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.

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.

Finally, SPACE.com has an update about those teams competing in the two Centennial Challenge lander events at the Cup. “We are looking pretty good,” John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, one the Lunar Lander Challenge competitors, said. Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems later told the Lunar Lander Challenge blog that his company is also still planning to participate in the event.

In her latest post on her blog, Anousheh Ansari explains why there’s a delay in her posts:

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.