As for the Lunar Lander Challenge, the centerpiece of the X Prize Cup: Armadillo Aerospace will be flying its Mod vehicle for the Level 1 challenge and the larger Pixel vehicle (which flew last year) for Level 2. If all goes well, Mod will fly Saturday morning and Pixel will fly Saturday afternoon; if both are successful then they may do some demo flights on Sunday even though they’ve captured the prizes. Should they be unsuccessful Saturday morning, they will keep trying again to win Level 1 before going on to Level 2, according to Armadillo’s Neil Milburn.

Representatives of several other teams are here as well, including Masten Space, Unreasonable Rocket, and SpeedUp. During the press conference, they estimated that they spent anywhere from a little over $100,000 to $3.5 million (what Armadillo has spent since inception), with 45,000 person-hours spent in aggregate by the teams alone in pursuit of the prize.

I’m in the media building at Holloman AFB, having gotten out of a press conference a little while ago about the X Prize Cup and related announcements. A few highlights:

Rocketplane Global, as expected, unveiled its new design for the XP suborbital spaceplane. The company is no longer using Learjet hardware for the vehicle, deciding instead to use a new design that is superficially similar in shape to the old one (with the exception that the V-tail has been replaced with a T-tail, and with more windows in the fuselage), but able to accommodate five passengers plus a pilot. They’re using a different jet engine, the J-85, but the same AR-36 rocket engine under development by Polaris Propulsion. The vehicle also features new landing gear similar to that used by the F-5 fighter. The interior will be designed by Frank Nuovo, a designer who has worked with clients ranging from Nokia to BMW.

While the new XP cabin is bigger, Rocketplane vice president and test pilot John Herrington said that the passengers, at least initially, won’t be allowed to float around the cabin once in weightlessness. His concern is that people will become disoriented trying to move around and could injure themselves and others. Down the road, it may be possible to remove a couple seats and allow the rear two passengers to float, he said.

Rocketplane officials, including Herrington and program maanger Dave Faulker, said that they believe they will be able to raise the money needed to develop the vehicle by the end of the year. They did not, though, disclose how much money they’re looking for. Current schedules call for flight tests to begin in 2010; AR-36 engine tests are scheduled to begin in the near future.

Rocket Racing League officials did announce three new teams, bringing the total number of teams to six. CEO Granger Whitelaw also confirmed rumors that their prototype X-Racer flew three times yesterday in Mojave, although he declined to offer many technical details regarding the flights, including their length and the turnaround time between flights. Whitelaw said that “exhibition” flights would begin at air shows in spring 2008, with actual competitive flights slated to begin in 2008-2009, depending on when they secure a TV contract and other sponsorships.

Teachers in Space announced that it wll soon start collecting applications by teachers for suborbital spaceflights. There will be two competitions: one for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers, and one for K-12 teachers in general; both will have to submit either lesson plans or proposed experiments they would perform during their flights. (In an interesting twist, all the lesson plans submitted by will be posted online in an wiki.) The project has no application deadlines right now. The effort has commitments from five companies (Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Global, and XCOR) to carry flights; Ed Wright’s company, the US Rocket Academy, has purchased a number of flights from XCOR Aerospace that is in the “double digits”.

The X Prize Cup gets started today with an education/media day at Holloman AFB that’s not open to the general public; the full event (open to the public and with free admission) is Saturday and Sunday. There’s a press conference scheduled for late this morning with several announcements planned:

• An unspecified announcement by the Teachers in Space project;
• An announcement by Rocketplane Global (the suborbital arm of Rocketplane Inc.) and Launch Magazine; this is expected to be the unveiling of the new Rocketplane XP design that is a move away from the modified-Learjet design the company had been pursuing in favor of something that is bigger and/or more affordable;
• An announcement by the Rocket Racing League. The league did announce this morning that three new teams had joined the league (one of which is led by former da Vinci Project founder Brian Feeney), but the expectation is that the announcement will be something bigger. RRL CEO Granger Whitelaw was a no-show during a panel session he was supposed to be a part of Thursday afternoon at ISPS; his replacement, another RRL official, said that Whitelaw was “off seeing his rocket fly”. There have been rumors that the cup might feature a video feed of an X-Racer test flight in Mojave; we’ll see…

Like with the ISPS, as time and technology permit I’ll post updates here and on Twitter during the day.

US-Canadian space transportation company PlanetSpace appears to have found an unlikely benefactor to help fund development of a planned spaceport for the company in Nova Scotia, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported Friday. Lockheed Martin is reportedly offering to contribute $45 million over six years to help pay for the development of a spaceport on Cape Breton, about a third the cost of the overall project. It’s part of a complicated transaction that starts with a deal by the Canadian government to purchase 17 C-130 cargo planes from the company; as part of the deal, Lockheed has to invest the purchase price, $3.2 billion, in “the form of regional benefits”, according to the paper, and the spaceport showed up on Lockheed’s proposed list of investments.

The particular form of Lockheed’s contribution would be “to invest the money on Athena rockets that would propel the PlanetSpace craft into space”; as noted here earlier this week, PlanetSpace is studying the use of Lockheed’s planned-but-never-built Athena 3 rocket as a launch vehicle for PlanetSpace’s COTS proposal. PlanetSpace has hired a lobbyist, Fred Doucet (described by the paper as “former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff and political troubleshooter”), to help the company secure the investment.

Bigelow Aerospace is reportedly planning to offer $760 million to any company that can provide crew transportation services to and from its planned orbital habitats, New Scientist reported Thursday. The offer is not in the form of a prize, like Bigelow’s earlier effort, America’s Space Prize, but instead a contract that would pay $760 million for eight flights. The article doesn’t have much in the way of further details, including how Bigelow would select the winning provider (or providers), and there’s been no formal announcement of the effort by the company itself. However, Robert Bigelow has talked on a number of occasions about the difficulties in finding transportation for his planned habitats, a concern he reiterates in the New Scientist article.

Speaking of Bigelow, the current issue of Wired magazine has a feature article about Bigelow Aerospace (which I read on the flight to New Mexico earlier this week and subsequently found online). The article doesn’t have much in the way of new insights on the company or Bigelow himself, and focused a lot on things like his fascination with UFOs and company secrecy (nevermind that the company is a lot less secretive now than a few years ago.)

Above: a panel of space travelers discuss the spaceflight experience on Thursday afternoon. From left: Jeff Hoffman, Jay Buckey, Michael Lopez-Alegria, Anousheh Ansari, Dan Barry, Janice Voss, and John Herrington.

The second and final day of the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight started off with a focus on spaceports (actually, it started off with a flamenco dancing demonstration, but that’s another story), and later turned its attention to the financial issues associated with NewSpace and closed out with a panel of government and commercial space travelers. Some highlights:

• Olle Norberg of Spaceport Sweden, in what was billed as the first public appearance (at least in the US) from an official of that planned spaceport, said that they are currently in the midst of a feasibility study for the facility, located at the Esrange sounding rocket launch site in northern Sweden, that is scheduled to conclude at the end of next year. If all goes well the spaceport could be open to Virgin or other operators in 2011-2012. One challenge: working through a tangled regulatory landscape that is not as well-defined as in the US.
• Turning to local spaceport issues, work is underway on the environmental assessment for Spaceport America in New Mexico. Officials here hope that the assessment is completed by September, which would allow a groundbreaking perhaps at next year’s conference. (The assessment is also required for the spaceport to get an FAA license.) The current schedule calls for Spaceport America to open in April 2010.
• Many communities in southern New Mexico, from Las Cruces to small towns like Hatch, are looking to the spaceport as a big driver of economic development for the area. One speaker said the spaceport was going to be the biggest economic benefit for southern New Mexico in 20 years.
• One issue in the area has been a sales tax (officials, “gross receipts tax”) that will help fund the spaceport. (Those taxes will contribute $60 million to the spaceport, with the state paying the rest of the $200-million cost of the facility.) Doña Ana County, which includes Las Cruces, passed the tax earlier this year, but two other counties, Sierra and Otero, have yet to hold their own referenda on the tax. Lori Montgomery, mayor of Truth or Consequences, NM, said Sierra County will likely hold a referendum on the tax in March or April of next year, after “educating” the citizens about the tax.
• A search for a new executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority is winding down, and the office plans to make an announcement by early November. Kelly O’Donnell, the current acting executive director, said the office plans to ask the state for a four-fold budget increase in 2008 to help staff up the office.
• Alex Tai, at the end of a general presentation about Virgin Galactic, said that the company had booked $31 million in sales so far, the largest figure announced by the company to date.
• Lov Levin of t/Space said he wanted to challenge the “myth” that this was a new market: instead, he argued, we are in the midst of a transition from a government-dominated market to a commercial one, which may make it easier for potential investors to better grasp the opportunities.
• Janice Voss, who left the astronaut corps a few years ago to work on NASA’s Kepler mission (she plans to return at the end of this year, but not in a flight capacity), said when she left she looked at the opportunities in the commercial market when she left but couldn’t see where the market was going. If she was leaving now, she said, it would be a different situation, with many more opportunities.
• John Herrington, a former NASA astronaut now working for Rocketplane, said that he expects a wave of retirements from the astronaut corps when the shuttle program ends, particularly among those who don’t expect much of a chance to get the limited flight opportunities once Orion comes online. These people, he said, will certainly look at opportunities in the commercial sector.
• Understatement of the day: Chuck Lauer, filling in for George French on a panel about how NewSpace companies have adapted to the changing market, about the K-1 saga: “Obviously there are challenges we are working through.”