The cost of a ticket on a Soyuz taxi mission to the ISS will go up $1 million to $21 million, the head of RSC Energia said Thursday. Nikolai Sevastyanov blamed “growth in the cost of materials and components used in the construction of the Soyuz spacecraft” for the cost increase. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should: last month Roskosmos said that Soyuz ticket prices in general would be going up to $21.8 million because of increased costs. That report said that what tourists would pay is negotiated individually and “considered a commercial secret”; someone apparently forgot to tell this to Sevastyanov.
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Alliant Techsystems (ATK) announced today that it has reached an agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) to work together on the development of the K-1. ATK will become the lead contractor for the K-1 development effort, with responsibility for “Launch vehicle development, assembly, integration and test of the launch system, and will conduct launch and landing site development and launch vehicle preparation for the K-1,” according to the press release; ATK will also provide “critical” composite structures for the K-1 payload modules. The role ATK is taking is largely one vacated by Orbital Sciences Corporation back in September, when Orbital backed out of a teaming and investment agreement with RpK that was made before the COTS awards were made. RpK signed Andrews Space a few days later to partially fill the role (including making an estimated $10-million investment that Orbital was to have provided), but at the COMSTAC meeting at FAA Headquarters last month RpK’s Will Trafton said that Andrews Space was not a “one-for-one” replacement for Orbital, and that ongoing negotiations (presumably, it now seems, with ATK) prevented him from discussing the issue in more detail. The Advertiser, a newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, reports in Saturday’s issue that Virgin Galactic will establish its second spaceport in Australia, most likely at Woomera, which will also be the home of Rocketplane Kistler’s K-1 orbital vehicle. Most of the details in the article aren’t that new, but what is interesting is the illustration that goes with the article. Captioned “An artist’s impression of the Woomera spaceport,” the image instead looks very much like the images Virgin Galactic and the state of An all-too-brief article in BizCommunity.com ( “South Africa’s leading daily advertising, marketing and media news resource for the industry!”) reports that a South African advertising firm is contemplating advertising to SpaceShipTwo passengers—in flight. Details are sketchy, but apparently Net#work BBDO (yes, the “#” character is part of their name), which is Virgin’s ad agency in South Africa, would like to create some sort of suborbital billboard for SS2 passengers to view during their flight (because, of course, they’ll have absolutely nothing else to do during their trip to space, evidently.) According to Net#work BBDO’s creative executive director, Julian Watt: “So, given that Virgin’s plan is to send a passenger airplane into space; shouldn’t there be some advertising right up there with them? Why can’t there be a space billboard to read?… Never before has a billboard roamed the stratosphere for commercial consumption.” How exactly are they going to pull this off? The report says that the ad agency has sent a letter to NASA, which Watt calls “our official appeal to NASA to set in motion our project plan to engineer, build and launch the idea.” The fact that they’re contacting NASA suggests that the ad agency really has no clue about this: exactly why would the US space agency help a South African company build a “space billboard”? Unfortunately, perhaps because space is so closely linked to NASA around the world regardless of the activity, the unnamed reporter of the article doesn’t question this assertion, or even contact NASA for comment. Flight International reports that Prodea Systems, the company founded by the Ansari family, has yet to make a decision on investing in the development of the Explorer suborbital vehicle proposed by Russia’s Myasishchev Design Bureau. The article notes that “Anousheh Ansari says the company is only funding a feasibility study that will continue for several months.” What isn’t clear from this report is if this schedule for such a study was planned all along or represents something of a delay in Explorer’s development. Back in February Space Adventures, which will market the Explorer flights, said that this would be the “first suborbital spaceflight tourism vehicles, but if a decision to proceed with funding and development doesn’t come until early next year, they’ll be hard-pressed to beat Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Rocketplane’s XP unless they have a very fast development schedule. There has been a lot of discussion about whether commercial passengers like Anousheh Ansari should be called “space tourists” or some other title. In an extensive analysis in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Michael Turner argues that it doesn’t really matter. Calling upon varying expertise in everything from language to marketing, he notes that’s its really not possible to come up with the “perfect” term to replace “space tourism”, and that even it was, it’s unlikely that the public would adopt it. He does, though, make a suggestion of his own for an alternative term: “space travel”. “Yes, Space Travel seems overly broad—after all, travel includes business travel,” he concludes. “It will probably be a while, if ever, before high-performance sales reps and merger consultants are plying coastal urban concentrations via suborbital hops. But does that really matter? Categories will emerge, and be given names.” Space Adventures formally announced yesterday that former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi will be the next space tourist, er, commercial spaceflight participant (or whatever) to visit the ISS, in spring 2007. The announcement was made at a press conference in Seattle, and comes a week after Russia media reports announced he would fly on the Soyuz TMA-10 taxi flight to the ISS. Simonyi, like previous commercial travellers, is playing up the research and educational angles of his trip, noting that he is in talks to participate in experiments on the health effects of spaceflight. (As MSNBC reports, though, he’s not necessarily as testy about being called a “space tourist”.) “I might be the first nerd in space,” he claims, something that many of his professional and commercial predecessors might dispute. The Space Adventures press release claims that Simonyi’s flight will lift off on March 9, 2007. However, previous Russian reports indicates that the next Soyuz flight would be delayed until April to avoid landing back in Kazakhstan during the early spring flooding season. According to SPACE.com, discussions about changing the launch date “are still ongoing and far from final.” Simonyi, not surprisingly, has his own web site devoted to the flight, including imagery and a blog. (The question is, will he “blog” from space?). On the site, he says that his goals for his flight are to “advance civilian space flight, assist research for the International Space Station, and involve young people in the science of space travel.” [Note: this entry is also posted on Space Politics.] The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report yesterday titled “Commercial Space Launches: FAA Needs Continued Planning and Monitoring to Oversee the Safety of the Emerging Space Tourism Industry”. The report is a review of how the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) oversees the safety of commercial launches, and how the office is prepared to handle any significant increase in such activity should suborbital space tourism take off in the next few years. Overall, the GAO approves of AST’s current work and its plans for the future. The report does raise a few issues, including the office’s ability to hire additional qualified staff for safety oversight should launch activities increase, as well as the concerns about the dual promotional/regulatory nature of the office. There’s a bit of a background to this report. The report was requested by Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar was one of the members of the House who opposed HR 5382 (the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act) two years ago, railing against what he saw as a “tombstone mentality” enshrined in the bill, which prevents AST from regulating crew and passenger before 2012 unless there’s been an accident or serious incident before then. Despite the bill’s passage at the end of the 108th Congress, Oberstar continued his opposition, first in a February 2005 hearing of the House Transportation Committee’s aviation subcommittee and, at around the same time, introducing HR 656, which would rewrite the CSLAA to include additional safety provisions. The legislation was referring to the House Science Committee, which never took action on it; it doesn’t seem as thought this GAO report would do much to revive the bill. [Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: Yes, my employer does work for FAA/AST. No, we’re not involved with licensing. Yes, Futron reports were referenced in the GAO report. No, I was not involved in the GAO study in any way, although I had heard about it months ago.] County commissioners in Doña Ana County, New Mexico (home to Las Cruces) have approved a plan to have county residents vote on a sales tax increase intended to support development of Spaceport America. Commissioners approved by a 4-1 vote a plan to draft a measure to increase sales taxes by a quarter-cent. After another vote by county commissioners early next year, the initiative would go before voters in April 2007. The tax would provide an estimated $6.8 million a year towards the $225-million spaceport; the bulk of the money for spaceport construction will come from state. While most of the NewSpace world was focused this past weekend on the X Prize Cup in New Mexico, there was a report on the Web business blog TechCrunch claiming that Google had bought SpaceShipOne and was installing it in its Silicon Valley headquarters, the Googleplex. That report, of course, was nonsense, since SS1 had been in the National Air and Space Museum for over a year now. As TechCrunch and eWeek later reported, the real SS1 is alive and well in the NASM, while Google has acquired a replica of SS1, one of several such replicas in existence (another was at the X Prize Cup). If you look closely at a photo of the replica being installed at the Googleplex you can tell it’s not the real thing: the replicas all bear the insignia of X Prize sponsors and Virgin, as SS1 looked when it made the two X Prize flights in September and October 2004; the real thing in the NASM has been “restored” to its appearance in June 2004 when it made its first space flight, lacking the X Prize sponsor and Virgin logos. |
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