A press release yesterday by a company called Broadway Media (whose founder, Mitchell Schultz, also recently started Xtraordinary Adventures, a space tourism company) announced the unveiling of a new publication: Space Cruise News, billed as “the who, what, where, when and how in the race to suborbital space” (I guess you’ll have to go elsewhere to find out the “why”). “In today’s world of constant media frenzy, it’s often difficult to separate credibility from clutter,” the press release states. And certainly it would be helpful to have another source of information on top of the existing one that could help distinguish the two. So far, though, the product is not promising.

The site is claiming an “exclusive first”: that Robert Bigelow and Donald Trump are “close to a deal” to put Trump’s name on Bigelow Aerospace’s current and future expandable spacecraft. Sounds intriguing, except when you get into the details, like this: “…the TRUMP name on Bigalow’s [sic] Genesis I and II and perhaps III and more that will host the weary space traveler for the night.” Besides the misspelling of Bigelow’s name (which is consistently misspelled throughout the article), there is no Genesis 3 spacecraft planned (the company is moving ahead with Sundancer around 2010). Moreover, Bigelow and other company officials have emphatically stated on a number of occasions that they are nor in the hotel business, although they would be willing to lease their modules to companies that would operate them as tourist destinations. And, of course, neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 2 are designed for human habitation.

A commenter on RLV and Space Transport News got a comment from Bigelow spokesman Chris Reed, who said that he had “heard nothing on my end about any negotiations between our company and Donald Trump,” and also reiterated that there would be no Genesis 3 mission.

“Lots of details to be worked out but it sound [sic] pretty spacey to us!” the report notes. Spacey? Maybe spaced out, instead. In its quest to separate “credibility from clutter”, this new publication is in danger of falling into the latter category.

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.)

A few minor items of note in the news the last few days:

• The Washington Post profiles Space Adventures and its role in shaping the space tourism industry. The article includes a quote from current ISS tourist Charles Simonyi, who contacted the reporter “in an e-mail from space”. Not a description you see in any ordinary Post article…
• Speaking of Simonyi, he calls the ISS both “cozy” and “complicated” in a video broadcast. He has made a number of amateur radio contacts, including one with a ham in Honolulu who got to speak with both Simonyi and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
• The Washington Times provides a breezy overview of the current state of the space tourism industry, from Simonyi to Virgin Galactic to future plans. The article claims that there is a “space tourism office at the United Nations”, but I have never heard of an office specifically devoted to space tourism there (there is the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, but that is not devoted to space tourism per se.)
• In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I review last week’s Bigelow announcement. Bigelow states, “We consider ourselves wholesalers of destinations that we build and we don’t consider ourselves as space hotel folks.” He does go on to say, however, that he would be willing to lease his facilities to companies that operate space hotels, including Virgin Galactic; Alex Tai of Virgin later said, “We can certainly look into that.”

Yesterday, as expected, Bigelow Aerospace announced details about its business plan. Some of those details were released in the earlier Aviation Week article, although company founder Robert Bigelow issued for the first time some pricing information: a four-week trip for a “sovereign client”—an astronaut from a national space agency—would cost $14,950,000 (in 2012 dollars), including transportation to and from the outpost. Bigelow will also lease half or full modules to “prime clients”—large corporations—for up to $88 million a year for a full (300-cubic-meter) module. (He also made it clear—again—that they are not a “space hotel” company, although he said he would be happy to talk with companies like Virgin Galactic interested in using the modules as such.)

One big question about his plans is what sort of transportation will be available to and from the modules. By 2015, Bigelow estimates that his company will need up to 30 launches a year to ferry passengers to and from the modules (as well as launching new modules). Bigelow admits that transportation is “the long pole in the tent” with a lot of uncertainty about who will be able to provide that level of activity: he did seem willing to work with any potential providers, provided that they meet his preferences, such as flying 6-8 people at a time and have a dry landing versus a splashdown. A second question is just how big the market is for this, particularly for prime clients: how many companies are interested in leasing a space lab? Bigelow admitted that they’re just now ramping up their sales and marketing efforts, and have yet to start talking with potential customers. What other major obstacles do you think are out there for Bigelow’s plan?

On Tuesday Robert Bigelow plans to hold a press conference in Colorado Springs at the National Space Symposium to release more details about his business plan. Craig Covault of Aviation Week has already been briefed about those plans and provides some details in an article published online late Friday. The article discusses a step-by-step plan for developing his orbital habitats, starting with Genesis 1 (launched last year) and Genesis 2 (scheduled for launch later this month), followed by larger modules: Galaxy in late 2008, Sundancer in 2010, and then the full-sized BA 330 modules in 2012 and 2013. By 2015 Bigelow envisions having three outposts composed of multiple BA 330 modules in orbit.

What about getting to and from the space stations? Bigelow said his company would contract for flight services with various transportation providers, agreeing to buy a certain number of flights per quarter or year. In his first full year of operations, he anticipates requiring 12-14 flights, increasing to three flights a month by 2016. Bigelow would buy from a number of companies, including COTS companies SpaceX and Rocketplane (which announced its letter of intent with Bigelow at the Space Access conference last month), and even Soyuz and Shenzhou flights from Russia and China, respectively.

What will the modules be used for? Bigelow said they would be able to support “a variety of functions or variety of uses”, but he explicitly said he doesn’t consider his stations “space hotels”. “We have been identified as the space hotel folks and that’s not the case — that really never has been the case.” As for what exactly he has in mind, we’ll have to wait until Tuesday—or maybe even later.

At the Space Access ‘07 conference this morning, George French III of Rocketplane Inc. announced that the company has signed a letter of intent with Bigelow Aerospace regarding transportation to Bigelow’s orbital habitats. French provided only a few details about the agreement, which basically states that once Rocketplane’s K-1 is ready to carry passengers, and once Bigelow’s modules are in orbit, they’ll do business to ferry passengers to and from the facilities. Rocketplane officials didn’t want to disclose too many additional details since this announcement since this announcement is really a prelude to Robert Bigelow’s planned big announcement next month at the National Space Symposium about his overall business plan, but Rocketplane wanted to get a bit of the news out for the Space Access audience.

There was not much else new about the company in its conference presentation. One minor change is that they now refer to the former Rocketplane Ltd. part of the company, the one developing the XP spaceplane, as “Rocketplane Global”, while the K-1 development is the responsibility of Rocketplane Kistler (the former Kistler Aerospace); the overall company is simply Rocketplane Inc. The “Global” part in the name is designed to reflect the company’s long-term plans to set up XP operations outside the US, such as Japan, and eventually move into the point-to-point transportation market.

The website for Time magazine has a fairly detailed review article about the emerging space tourism industry. Writer Cathy Booth Thomas talks with a number of the leading companies, including Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Benson Space Company, and also covers the more secretive Blue Origin; there’s also coverage if Bigelow Aerospace and developing spaceports, in particular Spaceport America in New Mexico. If you’ve been following the industry you won’t find that much new in this article, although the visit to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort where he gathered a number of his Founders late last year, is at the very least entertaining (including the obligatory discussion of sex in space, featuring Branson himself.)

Bigelow Aerospace made a cryptic announcement late Monday, stating that the company “will be making a very important and exciting announcement” at the National Space Symposium on April 10. About what? “For the first time, we will be presenting our business plans that we have kept to ourselves until now. This information that we plan to announce on April 10 at the Bell [sic] Aerospace Exhibit Center should help support the private space movement.” (I presume they mean the Ball Aerospace Exhibit Center.) Will this be about their Sundancer spacecraft, first announced at the AIAA Space 2006 conference in September? Or do they have something else up their sleeves?

Bigelow Aerospace announced this week that the launch of its Genesis 2 spacecraft will be delayed by two months until approximately April 1 because of launch vehicle issues. “Naturally, we are all disappointed because the spacecraft was and is ready to ship out to meet the original Jan. 30 launch date,” Robert Bigelow said in a statement. “We now expect to ship the spacecraft for flight sometime in the early part of March for a launch on or about April 1.”

While Bigelow said that the company had been “recently” notified of the launch delay, it had been clear for some time that Genesis 2 would not launch at the end of January as previously planned. Back in November Bigelow Aerospace’s Mike Gold said that the launch would take place at “the early end” of the first quarter, which seemed to suggest some time in March. The launch had been postponed because of a late-July failure of a Dnepr booster (on the launch immediately after the successful Genesis 1 launch), requiring an investigation. Kazakhstan just gave its approval to resume Dnepr launches from Baikonur this month, lifting a ban enacted after the July accident. While this probably does not directly affect the Genesis 2 launch (which will presumably take place from the Yasny base in Russia, as was the case for Genesis 1), the ban on launches has created a backlog in Dnepr launches. At least two Dnepr launches are ahead of Genesis 2: a launch of multiple small satellites later this month, and a late February launch of the European TerraSAR-X radar imaging satellite.

A SPACE.com article today provides an update on plans to launch Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 2 spacecraft, a small-scale demonstrator of the company’s planned inflatable orbital habitats. The launch, which earlier had been pushed back to January 2007, is now planned for “the early end” of the first quarter (which sounds like sometime in late February or early March), still on a Dnepr. The reason for the slip isn’t discussed in the article, although the Dnepr has yet to return to service following a launch failure just two weeks after the successful Genesis 1 launch.

The article also recaps the agreement announced in September between Bigelow and Lockheed Martin to study human-rating the Atlas 5, a plan described by a Lockheed official as an effort “to evaluate the market of space tourism and research to determine if Atlas could be a part of this potential new market area.” While there were rumors earlier this month that another Bigelow-Lockheed announcement was imminent, there’s no indication in this article of anything like that in the works.