This week’s issue of The Space Review features a report on plans to establish a spaceport in the unlikely locale of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. There’s been some confusion about the effort since initial activities have been focused on creating an educational center in the town, but spaceport proponents tell Eric Hedman that they are serious about eventually creating a facility for horizontal-takeoff vehicles on the shores of Lake Michigan, taking advantage of a sector of reserved airspace over the lake. Why Sheboygan? Backers say that there are a wide variety of other recreational activities there, from fishing to golfing, that space tourists and their families could partake in while in the area for a space flight. But then, how compelling will those reasons be in, say, January?

According to British media reports, Liam Gallagher, lead singer of the British rock band Oasis, gave his older brother Noel, the band’s lead guitarist, a flight into space on Virgin Galactic for his 40th birthday. Apparently Noel Gallagher won’t be one of the first 100 “Founders” on Virgin: the report said that his flight won’t be until 2012.

Jim Benson used his appearance on a panel at the ISDC on Friday afternoon to announce his company’s revised suborbital spaceship. Benson said that the new design came together after SpaceDev completed a five-month study of the viability of using the original Dream Chaser design—a lifting body based on the HL-20—for suborbital flights. The blunt shape of the spacecraft generated a lot of drag during ascent, he said, requiring the use of an external booster to get the vehicle into space. Also, the found that it was impossible to have the vehicle land back its launch site without subjecting those inside to accelerations as high as 7 Gs. The g forces could be lowered, he said, but it would require landing about 100 miles (160 km) downrange. “I had a couple of sleepless nights, thinking, ‘This just doesn’t feel quite right,’” he said.

As a result, they looked at alternative approaches, and settled on the new design after Hoot Gibson, the former astronaut that is Benson Space Company’s chief test pilot, suggested looking at bullet-shaped vehicles like the X-1, X-2, X-15, and T-38. That led to the design announced Friday, which takes off vertically using six of the hybrid rocket motors SpaceDev built for the SpaceShipOne flights, flies to a peak altitude of about 105 kilometers, and glides to a runway landing. Benson said peak accelerations will be less than that planned for SpsaceShipTwo, which will generate up to 6 Gs during reentry. Benson said later that the company hopes to achieve a two-hour turnaround time for the vehicle, with the changeout of the hybrid motors being the critical factor. The vehicle can carry six people, including one pilot.

The redesign cost the company a couple of months, Benson said, but will result in something that is “even simpler to fabricate, less expensive, and faster” to develop, allowing the company to make up the lost time. Benson is working now on raising a round of funding to allow development of the new vehicle (which also goes by the “Dream Chaser” moniker for now, although he said they are considering a new name for it). He said he is talking with five key investors, anyone of whom could fund the whole project. If he is able to secure that money in the next few months, he believes that they can begin commercial flights in 2009, ahead of Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, and others.

A few short items from presentations at the ISDC by Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic and Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane on Friday:

• Tai said that Virgin was “toying with the idea of ‘space attendants’” on its SpaceShipTwo flights. The attendants would help passengers back into their seats at the end of the zero-g phase of the flight, an alternative to some sort of tether system that would link passengers to their seats, but make it more difficult to float around the cabin.
• Virgin is planning three- and seven-day training experiences, including high-g and zero-g training as well as the “etiquette of space”: how to not get in the way of your fellow passengers on your flight. The training process, of course, would include the “five-star Virgin treatment”, which seems to involve plenty of parties: “Virgin is big on parties”.
• As in past talks, Tai was vague on the company’s schedule, saying that it will be drive by safety, not the calendar. Flight tests of SS2 was scheduled to begin in 2008, and will past 12-18 months. If all goes well during the flight test phase, he said, commercial flights could begin in late 2009.
• Lauer said the AR-36 engine that will be used on the Rocketplane XP, being developed by California-based Polaris Propulsion (a startup created by former Rocketdyne employees), passed its critical design review recently. The first “full-up” engine test is planned for this summer.

…has been selected, but hasn’t been announced yet, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said during a luncheon speech at the ISDC Friday. “The next [tourist] flight is next year,” he said. “We have the person who is going to go but we haven’t yet disclosed their name. But it will be another exciting one, it will be another first.” Anderson also said that the current cost of an orbital flight is $25 million, in line with earlier reports about Simonyi’s flight but more than the $21.8 million price quoted by Roskosmos this week.

Anderson was also revealing few details about Space Adventures’ suborbital flight plans. The company has kept a low profile about those plans since a flurry of publicity back in early 2006. “I prefer not to comment on that too much right now,” he said. “We are still working on it. Everything costs more and takes longer, so we’ll see.” At the other extreme, he said there is still strong interest in the company’s circumlunar space flight proposal. “I have a few people who are interested,” he said, adding that he plans to work with them over the next few months to get them to formally sign up.

Ad Astra/SPACE.com reports that Benson Space Company and SpaceDev plan to release a new design for their Dream Chaser suborbital spacecraft during the ISDC this weekend here in Dallas. The design drops the HL-20-based lifting body approach for the vehicle in favor of a more conventional rocketplane approach that bears similarities to the X-15, albeit with a cockpit studded with portholes like SpaceShipOne. This vehicle is intended to be “safer and more aerodynamic” that the earlier design, Benson said. The article has only a few other details, but Benson is scheduled to speak Friday afternoon during a panel session at the ISDC, which may be his opportunity to talk more about the new design and its implications for the company’s space tourism plans.

Update: Just after I posted this Benson Space issued a press release announcing the new design.

An RIA Novosti article today reports that “more than 10 people” are interested in buying seats on Soyuz flights, following in the footsteps of the five orbital space tourists to date. “We are holding preliminary consultations with them, and there are no Russians among them,” said Roskosmos spokesman Igor Panarin. He also confirmed past reports that the cost of s Soyuz flight was going up from $20 million to $21.8 million, although many news reports of Charles Simonyi’s ISS flight pegged the cost as high as $25 million.

Yesterday’s Space Venture Finance Symposium didn’t devote much attention to space tourism itself, focusing instead on the state of financing (from angels through VCs to private equity and corporate deals) in the entrepreneurial space industry. One item did catch my eye: German consultant Joerg Kreisel described several types of space ventures. There was space-to-space (S2S) businesses (borrowing from the commonly-used business-to-business, or B2B, class of ventures), such as a number of on-orbit servicing ventures in the works. There are also the more common S2E (space-to-earth) businesses, like communications and navigation. Then there’s S2R. S2R? Space-to-rism, Kreisel explained. (Groan.) So what does he think of S2R, er, space tourism? “I think we will see many people die on the way, but that was the same in the early days of air flight.”

Earlier this week I ran across an article titled “Space tourism still distant” in The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper of UCLA. Reading this, you’d think the prospects for space tourism were pretty dim indeed, based on these misconceptions included in the article:

• A suborbital spaceflight “has a price tag of about $20 million”;
• Orbital flights not only cost even more but are “restricted to astronauts and researchers”;
• A suborbital spaceflight “does not allow for the floating-in-air experience that a flight orbiting the earth permits”;
• A hurdle to orbital spaceflight is that “just the logistics of getting their bodies fit is alone another barrier”;
• Large-scale space tourism may never happen because “we will run out of petroleum before we can get off the planet in any large numbers”

Yikes. Although you can quibble with some of the opinions above, there are clearly some major errors in the article. The biggest flaw, though, is that the article relies on “experts” who are actually professors and grad students in the physics and astronomy department at UCLA. While these are smart people who know a lot about space science, they’re not automatically going to be experts about space tourism or related applications. Unfortunately, many people assume that just because you study the universe, you know everything that is going on in space.

Fortunately, this story should soon have a happy ending. I contacted the author yesterday and pointed out some of the most egregious errors, and suggested some alternative sources in the LA area. I got an email back saying that my corrections had been passed on the paper’s managing editor and a correction would run in Friday’s issue of the paper (although it’s not been posted yet to the corrections page of the paper’s web site).

I’m in Dallas right now for this year’s International Space Development Conference, which gets underway today with the Space Venture Finance Symposium, featuring a number of companies in the personal spaceflight or related fields. Some highlights from the rest of the conference, which runs through Monday morning:

• Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic will speak during a plenary session on Friday morning;
• Eric Anderson of Space Adventures will be the luncheon speaker on Friday, talking about his company’s proposal for circumlunar spaceflights for tourists;
• A “Space Business” track Friday afternoon features, among others, John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jim Benson of Benson Space Company, Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane, David Gump of t/Space, and Rick Tumlinson of Orbital Outfitters;
• A “Frontier Transport” track, also Friday afternoon, includes talks about space tourism and spaceports;
• Another Friday afternoon track on “Spaceflight Law and Insurance” covers some related issues, including “Insuring Space Tourism: It Isn’t Rocket Science - Is It?”;
• There will be a session on NASA’s COTS effort Saturday afternoon, with speakers from NASA, Rocketplane Kistler, and SpaceX;
• The COTS session will be followed by talks by Brett Alexander of the Personal Spaceflight Federation and Rick Homans of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority;
• A session Sunday afternoon will be devoted to NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and the X Prize Foundation;
• There will be two space medicine tracks, on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, with a particular focus on space tourism medical issues.

There’s actually a lot more, but those are (some of) the highlights. I’ll post updates from these sessions as time permits. There will be plenty of other reports from other outlets, as well: Alan Boyle of MSNBC has already posted a preview article about the conference with a nice overview of the status of a number of companies in the field.