Today’s Bakersfield Californian profiles two companies that are competing with Virgin Galactic to fly space tourists, namely Interorbital Systems and Benson Space. Both have Mojave ties: Interorbital is located at Mojave Airport and Benson Space plans to do testing at the airport. The same airport, of course, is home to Scaled Composites, which is developing SpaceShipTwo for Virgin and will host the initial flights of the vehicle, at least until Spaceport America in New Mexico is ready.

Given all the publicity surrounding Virgin Galactic, why would someone sign up with another company? Tim Reed, a Missouri businessman, says he’s getting a good deal: for $250,000 Interorbital will give him an orbital flight, versus the $200K for a Virgin suborbital flight. Interorbital believes that the suborbital market “will dry up” once cheap orbital flights are available, which is quite possible (depending on how cheap suborbital flights become in the process). The problem, though, is you have to develop a vehicle that can provide cheap orbital flights first, and as the article notes, “while the Mojave firm has developed detailed plans and conducted several rocket engine tests, no actual rocket for space tourism has yet been built.”

The New York Times reports that Shaun White, the Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding last year, will become “the first snowboarder to experience space travel.” How’s that? It turns out White and six other athletes from five “action sports” will get a zero-g aircraft flight in April, presumably organized by Zero Gravity Corp., although it’s not specified in the article. Well, weightlessness is one aspect of “experiencing space travel”, but hardly the only one.

Speaking of Zero Gravity (the company, not the sensation), the company announced yesterday a partnership with Space Florida to establish a microgravity research and education center in the state, providing flight opportunities for students and teachers as well as researchers. (The company also appears to be sporting a spiffy new logo on the press release, but not yet on the main web site.)

Several Indian media reports have identified the first Indian space tourist: Santosh George Kulangara, a TV journalist and entrepreneur, who has signed up to fly on Virgin Galactic. Beyond that, however, the details get a little confusing: it seems he is one of the Founders, having reservation number 38. However, he says he’s paid only a $20,000 deposit on his $200,000 flight: previous reports had suggested that the Founders had to pay the $200,000 in full up front. He also says he’ll spend “2-3 hours” in space, which is a huge over-estimate. (It might be closer to that time from takeoff to landing, but most of that time will be spend in the atmosphere, attached to the carrier aircraft.) Another report says that SpaceShipTwo carries four passengers, rather than the six displayed in cabin mockups in New York and London (the other report does indicate the correct passenger complement.) Both reports also state that Kulangara’s flight will take place either “by the end of next year” or “mid-2008″, when actually passenger flight don’t appear to be slated to begin in late 2008 or early 2009.

Reuters, meanwhile, (or, rather, “Reuters Life!”, exclamation mark included), has a brief profile of Namira Salim, who plans to be the first Pakistani-born woman in space by flying on Virgin Galactic. Salim has already gotten some media coverage, so there’s not much new here. Few of the reports have explained how Salim, described in the Reuters article as “a poet and an artist” (and elsewhere as a musician, “astrologist”, and peace activist) could scrape up the $200,000 for a flight. That’s a lot of poems.

Last week Jeff Bell published an essay on SpaceDaily questioning the safety of rocketplanes planned for space tourism applications. His essay was not well-received in many sectors, including here. If you have questions you’d like to pose to Professor Bell about his essay (or congratulate him for his comments, for that matter), he will appear on The Space Show this Thursday at 10 pm EDT. As host David Livingston puts it, “here’s your chance to engage Dr. Bell in a constructive dialog.”

The head of Space Florida, the state’s new overarching space agency, wants a “horizontal launch” spaceport operating in the state as soon as possible. Florida Today reports that Steve Kohler, president of Space Florida, said the state needs to “immediately secure” an FAA license for such a spaceport to capture suborbital space tourism business and other commercial businesses. (Hopefully Koehler realizes that spaceport licenses often take many months, if not years, of work, as people in New Mexico and Oklahoma would testify.) That approach suggests the state will look to refit an existing airport to handle spaceflights (as in Mojave and Oklahoma) rather than developing a new purpose-built spaceport (as New Mexico is doing). The article doesn’t mention any such sites, but previously one such facility that has been considered for a spaceport is Cecil Field, a former naval air station near Jacksonville, whose operators have already been doing the preparatory work needed to obtain a license.

Voters in three southern New Mexico counties are still scheduled to go to the polls early next month to vote on a quarter-cent gross receipts tax that would be used to help finance Spaceport America. The most populous of the three counties, Doña Ana, has now put some conditions on the use of those tax revenues, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. The conditions, approved by county supervisors Tuesday, would allow the county to revoke the tax should three conditions not be met by the end of 2008:

• The projected cost of the spaceport remains no more than $225 million;
• The spaceport obtains an FAA license;
• A lease agreement with Virgin Galactic is signed.

None of the conditions appear to be particularly surprising nor onerous, since the state already has an initial agreement with Virgin Galactic and is working on getting a spaceport license from the FAA. A bigger concern might be the cost estimate, although there’s no evidence any significant cost overruns on the project.

SpaceDaily has an essay today (it actually was posted late last night) by Jeffrey Bell titled “Rocket Plane Roulette”. In it, Bell argues that rocket-powered winged vehicles are inherently unsafe (based on their track record), and that they are likely to be involved in accident(s) shortly after their introduction as space tourism vehicles, which will, in turn, result in lawsuits and regulation that will kill the industry. Not exactly a feel-good article.

I will leave it to other more technically competent to pick apart Prof. Bell’s arguments (IANAAE - I am not an aerospace engineer) but I do see some flaws in his arguments. Much of his belief that rocketplanes are inherently unsafe is based on his examination of “the safety history of research rocketplanes in the US and UK”. Well, there’s a problem right there: experimental vehicles are going to have a much higher failure rate than operational commercial vehicles, because they’re pushing the envelope in terms of speed, altitude, and the like. Bell even concedes this: after going through the history of X-15 and rocketplane failures, he concludes, “Are these safety statistics relevant to the 21st-century commercial operators? Probably not.”

Prof. Bell later argues that “It is unlikely that any tourist rocket operator will be able to afford a comprehensive test program.” But what is a comprehensive test program? He hints at something approaching the much larger number of test flights needed for FAA aircraft certification, but doesn’t spell out the specifics. I will point readers to an article I published Monday in The Space Review that includes a section on when such vehicles will be safe enough for passengers, based on a session at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. These developers are very conscious of safety issues, and none showed any signs of rushing through testing to put vehicles in service. A sample quote from Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace: “Simple economic self-interest is going to force us to do our very, very best to get the vehicle that safe, and to do enough tests to convince ourselves that it is that safe.”

There are some other flaws in the article that suggest a lack of familiarity by Prof. Bell about the industry: at one point he lumps the DC-X in with various rocketplane designs, something the developers of the VTVL wingless DC-X would likely take umbrage with; he also claims that “SpaceShip1 [sic] suffered serious problems on all of its flights above 100km”, even though there were no signs of any serious problems on at least SpaceShipOne’s final flight on 2004 October 4. Prof. Bell is correct that safety is a critical issue for the emerging personal spaceflight industry, whether it’s done by rocketplanes or other vehicles. What’s not so certain is that the future is as dire as Bell makes it out to be.

Last February Space Adventures made a big push to develop a suborbital spacecraft that would compete with Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, and others in the suborbital space tourism arena. The Explorer vehicle would be based on a vehicle designed by Myasishchev Design Bureau in Russia to compete for the Ansari X Prize; the Russian space agency Roskosmos would be involved as well as Prodea, the company founded by Amir, Anousheh, and Hamir Ansari. Around the same time as this announcement Space Adventures also announced that it was involved in spaceport development efforts in the UAE and Singapore. Those announcements, along with Space Adventures’ track record in orbital space tourism, immediately put the company among the leading contenders to develop a successful suborbital space tourism business.

Since those announcements, though, there has been virtually no news about the effort coming out of Space Adventures and its partners. In an article published online on Friday, Flight International reports that those plans “hang in the balance”, following the completion of a feasibility study that had been in the works for months. Space Adventures will make a decision to proceed or not in the next couple of months, according to the article, but Roskosmos has already indicated that they are no longer involved with the effort.

My own angle on this: I spoke very briefly with Anousheh Ansari about this when she attended the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. Her keynote address focused completely on her trip to the ISS, with no mention of any suborbital plans, so I asked her about it during one of the breaks. (To her credit, she didn’t leave after giving her speech, but in fact stayed the entire day, and could be seen leafing through some of the reports distributed at the conference during the sessions.) She said that the feasibility studies were ongoing, and that Prodea had not made a decision whether and how to proceed, nor did she give a timetable for any decisionmaking.

Space Adventures has a very strong brand in the space tourism field because of their work getting various clients to the ISS, so it would seem natural that they would also get involved in the suborbital field as well. It remains to be seen, though, whether they have the ability and interest in continuing with the development of a new vehicle, instead of perhaps partnering with one or more of the existing suborbital players (as they had previously indicated), helping shape the customer experience, selling tickets, and getting a cut of the revenues.

The New York Times and MSNBC report that Stephen Hawking will get to experience weightlessness on a Zero-G aircraft flight on April 26. Hawking, who eventually hopes to fly into space on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight, is looking forward to the experience: “As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience, firsthand, weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment,” he said in a statement.

One particular concern will be his health and the stresses put on his body during both the zero-g phases of the flight and the corresponding high-g portions of the flight parabolas. “I’m not worried about the zero gravity section, but the high-G part will be difficult,” he tells the Times. His flight will “probably” be shorter than a typical Zero-G flight, according to the paper, and he will have doctors and medical monitoring equipment on the flight with him. Zero-G is also donating additional seats on the flight to various charities for them to auction off as fundraisers.