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I noted in an earlier post that one of the key issues with forecasting the demand for space tourism is the need to do an updated survey to see how preferences have changed since the original Futron/Zogby study in 2002. SPACE.com reports that such an effort is underway by Incredible Adventures, a Florida-based adventure tourism company, in cooperation with Derek Webber, a former colleague of mine who led the original Futron/Zogby study and is now an independent consultant.
The survey is available online and open for anyone to fill out. And that’s both the strength and weakness of this effort. The strength is that the survey instrument itself is very good: it asks pretty much all the key questions about interest in suborbital and orbital tourism activities, ranging from duration of the flights to cost, risk, and related topics. Moreover, since it’s an online survey, it’s available to anyone, regardless of location; the Futron/Zogby survey interviewed people only in the US.
However, the fact this is an open online survey is also its key disadvantage. The nature of any such survey (not just this one) is that there will be a selection bias in the results: the only data you will get will be from those people who know about the survey and decide they have the time to answer it. This presents the danger of skewing the results, which makes it more difficult to compare the results to previous surveys, one of the goals of this effort. (There’s also a greater risk of erroneous data—how do you know that people who say they make more than $250,000/year really do so?—although I don’t know how big of a concern this would be compared to more scientific surveys.) This makes it difficult to really do an apples-to-apples comparison of the results, but regardless it will be interesting to see the results.
So is Paris Hilton headed for outer space? Do you even care? Well, the Sunday Mirror newspaper in the UK thinks so, reporting that Hilton has paid the full $200,000 price for a flight on Virgin Galactic. A “source close to Paris” told the paper that Hilton has been “a fan of the Star Wars films and the idea of blasting into space thrills her”, but wonders if the young overexposed socialite has really “done the research” about what’s involved with the flight. One suspects that Virgin Galactic would be very straightforward with any prospective customer about the flight and the risks involved, but that doesn’t mean the customer, celebrity or otherwise, would pay attention.
The Mirror reports that Hilton would join a number of other celebrities planning to fly on SpaceShipTwo, including William Shatner, Kate Moss, and Sigourney Weaver. However, Weaver told an online publication that she has no plans to spend a “staggering $100,000″ on such a flight (staggering, perhaps, since it would be a 50% discount on the current going rate). She said she worried she has already been to space “so many times in my imagination”, and worried that the real thing might not live up to expectations. It true, it wouldn’t the first time that a celebrity denied reports about signing up with Virgin Galactic: earlier this year William Shatner denied reports he was a customer, even asking “Who the heck wants to go out into space?!”
You may recall that a few years ago Futron Corporation published a demand forecast for orbital and suborbital space tourism that has been widely regarded in many quarters. [Full disclosure: Futron is my employer.] Yesterday Futron published a short white paper that slightly updates the results of the suborbital forecast, taking into accounts developments in the market since the forecast was originally published in 2002. [Fuller disclosure: I wrote the white paper.]
What’s different about the new forecast? A few things have changed. Back in 2002 it seemed like the earliest that suborbital tourist vehicles would enter revenue service was 2006, based on the publicly-reported progress of X Prize competitors and other companies, and the belief that whoever won the X Prize would keep their vehicle in service. Things have changed somewhat since then, and 2008 appears to be a more probable date that vehicles like SpaceShipTwo will enter revenue service; the forecast has been updated accordingly. In addition, back in 2002 the estimated ticket price for suborbital flights appeared to be about $100,000, based on what Space Adventures was charging; now $200,000 appears to be a more likely starting price. These tend to slightly depress the demand compared to the original forecast.
One other thing we looked at was fitness requirements. In the original study we used very conservative fitness requirements: above average for most people and excellent for elderly people. This was a combination of conservatism about the physical conditions passengers would have to endure the stresses of a flight, as well as the belief that many people tend to overestimate, rather than underestimate, their fitness levels. However, given that fitness requirements have not (so far) appeared to be a major constraint to suborbital space tourism operators, we examined what happened when we relaxed the fitness requirements on under-65 passengers to “average”. That considerably boosted the forecast numbers, to levels well above the original 2002 forecast. Whether that change is warranted, though, remains to be seen.
One thing should be noted: this white paper simply tweaks the forecast model, and uses the same Futron/Zogby data used in the 2002 survey. A lot of things have changed since that survey (back then, suborbital space tourism still seemed very much theoretical, and SpaceShipOne was still a secret Scaled Composites project). What is needed is a new survey to see how potential customer preferences, levels of interest, and other factors have changed in the last four years. Conducting such a survey is not an inexpensive proposition, though, so we’re still looking for potential partners to help make this happen.
One final note: while I wrote the white paper mentioned here, much of the space tourism research performed at Futron over the last several years was done by Janice Starzyk, a colleague who recently took a new position at ILS. Without her hard work on this project this paper would not have been possible.
As further evidence that Anousheh Ansari will be taking the place of rejected Japanese space tourist Daisuke Enomoto on next month’s Soyuz flight comes this report from AFP about modifications being made to the Soyuz spacecraft to accommodate Ansari. And why are those changes being made? “A woman’s organism is different, that’s why we need to modify some of the life systems in the capsule,” said Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of RSC Energia. Yes, indeed, her “organism” is different…
Wired News has a brief article about Space Adventures’ plans to open a Chinese office, an effort to court the growing number of wealthy Chinese who may be interested in flying in space. While the effort appears to be initially focused on flight opportunities outside China, both orbital and suborbital, Space Adventures also sees a future where Chinese vehicles become available for space tourism. “We plan to initiate and develop a relationship with the China National Space Administration,” Eric Anderson told Wired News. However, he adds that “Space Adventures will consider the Chinese Shenzhou vehicle once it has proven its reliability.” Given the low flight rate of the Shenzhou (less than once every two years), it might be a long time before Shenzhou’s reliability is sufficiently demonstrated.
Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, will be the guest on David Livingston’s “The Space Show” this Thursday, August 24, at 7 pm PDT (10 pm EDT). This will be a rare opportunity for the general public to ask Bigelow questions about his company and its future plans.
While there has been no formal announcement from Space Adventures, Roskosmos officials said Tuesday that, as expected, Anousheh Ansari will replace Daisuke Enomoto on the Soyuz flight to the ISS next month. Ansari has been training in parallel with Enomoto as his backup, and when Enomoto was medically disqualified Monday, Ansari was the most likely replacement. The decision to replace Enomoto with Ansari will be “formalized” next week, according to a Roskosmos spokesman. Ansari would become the “first female space tourist”, although some might quibble that Helen Sharman might qualify as the first; at the very least, Ansari would be the first female space tourist to pay for her flight herself.
The Personal Spaceflight Federation originally formed last year after the passage of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act as a means for companies to exchange information about industry best practices in the nascent personal spaceflight (aka space tourism) industry. However, the organization faded from public view now long thereafter. A few months ago PSF president Mike Kelly said at Space Access ’06 conference that the organization was in the process of being relaunched, and that relaunch became official yesterday with a trio of press releases:
- One release covers future plans for the organization, including working on issues such as safety, liability protection, insurance, and public relations for the industry in general, as well as acting as an “interface” between the industry and the government;
- A second release announced a new set of officers for the organization, including Virgin Galactic’s Alex Tai as chairman, as well as a number of new member companies, including Bigelow Aerospace, SpaceDev, AirLaunch, and Spaceport America;
- A final press release congratulates two of its member companies, SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler, for winning COTS awards from NASA.
The PSF now has an official web site, although the information available there at the moment is limited to a brief summary of the organization, a list of members, and contact details. MSNBC has some more details about the re-launch of the Federation. Hopefully the PSF will be more active now than it was after the announcement of its formation last year.
In a surprise development, the Russian space agency Roskosmos announced Monday that Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto, who was to fly to the ISS next month on the Soyuz TMA-9 mission, had been removed from the crew because of an undisclosed medical condition. (See a summary of the announcement and related links.) With Enomoto no longer able to fly, his seat on the mission will likely be taken by Anousheh Ansari, who had been training alongside Enomoto as his backup.
This isn’t the first time that a space tourist has been dropped from a mission because of medical issues—Greg Olsen was removed shortly after starting his training in 2004, but was able to get his medical issues resolved and flew to the ISS last fall; he later disclosed that doctors found a spot on his lung that they feared could be a sign of lung cancer, although the spot disappeared on its own. What is curious is that this medical problem cropped up less than month from is his scheduled flight. Unless Enomoto decides to be as forthcoming as Olsen, though, we may never know what caused Enomoto to miss out on his chance to fly to the ISS.
NASA announced this afternoon that, as many people suspected in the days leading up to this afternoon’s announcement, that SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) won Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) awards to develop cargo and crew transportation vehicles to serve the ISS. SpaceX proposed the Dragon capsule, launched atop a Falcon 9, as described in an article I wrote in this week’s issue of The Space Review.
SpaceX said in a press release that they planned to perform three test flights of the Dragon in late 2008 and early 2009. RpK proposed the K-1 vehicle that Kistler Aerospace developed (and started to build) in the 1990s, with a module to carry cargo or passengers. RpK plans to perform the first flights of the K-1 in early 2008 and said in a statement that it remains committed to its XP suborbital spaceplane, which will make its first flights in “late 2008″, a bit later than previous plans.
Both vehicles also plan to serve commercial markets, such as orbital space tourism; Musk has previously stated an interest in supporting Bigelow’s orbital modules. Both companies will also be leaning on the private sector for funding to support the development of the vehicles: MSNBC reports that SpaceX is planning to spend around $200 on Dragon and Rocketplane would get on the order of $400 million in private financing.
SpaceX and RpK beat out four other finalists for the COTS award: Andrews Space, SpaceDev, SPACEHAB, and t/Space. Of the four, only SpaceDev has issued a statement since the award announcement, congratulating the winning companies as well as to NASA. “We will continue to look for other avenues to develop these technologies and further our capability to advance commercial space transportation,” said company CEO Mark Sirangelo.
Now the hard part—but also the fun part—begins: turning these winning designs into real spacecraft.
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