There has been a lot of discussion about whether commercial passengers like Anousheh Ansari should be called “space tourists” or some other title. In an extensive analysis in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Michael Turner argues that it doesn’t really matter. Calling upon varying expertise in everything from language to marketing, he notes that’s its really not possible to come up with the “perfect” term to replace “space tourism”, and that even it was, it’s unlikely that the public would adopt it. He does, though, make a suggestion of his own for an alternative term: “space travel”. “Yes, Space Travel seems overly broad—after all, travel includes business travel,” he concludes. “It will probably be a while, if ever, before high-performance sales reps and merger consultants are plying coastal urban concentrations via suborbital hops. But does that really matter? Categories will emerge, and be given names.”

Space Adventures formally announced yesterday that former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi will be the next space tourist, er, commercial spaceflight participant (or whatever) to visit the ISS, in spring 2007. The announcement was made at a press conference in Seattle, and comes a week after Russia media reports announced he would fly on the Soyuz TMA-10 taxi flight to the ISS.

Simonyi, like previous commercial travellers, is playing up the research and educational angles of his trip, noting that he is in talks to participate in experiments on the health effects of spaceflight. (As MSNBC reports, though, he’s not necessarily as testy about being called a “space tourist”.) “I might be the first nerd in space,” he claims, something that many of his professional and commercial predecessors might dispute.

The Space Adventures press release claims that Simonyi’s flight will lift off on March 9, 2007. However, previous Russian reports indicates that the next Soyuz flight would be delayed until April to avoid landing back in Kazakhstan during the early spring flooding season. According to SPACE.com, discussions about changing the launch date “are still ongoing and far from final.”

Simonyi, not surprisingly, has his own web site devoted to the flight, including imagery and a blog. (The question is, will he “blog” from space?). On the site, he says that his goals for his flight are to “advance civilian space flight, assist research for the International Space Station, and involve young people in the science of space travel.”

[Note: this entry is also posted on Space Politics.]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report yesterday titled “Commercial Space Launches: FAA Needs Continued Planning and Monitoring to Oversee the Safety of the Emerging Space Tourism Industry”. The report is a review of how the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) oversees the safety of commercial launches, and how the office is prepared to handle any significant increase in such activity should suborbital space tourism take off in the next few years. Overall, the GAO approves of AST’s current work and its plans for the future. The report does raise a few issues, including the office’s ability to hire additional qualified staff for safety oversight should launch activities increase, as well as the concerns about the dual promotional/regulatory nature of the office.

There’s a bit of a background to this report. The report was requested by Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar was one of the members of the House who opposed HR 5382 (the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act) two years ago, railing against what he saw as a “tombstone mentality” enshrined in the bill, which prevents AST from regulating crew and passenger before 2012 unless there’s been an accident or serious incident before then. Despite the bill’s passage at the end of the 108th Congress, Oberstar continued his opposition, first in a February 2005 hearing of the House Transportation Committee’s aviation subcommittee and, at around the same time, introducing HR 656, which would rewrite the CSLAA to include additional safety provisions. The legislation was referring to the House Science Committee, which never took action on it; it doesn’t seem as thought this GAO report would do much to revive the bill.

[Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: Yes, my employer does work for FAA/AST. No, we're not involved with licensing. Yes, Futron reports were referenced in the GAO report. No, I was not involved in the GAO study in any way, although I had heard about it months ago.]

County commissioners in Doña Ana County, New Mexico (home to Las Cruces) have approved a plan to have county residents vote on a sales tax increase intended to support development of Spaceport America. Commissioners approved by a 4-1 vote a plan to draft a measure to increase sales taxes by a quarter-cent. After another vote by county commissioners early next year, the initiative would go before voters in April 2007. The tax would provide an estimated $6.8 million a year towards the $225-million spaceport; the bulk of the money for spaceport construction will come from state.

While most of the NewSpace world was focused this past weekend on the X Prize Cup in New Mexico, there was a report on the Web business blog TechCrunch claiming that Google had bought SpaceShipOne and was installing it in its Silicon Valley headquarters, the Googleplex. That report, of course, was nonsense, since SS1 had been in the National Air and Space Museum for over a year now. As TechCrunch and eWeek later reported, the real SS1 is alive and well in the NASM, while Google has acquired a replica of SS1, one of several such replicas in existence (another was at the X Prize Cup). If you look closely at a photo of the replica being installed at the Googleplex you can tell it’s not the real thing: the replicas all bear the insignia of X Prize sponsors and Virgin, as SS1 looked when it made the two X Prize flights in September and October 2004; the real thing in the NASM has been “restored” to its appearance in June 2004 when it made its first space flight, lacking the X Prize sponsor and Virgin logos.

For this week’s issue of The Space Review I provide a summary of the just-completed X Prize Cup, with a particular emphasis on Armadillo’s attempt to win the Lunar Lander Challenge. If you’ve been reading this blog then you’re familar with most of the details in this article. However, I do try to put the events of the last few days in perspective:

Both the overall Cup and Armadillo’s efforts in the Lunar Lander Challenge illustrated one thing: the entrepreneurial “NewSpace” industry is in a particularly demanding phase of its development. The public’s expectations–and those of some in the industry–have risen because of past successes, like SpaceShipOne. Yes, most companies are still in the earliest phases of developing vehicles and related technologies, a phase prone to failures as new technologies and approaches are tried and often discarded. It’s a steep part of the learning curve, and even more difficult when it’s on public display.

Here’s a video from Armadillo Aerospace’s Saturday morning flight of Pixel at the X Prize Cup, when they landed partially off the pad. The video is a little crude and jumpy, but you can see most of the flight until Pixel disappears behind a tent shortly before landing.

The Space Elevator Games, comprised of the tether and beamed power competitions, was scheduled to end Saturday afternoon as the X Prize Cup wound down. However, because of scheduling and logistical issues, the event has been extended. The tether competition took place Saturday night at the county fairgrounds, where the climber qualifications took place earlier in the week; none of the four competitors won any prize money. This morning two teams that use microwaves to power their climbers will make a shot at winning the beamed power competition. They could not make their attempts at the airport during the Cup since their microwave rectennas were prohibited from the airport grounds.

I’ve posted on Flickr a set of images from day 2 of the X Prize Cup. Some of the photos have been featured in previous posts, while others illustrate the assortment of other events and activities at the Cup. Not to mention a giant space panda.

The 2006 Wirefly X Prize Cup is now history (or officially will be in 15 minutes although there are no more events planned.) Armadillo carted their vehicle back to the staging area around 3 pm MDT. The leg that broke off was covered with frozen dirt (from the chill of the LOX tank that the leg was attached to) and one of the seams of the tank may be damaged. John Carmack said it’s unlikely that the vehicle will fly again. Despite failing to win the Lunar Lander Challenge, everyone on the Armadillo team remained very upbeat and optimistic about the future.

I’ll have some additional posts tonight and tomorrow with more photos and notes from the event, but that’s it for today. Especially since they’re shutting down the Internet connection in the media center shortly.