Yesterday’s issue of The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, profiles businessman John Criswick, one of four Canadians who have signed up with Virgin Galactic for suborbital spaceflights. Criswick, the CEO of a mobile software company, has had a long interest in space, and even applied to join the Canadian astronauts corps but didn’t make the cut because, as he put it, “I didn’t have enough PhDs.” “I’m not excited because it’s so far away,” he added. But I’m sure two or three months before [the trip] my level of anxiety and excitement is definitely going to change.”

Meanwhile, an Indian television network, UTV, has announced a contest with a suborbital spaceflight as the top prize. The contest is tied to the launch of a youth-themed channel, Bindass (which presumably doesn’t sound quite so bad in Hindi as opposed to English); the winner will get a flight on Rocketplane’s XP vehicle at some future date. According to the PTI article, the contest is described as “a search for India’s first space tourist”, although one Indian has already claimed that feat as one of Virgin Galactic’s first 100 “Founders”. According to another report, the CEO of the new channel, Zarina Mehta, said, “The idea of presenting the youth with a chance to travel into space is a truly ‘Bindass’ thing to do.” Um, if you say so.

The online edition of Space News reported late Wednesday that Rocketplane Kistler missed its May milestone in NASA’s COTS program (subscription required). That milestone required RpK to have completed a second round of private financing by the end of the month; it has yet to complete that round, according to a NASA spokesperson contacted by Space News. NASA doesn’t plan to penalize the company for the missed milestone at the present time, instead choosing to work with the company “on a plan that would provide the company additional time to meet its goal while also meeting NASA’s needs.” RpK, by all accounts, has been making steady technical progress on the K-1 vehicle, announcing back in February that it achieved a systems requirement review for the vehicle three weeks ahead of schedule.

A few short items from presentations at the ISDC by Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic and Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane on Friday:

• Tai said that Virgin was “toying with the idea of ‘space attendants’” on its SpaceShipTwo flights. The attendants would help passengers back into their seats at the end of the zero-g phase of the flight, an alternative to some sort of tether system that would link passengers to their seats, but make it more difficult to float around the cabin.
• Virgin is planning three- and seven-day training experiences, including high-g and zero-g training as well as the “etiquette of space”: how to not get in the way of your fellow passengers on your flight. The training process, of course, would include the “five-star Virgin treatment”, which seems to involve plenty of parties: “Virgin is big on parties”.
• As in past talks, Tai was vague on the company’s schedule, saying that it will be drive by safety, not the calendar. Flight tests of SS2 was scheduled to begin in 2008, and will past 12-18 months. If all goes well during the flight test phase, he said, commercial flights could begin in late 2009.
• Lauer said the AR-36 engine that will be used on the Rocketplane XP, being developed by California-based Polaris Propulsion (a startup created by former Rocketdyne employees), passed its critical design review recently. The first “full-up” engine test is planned for this summer.

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.

An AP article yesterday reports that Rocketplane Kistler is considering setting up suborbital flight operations in Hawaii. The flights by the XP spaceplane could start as early as 2010; in one approach mentioned in the article, the vehicle would take off from Honolulu but land at the Kona Airport on the big island. The flights, as well as the creation of a “space-themed” training center, would be in addition to flights from Oklahoma; company officials had previously expressed interest in setting up flight operations at a number of different locations, including Japan.

There are two interesting items of note in the article. The article mentions in passing that, in order for RpK to carry out the Hawaii flights, the state would have to get spaceport license(s) for the airport(s) the XP would fly from. A bill introduced in the Hawaii State Senate last month, SB 907, would create an Office of Aerospace Development (originally to be called the Office of Space Industry) within the state’s economic development and tourism department and set aside $500,000 for “Establishment of an international commercial spaceport”. However, when the legislation was reported out of committee the accompanying report to the president of the state senate stated that “Your Committee also has concerns regarding the establishment of a commercial spaceport, which has generated considerable community opposition in the past.” (A reference to past efforts to establish a spaceport on the southern tip of the Big Island). Therefore, the committee decided to “delete all references to a commercial space launch, international spaceport, and the appropriation for a spaceport” in the bill.

The second item of note in the article is the state of RpK’s financing for the XP vehicle program. Chuck Lauer, VP for business development for RpK, told the AP that the company has raised only $25 million of the $150 million it believes it needs “to field a commercial fleet of space planes.” RpK has been spending a lot of time lining up several hundred million it needs to develop the K-1 vehicle as part of NASA’s COTS demonstration program; will it be able to win a somewhat smaller amount in addition to support the XP?

Microsoft and AMD, the sponsors of the “Vanishing Point” contest conducted online last month, announced Monday the winner of the grand prize, William Temple of Sacramento. Temple will get a suborbital spaceflight provided by Rocketplane Kistler; the date of his flight wasn’t announced although RpK is planning to begin commercial flights of the XP vehicle around 2009. For those wondering about taxes, which tripped up one other prize winner, Temple is also getting $50,000.

You may have heard the news earlier this week that the grand prize for Vanishing Point, an online “puzzle challenge”, is a suborbital spaceflight provided by Rocketplane Kistler. (Microsoft, which is co-sponsoring the competition as a way to promote its new Vista operating system, cleverly calls the grand prize “a trip to see the ultimate vista”. As opposed, of course, to Windows Vista Ultimate.)

This competition (announced this week at the gigantic CES trade show in Las Vegas) provides some good publicity for Rocketplane. However, though, this is not the first time a suborbital spaceflight has been offered as a top prize of a competition. Oracle teamed with Space Adventures for the Oracle Space Sweepstakes, targeting software developers, a constituency with a disproportionate share of space enthusiasts compared to the general population. Two people, one in the US and one in South Korea, won reservations on an unspecified future suborbital spaceflight through Space Adventures. And, back in 2000, Dole, the fruit company, had an “Outer Space Trip Sweepstakes”, with a grand prize being a suborbital spaceflight provided by Zegrahm Space Voyages (since acquired by Space Adventures) and Vela Technology. The grand prize winner, an elderly person from the Midwest, reportedly elected (wisely, no doubt) to take the alternate prize of $50,000.

There was also a hubbub this week when the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that Stephen Hawking plans to fly on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight. This has been a pretty persistent story, which I last noted here a little over a month ago. (Unlike some other celebrities that have been reported to be Virgin Galactic customers, Hawking does appear to be really interested in going.) MSNBC digs a little deeper into reports that Hawking will first take a zero-g flight some time this year, suggesting that opportunity could come as soon as April, when Hawking is scheduled to visit the US.

The Adelaide, Australia newspaper The Advertiser reports that Rocketplane Kistler has delayed plans to start work on spaceport facilities in Woomera. “Design changes” are blamed for the delay, although it’s not clear from the brief article whether the changes are in the design of the spaceport or in the K-1 vehicle that will fly from there. Work at Woomera was supposed to begin in May. “Things are a little behind but they are still on track,” said Alan Evans, chairman of Rocketplane Kistler Australia. (How can you be a “a little behind” but still be “on track”?)

[A nod to Mark Evans, who flagged the article in a comment to a post last month about Woomera.]

Alliant Techsystems (ATK) announced today that it has reached an agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) to work together on the development of the K-1. ATK will become the lead contractor for the K-1 development effort, with responsibility for “Launch vehicle development, assembly, integration and test of the launch system, and will conduct launch and landing site development and launch vehicle preparation for the K-1,” according to the press release; ATK will also provide “critical” composite structures for the K-1 payload modules.

The role ATK is taking is largely one vacated by Orbital Sciences Corporation back in September, when Orbital backed out of a teaming and investment agreement with RpK that was made before the COTS awards were made. RpK signed Andrews Space a few days later to partially fill the role (including making an estimated $10-million investment that Orbital was to have provided), but at the COMSTAC meeting at FAA Headquarters last month RpK’s Will Trafton said that Andrews Space was not a “one-for-one” replacement for Orbital, and that ongoing negotiations (presumably, it now seems, with ATK) prevented him from discussing the issue in more detail.

So what good is space tourism, rocket racing, or other seemingly-trivial endeavors? They’re actually very important, Taylor Dinerman argues in this week’s edition of The Space Review. Such ventures can stimulate interest in the space industry among students, and a vibrant industry filled with small developers is as important to the overall space field as small experimental airplane developers are to the overall aviation industry, he believes. “Over time it is going to make the space industry a greater and greater part of the US and world economy. Just as motor sports helped develop cars that eventually brought mobility to millions, space sports have the potential to bring space travel to a public with undreamed of results.”

Also in this week’s TSR, I have an article about risk, or at least the perception of risk, in both public and private space endeavors. A panel at the NewSpace 2006 conference back in July tackled this issue as it related to personal spaceflight, with Reda Anderson (Rocketplane’s first customer) and XCOR’s Randall Clague discussed informed consent and how to minimize the risk of flying in suborbital vehicles. (Anderson’s approach: going to Rocketplane’s factory and “shake hands and hug every one of the men and women there and say, ‘Hi, I’m Reda Anderson. I may look like payload to you, but I look like a human to me, and my only acceptable risk is to come back in equal or better condition than when I went up there.’” That works, although it may not be that scalable.