Since Galactic Suite formally announced their plans in August to develop a space hotel by 2012, generating a burst of publicity as well as unanswered questions about their funding, schedule, transportation options, and the like, they have kept a low profile. ArabianBusiness.com has an interview with project director Xavier Claramunt today with a bit of additional information since the August announcement. According to Claramunt, Galactic Suite has 28 “reservations”, although he doesn’t specify if that involves any sort of down payment or other up-front money from the customer. Claramunt declined to specify the cost of the effort (previous reports pegged the amount at $3 billion, a huge amount to raise privately). Because Galactic Suite is based in Spain, he said the company would meet Spanish regulations “in everything, including liability, insurance, certifications and registration”; that would be done through a “global administrative centre” the Spanish government is establishing to oversee national space activities.

I did, though, get a kick of out of this exchange:

Do you have any competitors that you know of who are offering a similar product to your company’s?

We know about one company which is developing inflatable modules to accommodate guests in orbit.

That would be an apparent reference to Bigelow Aerospace, which has actually flown two prototype modules; Galactic Suite, by contrast, has not flown anything yet nor has it even demonstrated that it has built any flight-quality hardware for ground testing.

When Space Adventures announced that Richard Garriott going to fly to the ISS next October and with some commercial sponsors, some wondered whether his employer, Korean computer gaming company NCSoft, would be helping pay for the trip. Not so, the company told the Korea Times on Monday. “It is a personal affair (of Garriott). We decided not to participate in the program,” a company spokesperson told the newspaper. There had been speculation that Garriott would use the trip to help promote the company’s online games, perhaps playing them while on the station. He could still do that, of course (communications issues permitting), but it would seem that there would be a lot more interesting things to do on the ISS than play computer games…