The Anglo-American space tourism venture Starchaser is asking people to full out a space tourism survey. The survey consists of a little over 30 questions that attempt to gauge interest in suborbital space tourism among potential customers. The survey, primarily multiple choice but with a few questions that have free-form answers (”Please list the training activities that you would expect space tourists to undertake”) on topics like cost, training, flight experience, and related issues. According to an article in the Las Cruces Sun-News, the survey is linked to the ESA award Starchaser received earlier this month, which requires the company “to analyze the sustainability of commercial space tourism”.

It’s always good to see new efforts to gauge the potential size of the space tourism market. However, there are a few issues with the survey. One problem is that some of the questions are a little too vague to be useful. An example is this:

How much would you be willing to pay for a sub-orbital trip into space?

• Up to 3 months income
• Up to 6 months income
• Up to 1 years income
• More than 1 years income
• Not interested

The problem is that these figures are not defined; the survey does not ask the respondent to provide his/her income. Three months’ income for a minimum-wage worker is very different than three months’ income for a CEO, making it impossible to translate those estimates into dollar figures. If, hypothetically, a majority of respondents say that they would be willing to pay up to six months’ income for a trip, that provides no guidance to the company regarding what prices it should charge.

A bigger issue is the fact that this is a non-scientific survey: the sample will consist of people interested enough to seek out and take the survey, rather than a controlled sample. Worse, Starchaser is incentivizing potential respondents by offering them a chance to win an iPod if they complete the survey, potentially further skewing the sample pool to include those who take the survey solely to qualify to win the prize, giving little real thought to the questions. I can understand why they’re doing this—performing a more rigorous study would have cost Starchaser a significant fraction of the money they received from ESA—but in doing so they risk running afoul of the old programmer’s mantra: garbage in, garbage out.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson paid a visit to Las Cruces and stumped for Spaceport America, saying that voters should approve tax referenda in three southern counties in April. “I’m asking every citizen to go out and vote yes on the spaceport because it is the future,” Richardson said in a speech at a Las Cruces middle school. The event did attract a “handful” of protestors outside the school who oppose the tax increase. One of them said they plan to organize a formal group to oppose the tax in the upcoming referendum, in an effort to counter the pro-spaceport group People for Aerospace.

On Friday it was death, and today it’s something that is equally inescapable: taxes. The AP has an article about Brian Emmett, who won the grand prize Oracle Space Sweepstakes in 2005, a suborbital spaceflight. Problem is, Emmitt was facing a $25,000 tax bill based on the value of the prize, a bill he couldn’t afford. So, Emmitt had to forfeit the prize.

While the AP article about this hit the wires Sunday, it’s not a new development. In a post on his personal blog from September 2006, Emmitt noted that he gave up the prize back in March after calculating his tax bill and discussions with Oracle. “This was probably one of the toughest decisions I’d made in my life so far. Turning down the ability to realize a childhood dream when it’s so f—ing close you can touch it is really impossible to put into words,” he wrote.

While this is an unfortunate case, it appears to be the exception to the rule. Most other spaceflight prizes, such as the one announced this month by Microsoft and Rocketplane Kistler, include cash awards in addition to the flight to cover the tax bill; that wasn’t the case with the Oracle award. On the bright side, it could have been worse: the prize was valued at “only” $138,000, considerably less than the current going rate for flights on Virgin Galactic and most other suborbital operators.

Some developments at commercial spaceport projects in the US and Europe:

• On Friday the Swedish government officially announced Spaceport Sweden, including an agreement to have Virgin Galactic conduct suborbital tourist flights from the facility near Kiruna. According to SPACE.com, the government doesn’t plan to invest any money into the site, saying that there is sufficient infrastructure there now to support SpaceShipTwo flights. However, the government has agreed to establish a regulatory framework similar to what exists in the US to permit those flights to take place, and will tackle export control issues as well on behald of Virgin.
• New Mexico governor Bill Richardson is scheduled to make an appearance in Las Cruces later today, but not for his nascent presidential campaign. Instead, Richardson will be stumping for the local tax referenda that would, if approved, provide the local share of funding for Spaceport America.
• Officials in Ohio are still in negotiations to lure PlanetSpace to an airport outside Columbus that would be the landing site for the company’s Silver Dart vehicle, as well as host manufacturing. One quibble: the article claims that “According to the most recent study by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, commercial space transportation and related industries accounted for more than $98 million in economic activity in 2004.” In fact, that report put the total at $98 billion. Million, billion, who’s counting?

It will happen, sooner or later: a commercial suborbital passenger spacecraft will have an accident, injuring or killing some or all of the people on board. What sort of reaction will the accident trigger among the general public and members of Congress? How should the industry and its regulators, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST), react? The Space Frontier Foundation announced last night that it is working with FAA/AST to solicit ideas on how to respond when such an accident occurs. “Nobody wants to think about it, and yet we must be prepared to deal with the consequences,” said Space Frontier Foundation executive director Jeff Krukin in an email message last night. The Foundation has created a five-question survey to collect ideas for the messages, audiences, and methods of communication in the event of an accident. The surveyis open through 5 pm EST January 30th.

[Disclaimer: while my employer performs work for FAA/AST, we are not involved in this survey.]

That was the request of domestic doyenne Martha Stewart to members of the International Space Station crew she interviewed earlier this week, USA Today reported. “Suni, please take care of Charles while he’s there,” Stewart said to NASA astronaut Suni Williams, one of the three members of the current ISS crew. The “Charles” in question is Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft exec who, besides being Stewart’s significant other, is in training in Russia at the moment for an April flight to the ISS as the fifth tourist to visit the orbiting outpost. “We’ll take care of him, don’t you worry,” Williams replied.

So how eager are Russians to fly tourists on their Soyuz missions to the ISS? One answer comes from Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov, who invited Indians to buy rides to the ISS as tourists while on a trip to India. “You could be a space tourist, if you have the money,” Ivanov said, according to the Indian newspaper The Hindu.

Other Russians aren’t so fond of flying tourists on such flights. In a commentary published by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Andrei Kislyakov criticizes the practice, saying that the Russian program “badly needs experienced and practiced professionals rather than amateurs.” the money such tourists provide, at about $20 million each, helps the Russian space agency, Kislyakov admits, but the small number of tourists means that the money “cannot be viewed as a sizeable contribution to the Russian space effort.”

Kislyakov, however, is much more supportive of suborbital space tourism, calling it “safer and cheaper” than orbital flights, and complementing the US for passing laws to clear the way for such flights. “We therefore see that Russia needs only American wisdom to rid its space research program of deadwood, and spare space tourists from excessive G-loads.”

The Saipan Tribune reported last week that the local government has approved a plan by a Japan “space adventure company” to lease space at an island airport. The company, Space Japan, plans to use the airport for high-altitude aircraft flights and likens itself to Space Adventures, although it appears that Space Japan doesn’t offer anything else at the present time. (See earlier coverage of Space Japan’s Saipan plans.)

The January issue of Reason magazine includes a feature article titled “Space Travel for Fun and Profit”. The article appears based primarily on coverage of the NewSpace 2006 conference in Las Vegas, including a tour of Bigelow Aerospace’s factory that took place during the conference. (Best line, from the introduction where author Katherine Mangu-Ward and others were traveling by van to the Bigelow facility: “They couldn’t have been more excited if the van had been on its way to a Star Trek-themed strip club.”) The version of the article that appeared in the print edition also included a sidebar on the “sex in space” session of the conference, a feature that appears to be missing from the web version.

The article misses on a few of the facts: at one point it states that “NASA recently awarded SpaceX, in partnership with Rocketplane, a $500 million prize to build a vehicle that will deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station by 2010.” SpaceX, of course, is competing with, not partnering with, Rocketplane Kistler on COTS, and “prize” would be an inaccurate description of the program. However, the article does a good job conveying the spirit and atmosphere of the event, such as describing a session of the conference when Ken Davidian of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program opened the floor to suggestions for future prizes as a “nerd orgy” (which, I assume, is meant as a compliment.)

Bigelow Aerospace announced this week that the launch of its Genesis 2 spacecraft will be delayed by two months until approximately April 1 because of launch vehicle issues. “Naturally, we are all disappointed because the spacecraft was and is ready to ship out to meet the original Jan. 30 launch date,” Robert Bigelow said in a statement. “We now expect to ship the spacecraft for flight sometime in the early part of March for a launch on or about April 1.”

While Bigelow said that the company had been “recently” notified of the launch delay, it had been clear for some time that Genesis 2 would not launch at the end of January as previously planned. Back in November Bigelow Aerospace’s Mike Gold said that the launch would take place at “the early end” of the first quarter, which seemed to suggest some time in March. The launch had been postponed because of a late-July failure of a Dnepr booster (on the launch immediately after the successful Genesis 1 launch), requiring an investigation. Kazakhstan just gave its approval to resume Dnepr launches from Baikonur this month, lifting a ban enacted after the July accident. While this probably does not directly affect the Genesis 2 launch (which will presumably take place from the Yasny base in Russia, as was the case for Genesis 1), the ban on launches has created a backlog in Dnepr launches. At least two Dnepr launches are ahead of Genesis 2: a launch of multiple small satellites later this month, and a late February launch of the European TerraSAR-X radar imaging satellite.