A couple of former X Prize teams plan on appearing, albeit not competing, at the X Prize Cup next month. Via the Lunar Lander Challenge blog is a press release from the da Vinci Project announcing that they plan to participate in the Cup and “show casing a new design”, and well as planning some “major announcements concerning our commercial manned space flight business initiatives”. (Unfortunately da Vinci’s web site is down as of this writing, so you can’t see what progress, if any, they have to show off at the moment.)
Meanwhile, the Romanian group ARCA plans to participate at the X Prize Cup and the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight immediately preceding it, discussing the progress they’re making on Stabilo, their balloon-launched manned vehicle. Stabilo has an unconventional design, looking like an escape rocket mounted on one end of a dumbbell. ARCA believes that they will be ready for manned flight tests of Stabilo by the spring of 2007; presumably they’ll share more details about their test schedule at the Cup.
I do not have realtime access to email. The email process is a batch process so it happens three times a day. I will do my best to get at least one entry in per day.
Also, she can’t directly access the web herself, but some of the comments posted on her blog are forwarded to her via email.
The rest of her post describes the flight to the ISS on the Soyuz, including dealing with a bout of space sickness. She also describes the “smell of space” she experienced as the hatches between the Soyuz and ISS opened after docking:
They said it is a very unique smell. As they pulled the hatch open on the Soyuz side, I smelled “SPACE.” It was strange… kind of like burned almond cookie. I said to them, “It smells like cooking” and they both looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed: “Cooking!”
Anousheh Ansari continues to blog from space, although there appears to be some kind of delay or other lag in their appearance on the site. A post titled “Atlantis from Orbit”, dated September 22 at 4:11 pm GMT (12:11 pm EDT) starts “L.A. [Michael Lopez-Alegria] just called me to watch the shuttle Atlantis land…” Atlantis, of course, landed Thursday morning.
Ansari is also doing something a lot of traditional terrestrial vacationers do these days: checking her work email. “It’s wonderful, the technology up here, it’s like I’ve never left the Earth and like I’m sitting in my office actually,” she told Reuters. One wonders if that’s really such a good thing…
German ISS astronaut Thomas Reiter said in a teleconference with the European Astronaut Centre that Ansari appears to be enjoying herself in space. “Our tourist is enjoying her stay. She is taking photos and has had radio contact over the amateur radio station. Meanwhile, we are just getting on with our jobs.”
New Mexico is set to inaugurate its commercial spaceport (even though construction of its facilities has yet to begin) with a launch Monday of a suborbital sounding rocket by UP Aerospace. The launch of the SpaceLoft XL rocket is scheduled for 7:30 am local time (9:30 am EDT, 1330 GMT). The nearest public viewing site will be about 11 kilometers away. Also, hunters are advised to stay clear of the launch area, for the safety of the rocket as much as for the safety of the hunters.
Anousheh Ansari’s blog now has its first post from space, in the form of an email from Ansari to Peter Diamandis. (Some might quibble whether that counts as blogging from space, but that’s a technicality that’s lost on most people.) “I cannot keep my eyes off the windows,” she writes. “Earth is magnificent and peaceful from up here. You don’t see any of those awful things you hear on the news, from up here.”
Tickets are now available for the X Prize Cup in New Mexico next month. (Well, maybe not available at the moment I write this Thursday morning: the X Prize cup server was down.) Tickets cost $10/day for adults and $5/day for children and students; two-day passes cost $15 for adults and $10 for students and kids (children under 3 get in free). Active military personnel get free passes with ID, and VIPs (or people who want to spend like VIPs) can buy a $250 two-day pass that includes gourmet food and an open bar.
The press release, not surprisingly, plays up the Centennial Challenges events being held there, including the Lunar Lander Challenge and Space Elevator Games. Also on tap: high-powered rocket launches, “Earth shaking” static engine firings (hopefully not as explosive as last year’s Starchaser engine test), T-38 flybys, and a variety of terrestrial activities.
Via YouTube, here’s a five-minute video showing the arrival of Anousheh Ansari and her Soyuz crewmates on the ISS:
The quality is so-so, since it appears to be a video recording of the NASA TV webcast of the arrival ceremony, but a reasonable alternative if you were sleeping when the event took place or otherwise missed it.
It’s been a quiet couple of days since Anousheh Ansari’s launch, since she’s had limited communications opportunities while the Soyuz spacecraft she’s flying in is in transit to the ISS. There are a couple items of note:
An AFP article notes the varying reactions in the Iranian media to Ansari’s flight. One newspaper criticized state-run TV for focusing too much attention on Ansari, claiming that it “has aroused people’s astonishment”. Another newspaper, though, called her flight “a source of pride for all Iranians.”
With Ansari pretty much incommunicado at the moment, her blog is featuring a YouTube video of her launch and some comments by Peter Diamandis.
While I’m thinking of it, I’ll mention a couple of personal spaceflight-related articles published yesterday in The Space Review:
I expanded a full-fledged article about the use of the term. As I note, for the time being, for better or worse, we’re stuck with the term “space tourist” whether or not such people act like, or consider themselves to be, tourists.
Alan Boyle of MSNBC reports that the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has awarded an experimental permit to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ secretive suborbital launch venture. The one-year permit allows Blue Origin to begin powered test flights from its facility in West Texas, over 30 kilometers north of the town of Van Horn. As Boyle notes, there was little doubt that Blue Origin would get the permit, since there were virtually no environmental concerns and no local opposition. Blue Origin got the permit even though AST is still working through the rulemaking process for awarding such permits; the office was only granted the authority for such permits at the end of 2004 with the passage of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.
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