A Reuters article last week led with the news that Virgin Galactic planned to order additional SpaceShipTwo vehicles, with an initial order of five. That, though, has been what the company has been saying for some time (although the option for seven more, also mentioned in the article, isn’t as widely known). Virgin’s Alex Tai added that he expected the company to be profitable “inside the first five years”.

The Reuters article was filed in Singapore, where Virgin Galactic and other companies were for an aerospace expo. A local publication, Today, reported that Virgin’s plans to expand beyond Spaceport America could breathe new life into proposals for Spaceport Singapore. The proposed spaceport was announced two years ago by Space Adventures, which proposed to use a Russian-designed suborbital vehicle to operate out of there as well as a new spaceport in the UAE. However, Spaceport Singapore has stalled out; the web site’s sole press release dates from the original announcement in February 2006. Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson told Today that they have managed to raise only half the funding required for the project, although he remains hopeful that the rest can be found by the end of the year. Singapore officials appear to be indifferent to the project; the city-state’s trade minister told the publication that the spaceport was a private, not public. venture.

Last week Interorbital Systems, which is developing the Neptune orbital vehicle, announced that it was partnering with DestinySpace Enterprises (DSE) to sell flights on the vehicle. Who is DestinySpace? The press release describes the company as “the world’s leader in space tourism retail”, which no doubt comes as a surprise to Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic, since it appears DSE hasn’t sent anyone to space or racked up much sales for tourist flights. The company’s web site describes it as “The Official Retailer Of The Space Tourism Industry” (official according to whom?) and it describes its mission as “a company working within the space tourism industry designed to act as a portal for all faucets of commercial space travel.” Obviously they hope to tap the latent demand for spaceflight and thus open the spigots of cash flow.