision? ‘Absolutely. I’m a worry bird 24/7.'”
And then there’s the case of Princess Beatrice, the 18-year-old daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, who has agreed to fly on a Virgin Galactic flight at some point. She was persuaded by her boyfriend, David Clark, who works in the sales and marketing department of Virgin Galactic. Whether she’ll pay for her own ticket wasn’t disclosed.
According to MSNBC and the AP, Blue Origin performed its first low-level flight test on Monday morning at about 7:30 am EST from its test site in West Texas. The company, not surprisingly, has released few details about the flight. FAA officials said that the flight lasted “one or two minutes”, but we don’t know how high (prior to the flight it appeared that it would not go much past 600 meters, with airspace reserved to 3,000 meters) nor how successful the test was. Standard operating procedure, really, for Blue Origin.
A front-page article in today’s Washington Post discusses the impending launch of a Minotaur rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. That launch will carry an experimental military satellite, TacSat 2, but spaceport officials would like to expand their operations to include suborbital or even orbital space tourism:
[Spaceport director Billie Reed] said MARS would love to host a tourist mission.
“Absolutely!” he said. “If you print anything, I would really like you to print that: Hey, guys, we can do it!”
MARS, while located in Virginia, is a cooperative venture between Maryland and Virginia (the facility is located just south of the Maryland border on the Delmarva Peninsula.) A Maryland official quoted in the article, though, was more skeptical about the whole idea of space tourism:
But there are concerns about the future of space tourism. “How large is that market?” asked Aris Melissaratos, Maryland’s Secretary of Business and Economic Development and the state’s point person on the spaceport. “I really don’t want to put too many economic eggs in that basket.”
That statement is ironic since one of the leading forecasts of the size of the space tourism market was developed by a Maryland company, Futron. (My employer; standard disclaimers apply)
MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that Blue Origin plans to conduct flight tests in the next few days from its West Texas spaceport. A notice to airmen (NOTAM) issued by the FAA sets aside airspace over about 15 square kilometers centered on the launch site up to an altitude of about 3,000 meters, although the flight tests are not planned to go any higher than about 600 meters. The airspace restrictions will be in place from 9 am to 2 pm CST starting today and ending Monday. Other details about the flight tests are, not surprisingly, being kept under wraps by Blue Origin.
El Paso TV station KTSM paid a visit to the front gate of the spaceport and saw “plenty of people traveling in and out of the entrance”; whether that’s a sign of increased activity or not isn’t certain, although locals in the nearest town report increased business in hotels and restaurants. “They welcome the new customers, but don’t know exactly what they’re doing there,” KTSM reports.
The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about Blue Origin’s spaceport (subscription required), and how Jeff Bezos hasn’t been the most neighborly of people in the area, including putting a neighboring rancher (by the name of Phil Guitar) who has a property boundary dispute into a legal runaround. The article also has what appears to be an aerial photo of the spaceport, but the photo is small and no details about the structures in the image are given.
Anousheh Ansari is scheduled to speak at Stanford University on Friday night. An op-ed in The Stanford Daily on Thursday from one of the organizers of the event makes a bid to lure otherwise-skeptical students to the event:
You might be thinking, “Yeah, I’m not an engineer. I don’t want to go to space. Next article.” Well, fine. If you’re not the least interested in technology, different cultures, space, women who have climbed to the top or entrepreneurship and innovation, then I release you from the obligation of reading this article. But I say:
Come on Friday. Meet some friends, learn something new, ask a question, dare to be inspired. After all, why else are we here?
Plus, it’s at 7 pm Friday. That leaves the whole rest of the night for parties.
It’s rare that Jeff Bezos speaks about his suborbital RLV startup, Blue Origin, adding to the secretive environment that surrounds the company. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the topic come up in an InformationWeeb interview with Bezos. He doesn’t say much about Blue Origin, and there are no real insights here, but at least he talks about it:
InformationWeek: I understand you’re also involved in a space startup, Blue Origin. Is there any reason beyond that fact that space exploration is just a great dream to have?
Bezos: I’m just now trying to think about how we could open up Blue Origin as a Web service. It’s not immediately clear to me. (Laughs) But if we can figure it out, we will.
InformationWeek: What’s in space for you?
Bezos: This is a childhood passion of mine. It’s a very talent team of people working on building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing, suborbital vehicle. It’s a separate company and they’re doing a fantastic job and I’m very proud of them.
CNET News.com, whose readers generally know John Carmack as the creator of the computer games Doom and Quake, interviews the Armadillo Aerospace founder about his space venture. Carmack talks about Armadillo’s participation in last month’s X Prize Cup, his idea for “vertical drag racing”, and future plans, with an eye in particular for going after the suborbital space tourism market.
There are a number of interesting comments by Carmack in the interview. He suggests that it’s possible Armadillo might one day work with Virgin:
But we think the first really significant business opportunity is with the suborbital space tourism market, taking people up to 100 kilometers on a rocket. Virgin Galactic has really proved that that market exists by taking in over $20 million of hard-cash deposits. But it is worth noting that they do not have any kind of an exclusive arrangement with Burt Rutan’s development company and that if somebody else comes up with a vehicle (with) worthwhile capability, they’ll be more than happy to work with other companies. So it’s not out of the question that we might wind up flying some of the Virgin passengers at some point.
He also believes that Scaled Composites’ SS1 and SS2 designs, while technically effective, may not be economical if ticket prices drop:
We have some idea of their expenses per flight, based on their engine technology and their operational cost. And they could certainly turn a pretty good profit at $200,000 per passenger, but it’s not likely that they could turn a good profit if the price pressure pushes it down to $50,000 or lower.
Carmack says that he’s “from the camp that says that spaceships really shouldn’t look very much like airplanes” and that the ideal rocket “looks like a flying fuel tank”, talking about some concepts for a simple suborbital vehicle he has in mind. And as for his vision for the future of space tourism:
I think that you’ll get at least 500 people that will pay the $200,000. And then I think the price will start to steadily go down when you get two vendors out there. They’ll start undercutting each other, but the early generation of ships won’t go down much below $100,000. (When the industry) builds a more cost-effective vehicle, it will start coming down more, and eventually, maybe 10 years from now, it will be a $10,000 ride located someplace like a quick ride from Vegas, where people can just go and do their mad-money thing, dropping $10,000 on a ride.
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