The Register, a British publication that normally specializes in IT news, offers an interesting account of a talk at NASA Ames this week by SpaceDev founder Jim Benson:

SpaceDev founder James Benson had plowed through the majority of his presentation on space tourism opportunities when the cackling broke out. “Will you sit down. I can’t see the screen,” barked one woman. “Well, I can’t hear the lecture. We came hear to listen to Mr. Benson not to hear you gossip,” replied an older Asian lady not much more than 5 feet tall. The squabble escalated from there with both sides agreeing that they despised each other’s lack of social graces.

Reporter Ashlee Vance sees this as a good sign for SpaceDev and suborbital space tourism in general: “We hope that companies such as SpaceDev can deliver on what they promise because they’re getting little old ladies awfully excited about the prospect of zooming off to the Moon in the near future.” Vance notes that Benson believes that the cost of a suborbital ticket will go down to $15,000 to $50,000 in the next seven to 10 years.

Bryan Singer is best known these days as the director of the newly-released blockbuster Superman Returns. But he also has a secret identity that he revealed to a Malaysian newspaper: he is a Founder:

Given all the money in the world, what kind of film would you’d like to do?

I would like to shoot a film in space. I’d like to shoot Star Wars on location [laughs]. Honestly, it’s doesn’t matter what environment or genre, because I’m very driven by story and character. But like I said earlier, to be able to shoot in space would be really exciting.

Speaking of that, I’m going to space in 2008. Richard Branson is building this Virgin Galactic Space craft, and I’m one of the 100 founders. We are the first to go up; the guinea pigs!

One wonders if he got any discount by giving Branson a cameo in the movie (although I have yet to see the film to see exactly how that turned out).

Eileen Borgeson, the artist who designed the giant trophy given to the Dennis Tito Award winners at the ORBIT Awards ceremony last month, announced this week that she has created an ORBIT Awards poster that is “Free to all Earth Citizens”. (Aliens, presumably, will have to pay some pricey interstellar shipping-and-handling charges.) We terrestrials can view the poster online. It lists the award winners as well as the major speakers at the International Space Development Conference: “Burt Rutan, Elon Musk, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Peter Diamandis, Dr. Gregory Olsen, Rusty Schweickart, Rick Searfoss, Shana Dale, Charles Elachi, Bill Nye, Gen. Pete Worden and Rep. Diane Rohrabacher.” Wait: Rep. Diane Rohrabacher? To the best of our knowledge, Dana Rohrabacher has not changed his name—or sex.

A Flight International article reports that the Explorer suborbital vehicle being developed by Russia’s Myasishchev Design Bureau for Space Adventures will undergo a test regime of at least 100 flights, to be carried out from the Zhukovsky air base near Moscow. The exact schedule of test flights wasn’t revealed by Space Adventures’ Chris Faranetta, but it’s not surprising: several other suborbital space tourism vehicles under development also have rigorous flight tests planned, including Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Rocketplane Kistler’s Rocketplane XP, and Blue Origin’s New Shepard. This makes perfect sense for a vehicle designed to carry paying passengers, and thus needs to be as rigorously tested as possible to provide customers with some degree of confidence about their safety. It is, though, a marked departure from conventional from conventional space vehicle development, where it’s rare to see 100 test flights—or even 100 flights, period—of a specific vehicle.

This is actually an old article, but only discovered it recently. It appears that some architectural critics are less than enthused with the designs for spaceports in New Mexico and the UAE. Or, as the headline puts it, future space tourists “will be flying out of the most crap-ass ground-based aeronautical terminals ever conceived.” (One assumes that “crap-ass” is a term of art in architecture.) Read on for the unnamed author’s assessment of the Virgin logo that’s part of the New Mexico design ( “undergraduate-level Illustrator rendering”) or the overall appearance of the UAE spaceport ( “looks slightly less like a child’s rendering, and slightly more like a NASA space rendering from 1962.”) Conclusion: “The heavenly experience of kind-of-weightlessness is bracketed by completely pedestrian experiences on the ground.”

A couple of articles in this week’s issue of The Space Review touch upon space tourism:

• I expanded my SpaceShipOne anniversary essay here into a full-length article about the state of the industry two years after SpaceShipOne’s historic flight. Things have taken longer than one might have thought a couple years ago because, in retrospect, SpaceShipOne was simply so much farther ahead of the competition than anyone thought at the time, and Scaled Composites is now focusing on a bigger, better vehicle rather than flying SS1.
• Taylor Dinerman explores the interesting announcement last month that Space Adventures was acquiring Space Launch Corporation. He sees the deal as a way for Space Adventures to tap the technical expertise it needs to oversee the development of future suborbital spacecraft that Space Adventures will be associated with, such as the Explorer vehicle in Russia.

If you haven’t heard by now, some new details (or, rather, some details period) about the New Shepard RLV being developed by Blue Origin were released last week, tucked away in a 229-page environmental assessment of the company’s planned West Texas launch site (PDF, ~12 MB). Both MSNBC’s Cosmic Log and RLV and Space Transport News have discussed the details about the vehicle, which appears to first order to be a derivative of the Delta Clipper. (I also talk about it in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review about the second anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s flight.) The report does raise some questions about the vehicle’s development and operations:

• The out-of-the-way location (about 250 kilometers’ drive from El Paso) is ideal for testing: as the document shows, there’s not much in the way of an environment that can be affected. It’s less ideal, though, for actual commercial operations, particularly when a commercial spaceport—presumably with more infrastructure—will be operating not that far away in southern New Mexico. Will Blue Origin operate New Shepard from other spaceports? What sort of cost-convenience tradeoff is there between effectively building your own spaceport versus using another commercial facility?
• Compared to other operators, Blue Origin has a somewhat slower schedule, with a series of prototype tests through the rest of the decade (starting this year, according to the document), but not entering operation until 2010, after Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, Space Adventures, and possibly others. Will they be coming too late to the market?
• The whole flight, from liftoff to landing, will be less than ten minutes. Will that seem too short to prospective passengers? How much weightlessness time will passengers get? Or, since this will be more like a conventional rocket than spaceplanes like SpaceShipTwo and Rocketplane XP, will this be more “space-like” ands hence attractive to passengers?

Seed magazine (tagline: “Science is Culture”), has put online an article from its June/July print issue about the new, um, crop of spaceports springing up around the world. It’s a fairly straightforward, complimentary article about the emerging spaceport and space tourism industries, looking at both the emerging trends and challenges spaceport and vehicle operators are facing: familiar ground for most readers of this blog. Read on to the end, though, for both the take-away message and a subtle dig one company takes at another:

Many believe that competition is beneficial. “Ten years from now, if New Mexico has the only spaceport, then the industry didn’t make it,” says Rick Homans. “My competition isn’t publicity hungry billionaires,” adds Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, referring to Virgin’s Richard Branson. “It’s the people out there in the world who don’t yet realize that space travel is possible for private citizens.”

The Denver Post and the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call provide coverage of yesterday’s SpaceDev event at Centennial Airport outside Denver, where the company unveiled a full-sized model of its Dream Chaser vehicle. The event was apparently a prelude to a two-day presentation today and tomorrow for visiting NASA officials as part of the COTS source selection process. The two articles don’t offer many new details about the vehicle, although they both have photos of the model (on display in a hangar that belongs to Adam Aircraft, a company teaming with SpaceDev on the COTS effort.)

Scott Tibbitts, founder of Starsys, the company acquired by SpaceDev earlier this year, did have an interesting comment on the “blunt-nosed, small-airplane-on-steroids” Dream Chaser design, which is distinct from the capsule-based designs the other five finalists for COTS have reportedly proposed. “If I’m a kid, I’m not excited about flying in a capsule,” Tibbitts said. “I’d be excited in flying in something that looks like (the Dream Chaser).” If you’re going to fly to space, do you really care if the vehicle you’re flying in looks like a plane, capsule, or anything else, so long as it works?

Today is the second anniversary of the first flight into space by a piloted, privately-developed spacecraft: SpaceShipOne. That flight, as well as the two X Prize-winning flights that followed in September and October of 2004, were witnessed in person by thousands in Mojave and many more on television and online–many of whom were probably interested in flying in SpaceShipOne, or another suborbital vehicle like it, soon.

The good news is that, two years later, you can buy a ticket, or at least put down a deposit for one, through the likes of Virgin Galactic (for SpaceShipTwo), Incredible Adventures (for Rocketplane Kistler’s Rocketplane XP), and Space Adventures (for the Explorer vehicle being developed in Russia, although the company has been signing up suborbital customers for several years now.) Moreover, there are a number of other ventures out there developing suborbital vehicles, with varying degrees of funding and technical progress. Overall, awareness of, and interest in, suborbital commercial spaceflight grew considerably because of SpaceShipOne.

The bad news is that, two years later, you still can’t fly to space yet on a commercial suborbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne was retired after it won the X Prize, and has been hanging from the rafters inside the National Air and Space Museum for nearly nine months now. The end of the X Prize competition also took away an incentive for the other competing teams: one of the flaws of the competition, many of its supporters now acknowledge, is that there was no prize for second place. A couple years ago, the general belief was that whoever won the prize would put their vehicle into commercial service shortly thereafter, making some money and perhaps funding the development of a better next-generation vehicle. Instead, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites decided to skip ahead directly to a larger vehicle, which won’t be ready for passenger flights for a couple of years, and no one else has stepped into the vacuum that has been created. If you had told most people who journeyed to Mojave two years ago that by 2006 you’d still have to wait perhaps two more years before taking a suborbital flight, you may well have been dismissed as a skeptic and naysayer because, goodness sakes, there’s a suborbital vehicle flying today!

There are, of course, good reasons why things have taken longer to develop than one might have anticipated two years ago: there’s a move to larger vehicles rather than the three-seaters required to win the X Prize, the not-uncommon technical difficulties associated with developing new vehicles, the challenges of financing, and the fact that, in retrospect, Scaled Composites was simply so far ahead of the rest of prize competitors (despite the effort by the X Prize in mid-2004 to drum up a “competition” between Scaled and the Da Vinci Project). Still, I’ve noticed a bit of nervousness among some advocates of commercial suborbital spaceflight because of this gap: it’s been two years and we still can’t fly? C’mon, hurry up!

In an article that I published literally hours before SpaceShipOne’s historic flight, I briefly examined the issue of how historic the flight would be: would it be on the same level as, to use an oft-used example, Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic to win the Orteig prize, opening a new era in aviation; or would be like the human-powered Gossamer Albatross crossing the English Channel to win the Orteig Prize, a notable accomplishment but, in the long run, a stunt? “It will take years–maybe decades–before we truly know how significant Monday’s flight could be to the future of space development,” I wrote at the time, and that assessment still holds. There’s enough activity going on to lead one to believe that someone, at some point, is going to start flying suborbital passenger vehicles commercially, and hopefully make some good money doing so. If, three or five years from now, there’s no such service in operation (or, worse, one or more such ventures started but failed, either technically or financially), there might be legitimate cause for concern about the viability of this market. Until then, those anxious to fly will have to wait a little longer.