[Another catchup post.]

About a week ago ABC News published the results a poll about space tourism, among other space-related topics, with the key takeaway point that four in ten people woule be willing to fly in space for at least some amount of money. ABC also published the complete poll questionnaire and detailed results.

Unfortunately, the poll itself is not that useful for determining actual levels of public interest in space tourism. For example, the poll makes no effort to discern among suborbital, orbital, and other (like circumlunar) forms of space tourism; it merely asks, “If you had a chance in your lifetime to travel in outer space, would you do so, or not?” The various price points selected are also highly unrealistic, with the lowest (excluding zero) being “$1-499″ and the highest being $20,000+”. Given that even the biggest proponents of space tourism see those prices coming down to the $20,000-30,000 range only after several years—at least—of operations, those price points need to be recalibrated. Also, there’s no evidence that the polling firm tried to restrict the respondents to those wealthy enough to be reasonably able to afford such flights (not surprising given the price points they selected.)

Still, there are a few nuggets of information in the poll, in part because these questions have apparently been posed in previous surveys. Here, the responses are mixed for space tourism proponents. The poll found that 65 percent believed that it was definitely or probably likely that “in the years ahead ordinary people will travel in outer space”, compared to 33 percent who answered “probably not” or “definitely not”. That compares to 57 percent who answered in the affirmative and 41 percent in the negative in a 1999 poll (which asked about the chances for such flights “in the next 50 years” versus “in the years ahead”). However, the results show a declining trend in terms of people who would actually want to fly themselves: the 39 percent who said they wanted to fly in 2008 is down from 41 percent in August 1999 and 47 percent in April 1998.

The results also provided some demographic breakouts. The poll found that 54 percent of men said they wanted to fly in space, but only 25 percent of women. (It would be interesting to compare this with the statistics of actual customers signed up by companies like Virgin Galactic.) Only 19 percent of those over 65 years old want to fly, but 56 percent of those in the 18-34 age group said yes. And people with higher incomes were more likely to say yes.

I have a clear bias here, since I was involved tangentially in the original Futron-Zogby survey in 2002 that many in the industry still consider to be the gold standard for space tourism market research. However, as much as I would like to see another survey done to see how levels of interest in space tourism have evolved over the last six years, this ABC poll isn’t it.

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston hosted a session yesterday titled “50 Years of the Space Age: Looking Back, Looking Forward”. The session an eclectic panel: space historian Roger Launius (as moderator), former Soviet space scientist and advisor Roald Sagdeev, former astronaut Kathy Sullivan, and Andrew Aldrin of Boeing/ULA. With a panel this diverse, you could expect to discuss a wide range of topics. Interestingly, they focused a fair amount of time on space tourism, and they did not have the most optimistic assessment.

Sagdeev provided a little bit of history. In 1987 he accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev to a summit meeting with Ronald Reagan. During the summit there was a reception where various Soviet and American dignitaries and other famous people mingled. At the reception, Sagdeev recalled, he was approached by someone interested in flying into space on a Soyuz: singer John Denver. Sagdeev helped broker negotiations between Denver and the Soviet space program (which was just then beginning to be open to commercial arrangements like this). They settled on a final price for the flight—$10 million—and Denver tried to raise the money. He failed, as some people familiar with the pre-history of space tourism recall, and tragically died a short time later in an ultralight accident.

Sagdeev said Denver told him that he had been a “finalist” to fly on the ill-fated Challenger flight, a claim that Sullivan found dubious. “I can’t tell you how many, at least scores, of people who I have met—journalists, musicians, others—who are absolutely, positively convinced that they were on the short list to get on Challenger,” she said. “I never saw any of them in any training. John Denver never went through any simulations, let me tell you that.”

Launius, noting that despite the long interest in space tourism, “the reach has exceeded the grasp” in terms of actual accomplishments in the field, asked the panel what they thought about the prospects of space tourism. Sullivan declared herself a skeptic. “I don’t see what they’re doing,” she said, referring to suborbital vehicle developers, “that is going to enable us to fundamental changes in technologies that fundamentally change the cost equation or the safety equation.” The work she does see involves taking known technologies, making incremental improvements to them, and then “cobbling them together into new systems.” (She undercut that argument a bit later when she said the airline industry took off in the US after World War 2, built on surplus aircraft and former military pilots; that, certainly, did not require new technology, and we are beginning to see a similar shift from the government to commercial world as astronauts leave NASA to take positions with entrepreneurial space ventures.)

Sagdeev said that he believes a Soyuz flight to orbit could be as cheap as $10 million (although the going rate is now close to three times that figure.) The current passenger flight rate for those missions, one or two people per year, is a “miserable figure”, in his words. (Of course, those flight rates are constrained by ISS servicing requirements as well as competition for those seats from the Russian government.)

Aldrin, who said that “in most space communities I’m regarded as kind of a skeptic on this issue”, was actually more optimistic than his fellow panelists. argues that the suborbital space tourism market, based on existing market studies, is probably too small to interest big aerospace companies. The number of vehicles needed to service the market is small, so you can’t set up a big production line and get economies of scale as you can with airliners. “For publicly-held companies, it’s going to be tough to justify the expense and risk of getting into that business,” he said. “It really is going to require entrepreneurship and, perhaps from a shareholder’s perspective, irrational investment, to make this happen.”