Flightglobal.com, in a feature article about Virgin Galactic turns up one mildly surprising point: the company, while still in the development stage, is profitable, if only by a modest amount. The article notes that in the company’s first publicly available financial reports since it was formally incorporated in the UK in mid-2006, the company had an after-tax profit of £136,400 (US$270,260)—a little more than the price of a single ticket. That the company is making a profit at all is a little surprising, since it’s still in its early stages with (presumably) large expenditures involved with the development of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two, although that depends on exactly how those expenses are accounted for, and their timing. The total development cost for the project is still pegged at around $250 million, with $80 million, provided by Virgin Galactic’s corporate parent, the Virgin Group, spent.

Indian television network NDTV posted a transcript of a recent interview with Richard Branson. (The transcript is very rough; perhaps it has gone through multiple translations, such as from English to Hindi back to English, given the odd language found in it.) In the interview, Branson appears to indicate that SpaceShipTwo will be rolled out at the end of the year, followed by ninth months of test flights before beginning customer flights. He also says, puzzlingly, “In July of this year, we will fly them over ship for the first time”—a reference to the first flights of White Knight Two?

As for those occasional reports that William Shatner was offered (or had accepted) a flight on SS2, Branson said, “He definitely made it clear that he was quite frightened to go into the space and I got a feeling that he will never actually go into the space.” Regarding the risks of human spaceflight, he added, “anybody going into the space will have to accept that there are more inherited risks in the space travel than the airline travel. But we hope that within three years or so, it will be no great a risk.”

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.

Also in Monday’s issue of The Space Review I discuss some of the issues that are emerging with the screening and training of space tourists, as well as their crew members, based on a panel during the FAA’s annual commercial space transportation conference earlier this month. The highlight of the panel upon which most of the article is based was a presentation by Julia Tizard of Virgin Galactic, who revealed that 65 of 70 of the company’s customers have passed centrifuge training at the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia. Those who were involved in the training ranged in age from 22 to 88, and included people with less-than-perfect medical histories, such as heart bypass surgery.

There is a concern, though, by some in the industry that regulators could move too quickly to establish rules for spaceflight participant training: Jeff Greason of XCOR said he is “living in fear” of such a move since there’s little known about what kind of training is appropriate, and that the training requirements could be different for different operators. “Codifying our mistakes early,” he said, “is one of the biggest errors we could make.”

…hijinks ensue, the Daily Mail claims:

The gents toilets are the last place you’d expect to find a princess who’s fifth in line to the throne.

But that’s exactly what happened when feisty Princess Beatrice was caught following her beleaguered boyfriend into the toilet to give him a right royal tongue-lashing.

The 19-year-old lambasted her man, Dave Clark, when she followed him into the gents at the launch party of the Virgin Galactic spaceship in New York.

You’ll have to read the article to find out what prompted the contretemps. Oddly enough, you never see this happen at, say, an AIAA conference or the National Space Symposium…

Many of the news reports about the SS2/WK2 design unveiling cover just the basics, repeating a lot of information that was already known about the effort. There are a few nuggets tucked away in the articles, though:

• Perhaps the biggest questions are when SS2 will fly, and what the status of investigation into the July accident at Mojave Airport is. MSNBC’s Alan Boyle devotes a post to those questions, but finds no firm answers. Burt Rutan told MSNBC that the exact cause of the July accident is still unknown, and that has obviously delayed work on SS2’s propulsion system. Virgin is also sticking to its belief of not stating a specific schedule for flights, with company president Will Whitehorn telling the New York Times, “We don’t want to make promises that we can’t meet. We’re in a race with nobody, apart from a race with safety.”
• The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] plays up one aspect of the WK2 design that had been previously hinted at: its use as a platform for launch small satellites into orbit. The specifics of such a launch system, including the type of rocket that would be used and the cost, aren’t mentioned. The WSJ article states, “Known as an ardent environmentalist, the British billionaire apparently was attracted to the notion that an alternative satellite-launch system would produce less pollution that today’s massive liquid-fueled or solid-fueled rockets.” Pollution, though, is not a major concern for satellite launches, and also depends on the type of propellant used.
• Scaled hopes to build 40 SS2 and 15 WK2 vehicles over the next ten years, according to SPACE.com; the current contract with Virgin calls for five SS2 and two WK2 vehicles. Also: SS2 will feature large (45-centimeter) windows for passengers to look out at the Earth.
• The current economic turmoil hasn’t affected sales, Reuters reports. Whitehorn said Virgin just had its best month of sales: “Clearly a lot of people want to get away from Planet Earth at the moment.”
• There are other design tweaks and features that Scaled is not disclosing for the time being to avoid tipping off any competitors. Rutan: “There are unique, new ideas scattered throughout the spaceship.”
• Virgin has put 80 of its customers through a high-G centrifuge test and only two could not take the G-forces. Among those who passed included James Lovelock, the scientist of “Gaia” fame, who is 88 years old.

Here’s an artist’s impression of the new design of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two:

Perhaps the biggest change not previously hinted at is the dual cabin design of WK2; the number of engines on the aircraft as well as the changed wing location had been previously reported. Skimming through the press release (available, along with many more illustrations, here) and the various media accounts, I did not see much in the way of other new developments and insights, but not being at the event, I may be missing something that will come to light later as other accounts are published.

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites will be formally unveiling the design of SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, at an event in New York today. Interesting, there hasn’t been much buzz leading up to this event: a preview in the UK newspaper The Telegraph yesterday is one of the few advance stories about the event. Attendance at the New York event appears to be very limited as well. I was unable to secure an invitation to the event despite considerable effort, and one company official said they were “heavily oversubscribed” (which begs the question of why they simply didn’t secure a bigger venue, but, oh well…)

This design is thought to be somewhat different than the artist’s conceptions that Virgin has been showing off for over a year. In a speech in Alabama last August, Burt Rutan said SS2 would have a low wing instead of the high wing on SpaceShipOne, and that WK2 would have four jet engines instead of two. We’ll see later today if that’s accurate, and what other design changes are in store.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (aka Cal/OSHA) has fined Scaled Composites for safety violations identified in the aftermath of the July accident that killed three employees at Mojave Airport. Cal/OSHA fined Scaled $25,780 for failing to properly train its employees about the dangers of nitrous oxide, the chemical that is used as the oxidizer on its hybrid rocket engines. Although the summary of the accident has not been completed (nor is any information about the fines posted on the Cal/OSHA web site, as far as I can find), Cal/OSHA officials confirmed to the AP that the July 27 accident was a nitrous oxide explosion.

The report should allow Scaled to help close the door on the accident (although it’s unclear if the company faces any additional government action or lawsuits from the injured or the families of the dead). It also comes less than a week before Virgin Galactic and Scaled unveil the new designs of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo in New York.

A few odds and ends from the last week of 2007:

• The Washington Times reported on Richard Garriott’s planned flight to the ISS in 2008 in an article published on Christmas Day. In addition to Garriott’s plans to perform commercial experiments on his flight, the article notes that “companies are invited to develop advertising campaigns or commercials that Mr. Garriott could shoot in space.”
• The British newspaper The Guardian reexamines Virgin Galactic’s plans to perform suborbital spaceflights from Kiruna, Sweden, allowing passengers to fly through the aurora borealis. There’s not much news here, other than that a sounding rocket flight is planned for November with cameras on it “to find out what being inside the aurora actually looks like”; it apparently never occurred to scientists to do this before.
• In Monday’s The Telegraph, also from the UK, Jim White feels a blast of nostalgia for the heady days of the 1960s space race thanks to Virgin Galactic (with an assist to Wallace and Gromit). Virgin’s planned suborbital flights will be expensive, but “for many of us of a certain vintage it might well represent the finest value for money: I’m getting all excited about the possibility just writing about it.”