According to MSNBC and the AP, Blue Origin performed its first low-level flight test on Monday morning at about 7:30 am EST from its test site in West Texas. The company, not surprisingly, has released few details about the flight. FAA officials said that the flight lasted “one or two minutes”, but we don’t know how high (prior to the flight it appeared that it would not go much past 600 meters, with airspace reserved to 3,000 meters) nor how successful the test was. Standard operating procedure, really, for Blue Origin.

A front-page article in today’s Washington Post discusses the impending launch of a Minotaur rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. That launch will carry an experimental military satellite, TacSat 2, but spaceport officials would like to expand their operations to include suborbital or even orbital space tourism:

[Spaceport director Billie Reed] said MARS would love to host a tourist mission.

“Absolutely!” he said. “If you print anything, I would really like you to print that: Hey, guys, we can do it!”

MARS, while located in Virginia, is a cooperative venture between Maryland and Virginia (the facility is located just south of the Maryland border on the Delmarva Peninsula.) A Maryland official quoted in the article, though, was more skeptical about the whole idea of space tourism:

But there are concerns about the future of space tourism. “How large is that market?” asked Aris Melissaratos, Maryland’s Secretary of Business and Economic Development and the state’s point person on the spaceport. “I really don’t want to put too many economic eggs in that basket.”

That statement is ironic since one of the leading forecasts of the size of the space tourism market was developed by a Maryland company, Futron. (My employer; standard disclaimers apply)

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that Blue Origin plans to conduct flight tests in the next few days from its West Texas spaceport. A notice to airmen (NOTAM) issued by the FAA sets aside airspace over about 15 square kilometers centered on the launch site up to an altitude of about 3,000 meters, although the flight tests are not planned to go any higher than about 600 meters. The airspace restrictions will be in place from 9 am to 2 pm CST starting today and ending Monday. Other details about the flight tests are, not surprisingly, being kept under wraps by Blue Origin.

El Paso TV station KTSM paid a visit to the front gate of the spaceport and saw “plenty of people traveling in and out of the entrance”; whether that’s a sign of increased activity or not isn’t certain, although locals in the nearest town report increased business in hotels and restaurants. “They welcome the new customers, but don’t know exactly what they’re doing there,” KTSM reports.

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about Blue Origin’s spaceport (subscription required), and how Jeff Bezos hasn’t been the most neighborly of people in the area, including putting a neighboring rancher (by the name of Phil Guitar) who has a property boundary dispute into a legal runaround. The article also has what appears to be an aerial photo of the spaceport, but the photo is small and no details about the structures in the image are given.

Anousheh Ansari is scheduled to speak at Stanford University on Friday night. An op-ed in The Stanford Daily on Thursday from one of the organizers of the event makes a bid to lure otherwise-skeptical students to the event:

You might be thinking, “Yeah, I’m not an engineer. I don’t want to go to space. Next article.” Well, fine. If you’re not the least interested in technology, different cultures, space, women who have climbed to the top or entrepreneurship and innovation, then I release you from the obligation of reading this article. But I say:

Come on Friday. Meet some friends, learn something new, ask a question, dare to be inspired. After all, why else are we here?

Plus, it’s at 7 pm Friday. That leaves the whole rest of the night for parties.

It’s rare that Jeff Bezos speaks about his suborbital RLV startup, Blue Origin, adding to the secretive environment that surrounds the company. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the topic come up in an InformationWeeb interview with Bezos. He doesn’t say much about Blue Origin, and there are no real insights here, but at least he talks about it:

InformationWeek: I understand you’re also involved in a space startup, Blue Origin. Is there any reason beyond that fact that space exploration is just a great dream to have?

Bezos: I’m just now trying to think about how we could open up Blue Origin as a Web service. It’s not immediately clear to me. (Laughs) But if we can figure it out, we will.

InformationWeek: What’s in space for you?

Bezos: This is a childhood passion of mine. It’s a very talent team of people working on building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing, suborbital vehicle. It’s a separate company and they’re doing a fantastic job and I’m very proud of them.

CNET News.com, whose readers generally know John Carmack as the creator of the computer games Doom and Quake, interviews the Armadillo Aerospace founder about his space venture. Carmack talks about Armadillo’s participation in last month’s X Prize Cup, his idea for “vertical drag racing”, and future plans, with an eye in particular for going after the suborbital space tourism market.

There are a number of interesting comments by Carmack in the interview. He suggests that it’s possible Armadillo might one day work with Virgin:

But we think the first really significant business opportunity is with the suborbital space tourism market, taking people up to 100 kilometers on a rocket. Virgin Galactic has really proved that that market exists by taking in over $20 million of hard-cash deposits. But it is worth noting that they do not have any kind of an exclusive arrangement with Burt Rutan’s development company and that if somebody else comes up with a vehicle (with) worthwhile capability, they’ll be more than happy to work with other companies. So it’s not out of the question that we might wind up flying some of the Virgin passengers at some point.

He also believes that Scaled Composites’ SS1 and SS2 designs, while technically effective, may not be economical if ticket prices drop:

We have some idea of their expenses per flight, based on their engine technology and their operational cost. And they could certainly turn a pretty good profit at $200,000 per passenger, but it’s not likely that they could turn a good profit if the price pressure pushes it down to $50,000 or lower.

Carmack says that he’s “from the camp that says that spaceships really shouldn’t look very much like airplanes” and that the ideal rocket “looks like a flying fuel tank”, talking about some concepts for a simple suborbital vehicle he has in mind. And as for his vision for the future of space tourism:

I think that you’ll get at least 500 people that will pay the $200,000. And then I think the price will start to steadily go down when you get two vendors out there. They’ll start undercutting each other, but the early generation of ships won’t go down much below $100,000. (When the industry) builds a more cost-effective vehicle, it will start coming down more, and eventually, maybe 10 years from now, it will be a $10,000 ride located someplace like a quick ride from Vegas, where people can just go and do their mad-money thing, dropping $10,000 on a ride.

The cost of a ticket on a Soyuz taxi mission to the ISS will go up $1 million to $21 million, the head of RSC Energia said Thursday. Nikolai Sevastyanov blamed “growth in the cost of materials and components used in the construction of the Soyuz spacecraft” for the cost increase. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should: last month Roskosmos said that Soyuz ticket prices in general would be going up to $21.8 million because of increased costs. That report said that what tourists would pay is negotiated individually and “considered a commercial secret”; someone apparently forgot to tell this to Sevastyanov.

Alliant Techsystems (ATK) announced today that it has reached an agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) to work together on the development of the K-1. ATK will become the lead contractor for the K-1 development effort, with responsibility for “Launch vehicle development, assembly, integration and test of the launch system, and will conduct launch and landing site development and launch vehicle preparation for the K-1,” according to the press release; ATK will also provide “critical” composite structures for the K-1 payload modules.

The role ATK is taking is largely one vacated by Orbital Sciences Corporation back in September, when Orbital backed out of a teaming and investment agreement with RpK that was made before the COTS awards were made. RpK signed Andrews Space a few days later to partially fill the role (including making an estimated $10-million investment that Orbital was to have provided), but at the COMSTAC meeting at FAA Headquarters last month RpK’s Will Trafton said that Andrews Space was not a “one-for-one” replacement for Orbital, and that ongoing negotiations (presumably, it now seems, with ATK) prevented him from discussing the issue in more detail.

The Advertiser, a newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, reports in Saturday’s issue that Virgin Galactic will establish its second spaceport in Australia, most likely at Woomera, which will also be the home of Rocketplane Kistler’s K-1 orbital vehicle. Most of the details in the article aren’t that new, but what is interesting is the illustration that goes with the article. Captioned “An artist’s impression of the Woomera spaceport,” the image instead looks very much like the images Virgin Galactic and the state of
New Mexico released last year of what has come to be known as Spaceport America—right down to the Zia symbols on the sides of the odd domes that sprout like mushrooms from the desert floor. Somehow I don’t think facilities at a spaceport in South Australia are going to be emblazoned with the state symbol of New Mexico. Perhaps a revised photo and/or caption is in order?

An all-too-brief article in BizCommunity.com ( “South Africa’s leading daily advertising, marketing and media news resource for the industry!”) reports that a South African advertising firm is contemplating advertising to SpaceShipTwo passengers—in flight. Details are sketchy, but apparently Net#work BBDO (yes, the “#” character is part of their name), which is Virgin’s ad agency in South Africa, would like to create some sort of suborbital billboard for SS2 passengers to view during their flight (because, of course, they’ll have absolutely nothing else to do during their trip to space, evidently.) According to Net#work BBDO’s creative executive director, Julian Watt: “So, given that Virgin’s plan is to send a passenger airplane into space; shouldn’t there be some advertising right up there with them? Why can’t there be a space billboard to read?… Never before has a billboard roamed the stratosphere for commercial consumption.”

How exactly are they going to pull this off? The report says that the ad agency has sent a letter to NASA, which Watt calls “our official appeal to NASA to set in motion our project plan to engineer, build and launch the idea.” The fact that they’re contacting NASA suggests that the ad agency really has no clue about this: exactly why would the US space agency help a South African company build a “space billboard”? Unfortunately, perhaps because space is so closely linked to NASA around the world regardless of the activity, the unnamed reporter of the article doesn’t question this assertion, or even contact NASA for comment.