Yesterday’s report that PlanetSpace is planning to develop a spaceport at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia generated a fair amount of media attention in Canada. Some summaries of the coverage:

• PlanetSpace tells the Canadian Press that they will proceed with their orbital vehicle, Silver Dart, even if they are passed over in NASA’s COTS competition. That’s a good thing, since PlanetSpace hasn’t made anyone’s list of finalists for the competition. The article also states that PlanetSpace was formed last year “was created in response to NASA’s request for bids to shuttle cargo and crew to the space station”; the timing seems a little off there since the company’s formation was announced in May 2005, prior to the formal announcement about COTS.
• The Toronto Star follows up its initial report with news that the Canadian Space Agency is aware of the project and supports it, although it wasn’t clear if CSA was willing to back that support with funding. The report also hints that MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), a Canadian company that built the shuttle and station’s robot arms, among other space projects, might be involved in the effort in some way: a company spokesperson would only say that “two members of its firm familiar with the program were on vacation.”
• The Globe and Mail looks at the project from the perspective of Mark James, the Nova Scotia Business Inc. official who was initially “laughing under his breath” about the idea of a Cape Breton spaceport, but was won over by the company.
• The proposal wins some support from an editorial in the Halifax Daily News in Nova Scotia. “The impulse to crack jokes… is irresistible,” the editorial notes, but adds that “this notion is not as far-fetched as it appears at first glance.”
• Another Halifax newspaper, the Chronicle Herald, features a skeptic about this whole approach: me. I talked with the reporter for about 15 minutes, discussing my issues with the project (which I outlined here yesterday); I was surprised how much play those comments got in the article. I’ll note here that my skepticism doesn’t mean I don’t believe that the company can do what it’s claiming, only that there’s insufficient evidence available publicly today to support claims that they can—a subtle but important distinction.

The Toronto Star reports this morning that PlanetSpace has signed an agreement with the government of Nova Scotia to develop a spaceport in the province for the company’s planned orbital vehicle. As reporter Scott Simmie writes:

…Nova Scotia has signed a “team agreement” to provide 300 acres of land – and perhaps even some funding – for a massive orbital launch facility that will involve industry giants and could eventually be on scale with huge NASA operations.

There are a lot of big claims there: “massive orbital launch facility”, “industry giants”, and “on scale with huge NASA operations”. However, the evidence to support that in the article is pretty weak—perhaps simply because the agreement hasn’t been formally announced yet, but nonetheless enough to raise questions among skeptics.

For example, the article claims that the company has “also been in talks with the U.S. space agency, which is very interested in their Silver Dart design.” (So interested, it seems, that the company did not make the cut in the first round of the COTS evaluations.) Company chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria told the Star that the company “in discussions with NASA to sign a space act agreement with one of the NASA centres to build a cargo and crew vehicle for the International Space Station.” This sounds like a typical Space Act agreement where NASA facilities are provided for testing, or other assistance, with no exchange of funds. In other words, if PlanetSpace is going to build a “cargo and crew vehicle” for the ISS, it will have to raise the money elsewhere to do it.

Perhaps that’s where the “industry giants” come in. No names were mentioned in the article, but Mark James, an official with Nova Scotia Business Inc., the province’s business development agency, said that “industry leaders from Canada and the U.S. are on board”.

The size of the proposed facility seems a little small: it’s less than half a square mile, whereas Spaceport America in New Mexico will have access to nearly 50 times the land. (James also says that New Mexico is spending “over $500 million for a facility similar to this”; that’s two to three times what the state plans to spend on the spaceport, even when converting from US to Canadian dollars.)

One space tourism-related item not covered in last week’s report about the company: PlanetSpace is still planning to develop and operate the Canadian Arrow suborbital vehicle, but not from the Nova Scotia spaceport. Instead, Kathuria said Canadian Arrow will operate from a “Midwestern state”. However, there’s not much in the way of options there: Oklahoma’s spaceport is inteneded for horizontal takeoff and landing vehicles, not VTOL vehicles like Canadian Arrow; New Mexico, while most likely able to support such launches, is not typically considered a “Midwestern” state. Maybe Spaceport Sheboygan would be an option…

MSNBC’s Alan Boyle checks in with PlanetSpace, one of the lesser-known space tourism companies. PlanetSpace evolved from Canadian Arrow, one of the two Canadian X Prize entrants (The da Vinci Project being the other); Canadian Arrow planned to develop a vehicle similar to the V-2 for suborbital spaceflights. Most of the focus of the report is on the company’s “Silver Dart” orbital spacecraft, which was proposed for NASA’s COTS program but did not make the cut. Still, the company is proceeding on several fronts, including negotiating a Space Act agreement with an unnamed NASA center, working with the Canadian Space Agency on plans for an orbital spaceport in Canada, and may get involved with ESA’s space tourism initiative.

It’s difficult to tell how seriously to take all of these developments. Entrepreneurial ventures will often explore many avenues to seek markets and funding, but run the risk of spreading themselves too thin. It’s notable what the MSNBC report doesn’t discuss: the progress on the Canadian Arrow vehicle itself, which is still mentioned on the PlanetSpace site but isn’t brought up in the article other than the fact that clusters of the booster would be used to launch the Silver Dart. (Also unclear is how the Chicago-based PlanetSpace could participate in the ESA program; at the very least, they would have to establish a European subsidiary or partner with a European company.) PlanetSpace chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria said that many of his company’s plans have to stay confidential for now while details are worked out. That’s fine, but progress is even better.

There are several companies competing in the suborbital tourism market: Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, Space Adventures, among others. By in large the companies have said little about each other in public, other than a few glittering generalities or, at worst, some very general dismissals of unnamed rivals. In the cover story of the latest issue of Arabian Business, Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and Will Whitehorn has some less-than-kind things to say about Space Adventures, however:

Branson is dismissive, telling Arabian Business: “A lot of companies around the world are now offering space travel, but no-one else has made the same progress as us. People have to be careful about paying deposits. I don’t want to name any companies, but we have looked at all the different kinds of technology. We looked at Russian technology and we dismissed it. We looked at a lot of US technology, and we dismissed it.”

His Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn is even more disparaging of the claims coming out of Ras Al-Khaimah and Space Adventures, adding: “They haven’t actually built a system that works. It has never flown. It is a plywood mock-up in the middle of Russia. I favour competition but only when it exists. You shouldn’t sell people dreams that don’t work.”

The Ras Al-Khaimah reference above is to plans announced by Space Adventures in February to set up a spaceport in the emirate, part of the UAE. That spaceport will be at the Ras Al-Khaimah International Airport, but the Arabian Business notes that several companies—the three mentioned above plus the Canadian-US venture PlanetSpace—have been checking out an unused airstrip in the emirate for possible conversion into a spaceport. As the article notes, “local residents have for several months noticed the fleets of limousines that regularly pull up, circle the area for half an hour, then disappear.” Officials from these four companies have apparently all been passengers in those limos.

Space Adventures isn’t lying low, though. Richard Branson was in Dubai last week, primarily to publicize the beginning of Virgin Atlantic flights to the UAE, but also to discuss potential Virgin Galactic flights from RAK. During that trip Space Adventures announced that it would fly the first UAE national, Adnan Al Maimani, on one of its flights from the RAK airport. “I am honored to represent the UAE as the first national to fly to space, but even more thrilling is that I’ll launch from Ras Al-Khaimah,” he said in a Space Adventures press release. “If I could fly today, I would!”