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.

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.”

• 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.