NewSpace Journal

One SS2 picture

One picture from this morning’s event: Richard Branson gives two thumbs up sitting in one of the chairs in the SS2 cabin mockup. Note the “view” outside the porthole.

SpaceShipTwo event notes – early edition

I’m sitting in the Javits Center in New York right now, having attended the Virgin Galactic press conference earlier this morning (right now over 10,000 students are here from around the city attending the education day of Wired NextFest, which runs through this weekend.) At the press conference Richard Branson and other Virgin Galactic officials unveiled a conceptual full-scale model of the cabin of SpaceShipTwo. Here’s a first cut of the notes from the press conference:

SS2 will be about 60 feet (18.3 meters) long, twice the length of SpaceShipOne. While an animation of the flight shown at the press conference features a design of SS2, company officials stressed those are still notional at best, since Scaled Composites is keeping the actual SS2 design under tight wraps until they’re ready to show it off, in about a year.
The cabin features three rows of two seats each, plus seats at the front for the two pilots. The seats are in an upright position for launch, but retract after the powered portion of the flight to allow more room in the cabin during zero-g, and also to put them in the proper position for reentry.
Virgin is no longer planning to tether their passengers to their seats during the zero-g phase of the flight. Instead, the flight profile is such that there should be plenty of time (around 40 seconds) from the end of zero-g to the onset of high-g deceleration during reentry to allow people to get back to their seats. And even if they can’t, officials said passengers could simply lie on the floor and be able to safely withstand the peak g forces.
The animation showed passengers wearing pressure suits and helmets throughout the flight, but Will Whitehorn said they have not yet made a decision about whether passengers will wear them. they are looking at several pressure suit designs that would apparently be less cumbersome than traditional suits but protect passengers in the event of cabin decompression.
Virgin estimates that about 80-85% of people who are interested in flying will be healthy enough to do so; they are starting to work through the health issues for the Founders.
There was a big emphasis on how environmentally friendly the system would be (part of a broader initiative by the Virgin Group); they noted that the CO2 emissions from a SS2 flight would be the equivalent of those associated with a single business-class passenger going from New York to London on Virgin Atlantic.
Branson and Whitehorn also emphasized that they see SS2 as a stepping stone to an orbital vehicle, SpaceShipThree, that would be able to carry passengers but also satellites and scientific payloads at a fraction of the cost of existing vehicles.
SS2 will be powered by a hybrid motor, but of a somewhat different design than that used by SS1; the company declined to offer details.
Current plans call for SS2 and White Knight 2 carrier aircraft to be unveiled in late 2007, with flight tests to begin at the end of 2007 or early 2008.
There’s a new version of the Virgin Galactic web site (very Flash-heavy) now available with some of the new details.

I will have some more details later today or tonight, along with some photos I took of the event, as well as, most likely, a summary article in Monday’s edition of The Space Review.

Jim Benson’s new gig

The Wall Street Journal reported in this morning’s issue that Jim Benson, founder of SpaceDev, is creating a new space tourism-oriented startup, Benson Space Company (BSC). (The Journal requires a subscription, but you may be able to read the article for free here). Benson is stepping down as chairman and CTO of SpaceDev to start the new venture, which will purchase Dream Chaser spacecraft from SpaceDev and operate them for suborbital and, later, orbital space tourism. Benson told the Journal that he has already raised an initial round of $1 million with “less than a dozen phone calls”; he eventually plans to raise on the order of $50 million to build and test Dream Chaser. (See also Alan Boyle’s coverage of the development at MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.)

A press release announcing the formation of BSC just hit the wires early this morning, and the company’s web site is also up, including a form to reserve a seat on a Dream Chaser flight. Ticket prices will be between $200,000 and $300,000, which would put BSC in the high range of planned suborbital space tourism operators.

Preparing to say farewell

Around this time tomorrow Anousheh Ansari will no longer be on the station, having joined Pavel Vinogradov and Jeffrey Williams on the Soyuz spacecraft that will take them back to Earth; landing is scheduled in Kazakhstan at approximately 9:10 pm EDT Thursday. In the meantime, Ansari speaks about the joys of weightlessness and the benefits of Velcro when those joys aren’t so apparent. Her official web site now has several videos she recorded on the ISS, including one thanking all the people who visited and left comments on her blog. (Note that in the videos she is wearing overalls whose design incorporates both the US and Iranian flags. Hopefully no one at the State Department is going apoplectic at the moment…)

Virginia is for space tourists?

That’s the suggestion of Jack Kennedy, a Virginia attorney, in an op-ed in the Roanoke Times this week. Looking at the boom in commercial spaceports in the US and elsewhere, he believes that the state is missing an opportunity to get involved by using an existing spaceport, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), co-located with the Wallops Flight Facility. “Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted,” he notes, “it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.” His recommendation: “Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia’s own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague… Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia’s spaceport should be made.”

SpaceShipTwo mockup (of sorts) in New York

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend, or in easy traveling distance, you may want to check out the Wired NextFest at the Javits Center, which will feature, among others exhibitors, Virgin Galactic. While some reports indicate that Virgin Galactic will be displaying a full-scale mockup of SpaceShipTwo, the company itself indicated in a media announcement that it will be unveiling a “full-sized mock-up showing the conceptual interior of SpaceShipTwo within the concept of scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne.” Rather convoluted language, but suggesting that what’s really being unveiled is the current design of the cabin interior, not the full vehicle itself. (One imagines that the overall design of SS2 itself will be kept under tight wraps until Burt Rutan is good and ready to show it off.)

In addition to the cabin mockup (which will be unveiled at a Thursday morning press conference featuring Richard Branson, Will Whitehorn, and other Virgin Galactic officials), there are a couple of related panel sessions during NextFest itself. At noon on Friday Virgin officials (sans Branson), along with Brian Binnie, will speak on “Virgin Galactic, Cleared for Take-off”. Saturday at 10 am “The New Vacationauts” panel includes Eric Anderson, Peter Diamandis, Whitehorn, Granger Whitelaw of the Rocket Racing League, and Chris Shank of NASA.

Tuesday Ansari updates

Anousheh Ansari continues her blogging (or pseudo-blogging or whatever you want to call it), discussing life on the station and watching the Earth from the station. The best part,” however, she notes, “and by far my favorite view up here is the view of the universe at night. The stars up here are unbelievable… It looks like someone has spread diamond dust over a black velvet blanket.”
In addition to her blog, Ansari also has a Flickr account, including a few photos taken from the ISS. So whether or not she’s the first female space tourist, she’s obviously the first Web 2.0 visitor to the ISS…
A noted critic of claims that Ansari is blogging in space has something of a change of heart. “Despite where you may fall on the claim as to whether she is ‘blogging’ or not, I do feel that she has broken totally new territory – in an expansive, profound, global fashion.”
CBS News’ Bill Harwood writes about Ansari’s blog and her stay on the ISS. Later in the article NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria notes that while he’s changed his mind and is supportive of space tourism, he’s still undecided on other commercial uses of ISS, including the planned golf shot that his Russian crewmate will perform during a November spacewalk. “I think the sort of commercialization of time, of use of time of astronauts and cosmonauts, is a little bit of another step for me. I’m not quite there yet.”
There’s been a lot of reaction in the blogosphere to Ansari’s flight, but this post offers a unique opinion about Ansari: “She has advanced the cause of freedom as much as a squadron of B-52’s.” Umm, okay.

Setback for RpK?

On the same day that Taylor Dinerman wrote glowingly on the future prospects of Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) after the company won a COTS award from NASA last month to help finish development of the K-1, Space News reports that a key member of the RpK team, Orbital Sciences Corporation, has pulled out [subscription required]. Orbital was going to manage the K-1 development program and kick in $10 million towards the vehicle’s development, but an Orbital spokesman said that the company could not agree “on all the elements of the business plan so we will not be part of the program going forward.” How big a blow this is to RpK and K-1 project isn’t clear yet; RpK officials were not quoted in the article. Certainly there will be at least some degree of scrambling to develop a new project management plan, as well as reassure potential investors and NASA.

Update 7pm: RpK president Randy Brinkley tells Space News that the company has found a new partner willing to take over for Orbital, including investing at least $10 million into the venture. Brinkley said that their partnership with Orbital unraveled after Orbital reportedly wanted to make design changes to the K-1 that RpK found unacceptable. Who the new partner is, and what those design changes were, has not been disclosed.

Revisiting the “space tourist” term

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Rick Tumlinson writes about why visitors to the ISS like Anousheh Ansari should not be called “tourists”. The catch here is that this essay was actually written back in 2000, right after Dennis Tito signed with MirCorp to fly as the first passenger to pay his way to the Mir space station. (MirCorp? Mir? Yes, this is a little old.) While the essay is a bit dated, the key arguments here still hold up: this is still a cutting-edge and dangerous venture, so we shouldn’t call ISS visitors tourists any more than we call those who climb Everest tourists. Moreover, even terrestrial tourist destinations like Las Vegas and New York don’t advertise for “tourists”, so why should we use the label for visitors to space?

This analysis may hold up for orbital tourists, but it does raise the question whether the “tourist” appellation might be more appropriate for suborbital commercial passengers. The higher safety factors, lower costs, and greater anticipated demand for such services may well meet Tumlinson’s criteria in his essay about when the tourist label is appropriate. “We will certainly know it when we see it,” he writes, “but that time is not now, and we only hurt our cause by using the phrase prematurely.”

Monday Ansari updates

Anousheh Ansari discusses some “space travel details” in her latest blog entry, including keeping clean and exercising. Not exactly the most romantic material but, as she puts it, “So I guess all the beauty and excitement of space comes with a price.”
Also: the ISS is in the 281 area code, as Peter Diamandis discovered.
But is Ansari really blogging from space? Keith Cowing argues no, because she is emailing her entries rather than directly entering them through the web interface of blogging software. “Yawn – astronauts have been doing this for years.” On the other hand, blogging applications like WordPress (the software used by Ansari’s blog) does have a blog by email interface, although we don’t know if that’s being used or not. In any case, it appears from the hundreds of comments left on each post (something typically not found with NASA astronaut dispatches from the ISS) that most people don’t care much about the “purity” of Ansari’s blogging.
In addition to blogging (or pseudo-blogging), Ansari is also spending some time on the amateur radio link, as one ham radio operator in Saskatchewan discovered. Ned Carroll is the first ham to talk with Ansari, although their conversation was brief.

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