No, this is not some kind of World Cup reference, but rather the apparent competition between two sites in Europe for a future Virgin Galactic spaceport. The British newspaper The Business noted in Sunday’s edition that Virgin Galactic has set its sights on Kiruna, in northern Sweden. Flights there would begin as early as 2011 and could feature flights through the aurora borealis. Because Kiruna is home to a sounding rocket range today, it has a number of benefits, including free airspace. There’s also, the article adds, the “Icehotel” near Kiruna, which, as the name suggests, is made entirely of ice and rebuilt each winter.

However, The Times of London, which briefly noted Virgin’s interest in Kiruna last month, said Sunday that Virgin is also looking at Scotland as a potential spaceport site. Like Kiruna, northern Scotland has relatively open airspace needed for suborbital flights to regularly take place. “It’s very likely that we will operate from northern Scotland in the future,” Will Whitehorn, a native of Edinburgh, told the Times.

The best part of the Times article, though, might be when Whitehorn is asked what it’s like to work with Richard Branson:

Suddenly Whitehorn’s speedy replies are sent into slow motion. He chooses his words carefully.

“Good question. Ehh, fascinating. Ehh, fun. Ehh, challenging,” he says, before finally launching into a description of the business tycoon.

“He’s fascinating to work for. He doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer very easily. But he does listen to people, even if he draws his own conclusions. He is charming, and doesn’t separate work and family. For him it’s all one thing. That’s very rare.”

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Tom Hill reviews a new novel, Orbit, that may be one of the first thrillers associated with space tourism. In the John J. Nance novel, tourist Kip Dawson is trapped in orbit when his spacecraft is apparently struck by a micrometeorite, killing the pilot. Will Dawson get rescued? And what happened exactly to the spacecraft? You’ll have to read the novel to find out (and don’t ask me; I haven’t read it yet.) One sign that space tourism is becoming a little more mainstream: Hill notes that the book is categorized simply as “fiction” instead of “science fiction”.

As noted here last week, NASA astronaut and Australian native Andy Thomas has become a major advocate of a spaceport in Woomera, one that could serve the space tourism market. The article mentioned a meeting he had with science minister Julie Bishop about the topic. However, Bishop, in an interview Sunday with Barry Cassidy of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., has a different recollection of that meeting, and the importance of space tourism to any Woomera spaceport plans:

BARRIE CASSIDY: Now finally, if I could ask you to put on your science cap for a moment. And Andy Thomas, the astronaut, wants Woomera to become a space sport for space tourism. Is this pie in the sky?

JULIE BISHOP: I believe it’s serious about it. I happened to meet him during the Commonwealth Games. We sat next to each other at a lunch hosted by the Melbourne Lord Mayor and he spoke about his passion for a space program, about what we could do in Australia compared to other nations. And his view was that we could use existing resources at Woomera for a satellite program that could be exported to other countries. And I was interested in his views. I respect him as an astronaut and as a scientific thinker and I invited him to send me his thinking. We’ve corresponded. He’s back in Houston and I’m looking forward to receiving a more detailed paper from him.

BARRIE CASSIDY: What is the prospect that 10 years or so down the track there might be enough tourists around who’ll want to go into outer space and then it would justify that sort of expenditure?

JULIE BISHOP: I don’t think that’s what he was talking about. He was talking about launching satellites from the existing infrastructure at Woomera for use by other countries. So he was looking at it on a commercial basis. He wasn’t talking about sending people to the moon or Mars or anything like that.

BARRIE CASSIDY: So he hasn’t raised space tourism with you at this stage.

JULIE BISHOP: No, not at this stage. The breakfast didn’t last that long!

Of course, in the original Advertiser article, Thomas was talking about space tourism. It makes little sense to build up Woomera simply for satellite launches: the market is limited for the foreseeable future and Woomera would have to compete with many other spaceports worldwide. The addition of space tourism—particularly if any operator there could draw upon the East Asian market—could generate enough activity to warrant government investment in spaceport infrastructure.