Remember the Million Dollar Homepage, an effort by a British student to raise $1 million by selling ad space, one pixel at a time, on a web page. That effort was wildly successful (even if the page looks like a pointillist’s nightmare), netting Alex Tew his $1 million and spawning countless similar, if generally less successful, efforts.

One of the latest efforts is BuyMeToTheStars.com, by Michael Halls-Moore, a grad student working on a PhD in hypersonics at Imperial College London. Halls-Moore is trying to raise £1 million to help pay for a ride into space, either on SpaceShipTwo or its orbital successor. (He acknowledges in the site’s FAQ that he only needs a little over a tenth of that £1 million for a suborbital flight on SS2, but he’d really like to save up for an as-yet hypothetical SpaceShipThree flight.)

Unlike the original Million Dollar Homepage or many of its clones, the site is not filled with a garish collage of tiny ads. Instead, advertisers buy stars or larger nebulae or galaxies. A handful of advertisers have signed up right now, so that most of the constellation Orion is clearly visible, netting Halls-Moore a total of £170. He’s also gotten a little bit of media attention, including a press release from his university this week.

The Wall Street Journal reports that former astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson will join Benson Space Company as its chief operating officer and head test pilot. (Subscription required) The official announcement may come as early as today. Gibson has been listed as an “advisor” to the company since the company’s launch in late September. Since then, Gibson retired from his post-astronaut career as a pilot for Southwest Airlines when he reach the FAA-mandated retirement age of 60.

The WSJ article states that Gibson had been working with Benson since last year, when Benson, then running SpaceDev, was pursuing the NASA COTS demonstration competition. Benson said that Gibson will be able to fly the company’s Dream Chaser spacecraft “as much as he wants and we can afford” once it’s built.

Hiring Gibson certainly gives Benson Space come addition cachet and credibility, although it’s hardly unprecedented. Rocketplane Ltd, prior to its merger with Kistler Aerospace, hired former astronaut John Herrington as a vice president and test pilot for the XP suborbital vehicle. And just last month Andrews Space announced it had hired former astronaut Wendy Lawrence as a “senior advisor for human spaceflight and crew safety”.

The Las Cruces City Council decided earlier this week to draft a resolution that calls for a voter referendum next spring on a tax that would help pay for the development of Spaceport America, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. The resolution, which would have to be approved by the council in January, would call for a special election in early April for a quarter-cent sales tax, the proceeds for which would go to helping pay for the spaceport. Doña Ana County, where Las Cruces is located, is also planning a similar resolution, and two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, are expected to follow suit. The taxes would cover the local contribution to the costs of the spaceport, in addition to funds approved by the state legislature earlier this year and possible federal funding.

The article indicated that while there is support in general for the spaceport, the tax could face some opposition from residents who want more information about the spaceport before voting for a tax increase. One person attending the city council meeting noted that an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the spaceport has yet to be released, as well as additional technical and financial details about the spaceport. A Doña Ana county commissioner said that passage of the tax in Las Cruces and the rest of the county is crucial to getting similar tax resolutions passed in the other two counties, and to the spaceport in general. “If we don’t do this, the outlook for the spaceport is extremely grim.”

A new poll conducted for CNN and Time by market research firm TNS finds strong interest in space tourism among many people in the Asia-Pacific region, provided you don’t bring up minor issues like price. The poll, conducted last month and tied into the “CNN Future Summit” in Singapore that included a discussion of space tourism, found that two-thirds of respondents “would be interested in taking a trip into space”, although it’s not clear from the press release whether the poll referred to orbital or suborbital flights, or if even any distinction was made. “If money were no object,” the release stated, “49 per cent of Indians said they would be very interested in becoming a space tourist, alongside 46 per cent of Thais, 44 per cent of Singaporeans and 43 per cent of Hong Kong citizens.” The lowest levels of interest in space tourism were in the Philippines and Japan.

An article earlier this week in the Alamogordo (N.M.) Daily News indicated that Otero County’s economic development board wanted nearly Holloman Air Force Base designated a spaceport. Huh? With Spaceport America just on the other side of the mountains from Holloman, why promote developing another spaceport?

It turns out there was some confusion on the part of the Daily News, which has since corrected the original article. In a followup piece, county officials tell the paper that what they’re interested in is a piece of the annual X Prize Cup activities. County officials said that it’s possible that the Cup might “unite with the Holloman Air Force Base Air Show on a temporary basis”, with the implication that the Cup might move from Las Cruces International Airport to the air force base before finally going to Spaceport America. An X Prize Foundation press release Thursday said that the organization is considering an expansion of the X Prize Cup that could include activities at Holloman or White Sands, although keeping the event based primarily in Las Cruces.

I’ve been too busy in the last week with other work to post here, so instead here are a few summaries of some recent developments in space tourism and related fields:

Flight International reported this week that the European Commission is considering funding a feasibility study for a “European version” of SpaceShipTwo. The €110,000 (US$145,000), 12-month study would look at the various issues associated with developing an air-launched suborbital passenger spacecraft similar to SS2 (but launched from an Airbus, of course; this is a European study, after all.) If this is the best that the EC and European industry can come up with, it’s hard to think that they’re that serious about suborbital space tourism: they’d be better off supporting existing European ventures, like ARCA in Romania or Starchaser, nominally based in the UK but with a presence in New Mexico.

Flight International also reports that plans by Virgin Galactic to built its New Mexico spaceport facilities underground have been changed by geologic studies that found that the bedrock at Spaceport America was unsuitable for their original plans. The spaceport design will still be environmentally friendly, Virgin officials said, including a dome that will collect what rainwater falls there and solar panels for generating power.

Space tourist, er, private space traveler Anousheh Ansari paid a visit to Huntsville last week, visiting the US Space and Rocket Center and speaking to Space Camp attendees there. She was accompanied by Homer Hickam of Rocket Boys fame, who had struck up an email correspondence with Ansari prior to her flight.Asked if Hickam might write about Ansari and her flight, he responded, “We may talk about that. It could happen.”

Potential space tourists in Kansas City, Jacksonville, and even Naples, Florida don’t have to go far to book a flight: travel agents in those cities are among the 45 in North America selected by Virgin Galactic to sell trips. The selected agents will have to under go “accreditation training” next year before beginning their five-year sales agreements.

MSNBC reports, in a surprising development, that PlanetSpace is in negotiations with the state of Ohio about establishing a spaceport at a cargo airport on the outskirts of the state capital, Columbus. Rickenbacker International Airport, a former Air Force base that is today a cargo and passenger charter airport, would be the landing site for suborbital flights of PlanetSpace’s Silver Dart vehicle, and potentially also serve as a manufacturing site for it. Local and state government officials are in negotiations with PlanetSpace on an investment package potentially worth up to $20 million.

A few items of interest from this article: This is the first time that I can recall PlanetSpace saying that they plan to use the Silver Dart, which they originally proposed for orbital missions for NASA’s COTS demonstration program, for suborbital flights. Previously, they planned to use a capsule that would splash down (that capsule is still shown on the PlanetSpace web site.) That approach does make sense, though, if they’re still interested in developing the Silver Dart for orbital flights, which they are (chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria told MSNBC’s Alan Boyle that they’re still interested in NASA’s COTS program once it moves out of its current demonstration stage.) The Ohio site would not be used for orbital operations: PlanetSpace is still planning on developing a spaceport for that in Nova Scotia, as announced this summer.

Another issue is flight operations of the suborbital Silver Dart. PlanetSpace doesn’t intend to conduct launches from Rickenbacker, instead launching “from a floating barge or from a land-based pad”. Unless SilverDart has significantly different flight characteristics than other early-generation suborbital vehicles, which have limited crossranges, that launch site would have to be relatively close to the airport; perhaps no more than a few hundred kilometers. (Maybe Lake Erie?) That means that PlanetSpace may require two different spaceport licenses, one for launch and one for landing—which could be further complicated if the Canadian-American company decided to carry out launches from, say, Southern Ontario or the Canadian side of Lake Erie. Coordination with air traffic control would also pose more problems than for spaceports in California, New Mexico, or Oklahoma, especially since Rickenbacker is about 20 kilometers from Port Columbus International Airport, the city’s main passenger airport.

There’s also the question of where the money will come from for PlanetSpace to develop the Silver Dart and its Canadian Arrow-derived launcher. Kathuria, the article notes, is a millionaire who has had success in several industries (although a previous space venture he invested in, MirCorp, didn’t turn out so well). Apparently PlanetSpace’s funding is not a concern for Ohio officials, who cited “Kathuria’s confidential list of partners and backers” as one of the reasons why they’re in serious negotiations with the company.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking dropped a big hint yesterday that he would like to take a suborbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic: as the BBC reported, Hawking said that, “My next goal is to go into space; maybe Richard Branson will help me.” MSNBC’s Alan Boyle follows up on this statement and finds that, yes, Virgin Galactic would be happy to help Hawking realize his goal, and that Hawking might be able to experience weightnessless on a Zero Gravity Corp. aircraft flight as soon as next year. (Be sure to skim through the dozens of comments to Boyle’s Cosmic Log post: while most people are very supportive of Hawking’s desire to fly in space, there are a few that criticized the “morons” who “want to spend billions into a fairy tale journey into outer space.”)

An interesting note: this is not the first time that Hawking has been linked to Virgin Galactic. In a number of previous reports, like this Business Week article back in August, Hawking was listed among celebrities who were either interested in such a flight or who had already signed up. However, since those lists included people like William Shatner and Sigourney Weaver who have since stated that they have no interest in flying in space, it’s been tough to take those lists seriously.

Earlier this week I noticed a press release from Universal Space Systems (USS) announcing their “2006 Pre-release Holiday Sale” for their upcoming report, the “Space Adventurer Assessment/Report”. This document, which the release humbly describes as “the ultimate reference guide whether you will be taking a trip into space in the next few years or many years from now”, is on sale through Christmas Eve for the low, low price of $2,000, one-third of its list price.

The idea of selling research reports for hefty prices is commonplace in a wide range of industries: when we originally released the Space Tourism Market Study at Futron four years ago, we charged $1,500 for the suborbital-only version and $2,500 for the suborbital and orbital version. (Two years ago we made the report free to all.) Another company, Research Reports International, issued a report earlier this year on the space tourism industry for “just” $199, although as noted here there’s not much original work in that report. USS does provide a table of contents and sample pages from the report; it’s tough to judge the report from that alone, but what’s provided suggests a comprehensive report, although at a basic level of detail and primarily regurgitating existing information.

A bigger concern for prospective customers is the lack of information about the company itself. The company’s web site does have a toll-free number and email addresses, but no mailing address. (The press release is datelined “Upham, NM”, but that seems unlikely since no one lives in Upham, the future site of Spaceport America.) The company’s domain name, universalspacesystems.com, has its registration information, including address, assigned to contactprivacy.com, a Toronto company that provides a Whois privacy service. The web site also doesn’t provide any information about who works for the company, to gauge their expertise and credentials. That doesn’t mean the company’s up to no good, of course, but does suggest you might want to do a little research on your own before paying $2,000 or more for their report.

(I’ve contacted the company y email, asking for some more information about themselves and their report; I’ll pass along any response.)