The number of proposed commercial spaceports in the US has now dropped by one. Last night county commissioners in Brazoria County, Texas, south of Houston, voted 4-1 to dissolve the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport Development Corp., a county-chartered organization that had planned to develop a spaceport along the Gulf Coast. The corporation had been commissioned in 2000 but had made only modest progress, such as the development of a small launch pad for high-powered amateur rockets on land leased from the Dow Corporation. To be fair, though, for much of the time since 2000 the industry had been in the doldrums after the collapse of the commercial launch market and the failure of a number of RLV ventures. Still, this effort had been unable to attract much attention from the new generation of commercial space ventures, which have instead flocked to Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California.

Besides the lack of luck attracting business, the spaceport also had considerable opposition from local residents who lived near the site, as well as others who thought its location next to a wildlife preserve was inappropriate (nevermind that the Kennedy Space Center coexists with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.) Commissioners who voted to terminate the spaceport efforts were in the end frustrated with the lack of progress, according to the Houston Chronicle. “They just sat there and sat there and studied it,” said Joe King.

The website for Time magazine has a fairly detailed review article about the emerging space tourism industry. Writer Cathy Booth Thomas talks with a number of the leading companies, including Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Benson Space Company, and also covers the more secretive Blue Origin; there’s also coverage if Bigelow Aerospace and developing spaceports, in particular Spaceport America in New Mexico. If you’ve been following the industry you won’t find that much new in this article, although the visit to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort where he gathered a number of his Founders late last year, is at the very least entertaining (including the obligatory discussion of sex in space, featuring Branson himself.)

Last year I noted BuyMeToTheStars.com, an effort to raise money for a suborbital spaceflight by selling ad pixels, a project modeled on the “Million Dollar Homepage”. Now there’s another entrant in this field. Last week Ben Riecken, a flight instructor in Florida, announced his own effort to raise money for a trip through a pixel-selling scheme. My Trip In Space is more like the original Million Dollar Homepage, with ad logos filling up a grid. (BuyMeToTheStars.com, by comparison, sells “stars” and “nebulae”.) So far Riecken’s site has only a handful of advertisers, just as Michael Halls-Moore has only sold a few stars on his site. Given that few copycats to the original Million Dollar Homepage have enjoyed even a small level of success, it doesn’t seem like this is going to be a tenable approach to raising money for a suborbital spaceflight.

The web site of Smithsonian magazine includes a brief interview with Joe Sutter, author of a new book about the 747. There’s a brief but interesting exchange in the interview of relevance here:

If you were a young aerospace engineer just starting out today, what area would you be most interested in? The private space industry seems quite exciting at the moment, for example.

Space tourism is exciting, all right, but it’s just for the elite few. If you look at the world today, commercial aviation is where flying machines truly benefit humanity.

Sutter is correct: commercial aviation has orders of magnitude greater impact on the world than space tourism, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. However, recall that once commercial aviation was “just for the elite few”. A similar interview 80 or so years ago would have had someone like Sutter saying that locomotives or steamships, not commercial aviation, are transportation systems that “truly benefit humanity”. One must be careful about taking historical analogies too far—commercial aviation grew quickly since it could serve as a transportation system to link up existing destinations, an option not really available for spaceflight—but it does note that one should be careful about dismissing a technology as being just for the elite.

I received an email overnight that had been forwarded from a list of X Prize Cup volunteers indicating that there may be some problems securing some state funding that was intended to support the 2007 event. Here’s the key passage of that message:

The Governor had pushed for $1 million to be allocated for assistance in producing the X PRIZE Cup this year. That money has been removed by an unknown senator. In order for us to have those appropriations returned to the legislation we need “all hands on deck” to call Senate Minority Leader Lee Rawson 505-986-4703 and promote their support of our event. Please contact Senator Tim Jennings (D), Co-Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and ask that he help convince Sen. Rawson to add back the $1 million originally proposed. This money is crucial to our ability to produce the “space” portion of this show. Without the state’s support we are in jeopardy of loosing [sic] major assets of content.

The email asked people to call their state senators in New Mexico, as well as the two listed in the pssage above, by noon today. Given the short notice I have not been able to verify what the exact nature of the problem is, or how firm that noon (MST) deadline is. If I hear anything more I will pass it along.

In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Steven Fawkes discusses the potential impact global warming concerns could have on space tourism. Space tourism activities, even in their most robust scenarios, would make on a very small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, but Fawkes notes that there could be the perception that even that is too much in the eyes of environmental activists. That “is a particularly high risk as space tourism, although small in extent, will be very high profile and it will be seen as an activity for ‘the rich’, which adds to its negative image in some environmental circles.” Fawkes’ recommendation is that space tourism operators make every effort to be “carbon neutral”, offsetting any impact through emissions trading programs or similar measures.

Virgin Galactic has been noting that their flights will have limited environmental impacts for some time, such as at the SpaceShipTwo cabin unveiling in New York in September. But that has not insured Virgin from criticism, even as Richard Branson announced a climate change prize earlier this month. “But what is the use of a trip that takes you nowhere but 70 miles above ground - with the “space” bit of the ride lasting just a couple of minutes?” asked Steve Connor of The Independent earlier this month in an article titled “Saviour of the planet - or a space-hopping hypocrite?” (This is the same article where Connor calls the company “Virgin Galactica”, so weight his comments accordingly.) Branson climate change prize, writes Connor, “is a commendable gesture in that direction. But how does he square that with his desire to turn us all into an army of carbon-crazed space cadets?”

As Charles Simonyi prepares to his flight to the ISS in early April, he recently passed a major milestone: his own official spacesuit. “Being in my own spacesuit, which I’ll get to keep after the flight, is just an incredible experience,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He’s continuing his training with no problems. The article notes that “He’s continued posting photos and journals from his odyssey on his blog, charlesinspace.com.” However, he hasn’t posted a blog entry there since January 22.

Simonyi also tells Reuters that he’s happy to take of mundane and even dirty jobs while he’s on the station. “I want to participate in activities, for example the toilet needs a lot of maintenance.” He’ll also bring his passport with him, and not just in case he makes an emergency landing outside Kazakhstan. “It’s … to get a stamp in it. Like a tourist wants to get a stamp in an exotic place, I think, I will have it stamped on the International Space Station.”

Here comes Florida. That’s the message the head of Space Florida conveyed to Florida Today in today’s issue. Steve Kohler said that he has been talking to Virgin Galactic “among others”, trying to lure them to establish operations in the state. Kohler didn’t indicate if those discussions with Virgin were for operations in addition to the company’s announced plans in New Mexico, or as a backup should the company become disenchanted with the Land of Enchantment. Kohler admitted that New Mexico has already made a big financial commitment, “But there’s a long way from that and something coming out of the ground.”

SPACE.com published yesterday an overview of PlanetSpace and its plans to develop the Silver Dart spaceplane. What’s noteworthy about this review is that space tourism is a relatively low priority for the company, which is instead pursuing orbital flights to the ISS (and presumably other destinations, if any) as well as point-to-point flights, taking advantage of the Silver Dart’s designed capability to glide for long distances. “This is the killer application for space industry,” GEO Geoff Sheerin said of point-to-point flights. “You’ve got a destination already.” Later in the article, Sheerin ranked suborbital tourism flights third in the list of preferred missions for the Silver Dart. “If they’re not flying to orbit, then I’d like to fly them point-to-point and if they’re not flying point-to-point than I’d like to be flying them on short jaunts into space on space tourist flights, ” he said. Of course, the company first has to raise money and develop the vehicle—neither of which will be an easy task.

The British tabloid The Sun checks out a mockup of the SpaceShipTwo cabin on display at the Science Museum in London. So what could future SS2 passengers do on their suborbital spaceflights? “It could give visitors a opportunity to see life in space and maybe the chance to try and spot aliens and UFOs.” Um, right. But then, what do you expect from a paper arguably best known not for its hard-hitting insightful journalism but instead for its “Page 3″ topless pictorials?

On a more serious note, Business Week examines the design of the SS2 interior in an interview with Dick Powell, cofounder of design company Seymourpowell. He noted that Virgin wanted a full-sized model of the cabin “but they didn’t have the budget for us to do it” initially, although Powell won them over in the end by telling them they didn’t want a 3D computer model “that wasn’t very convincing and looked a bit crap”. The actual design work for the cabin interior wasn’t that out of the ordinary, he added. “The truth is that the processes by which you make planes, trains, rockets, and consumer products are all broadly the same… The individual companies [we work with] all have certain idiosyncracies but really, it’s not rocket science.”