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.”

Saturday’s issue of the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph has an editorial raising questions about the environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight. The article is based on a recent AP article about the growth of the suborbital space tourism field, specifically mentioning the recent investment in XCOR Aerospace. (You can tell that the editorial is not going to be that positive when it refers to Boston Harbor Angels, the group of angel investors that made the investment into XCOR, as “fat cats with money to spare”.)

The Telegraph editorial’s key section is:

While these ventures have a futuristic outlook, what no one questions is whether the planet, already inundated with harmful emissions, needs yet more of them from space vehicles that serve no other purpose that to give rides for people with money to burn for a brief personal adventure.

Planes provide needed transportation and scientific rockets hopefully will benefit humankind. But do we really need to unload more fuel emissions into the skies with tourist rockets while we haven’t yet brought the Earth’s present overload of toxic gases under control? Just wondering.

This is not the first time this issue has come up; Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic tried to head this issue off at the pass last year at the SpaceShipTwo cabin mockup unveiling in New York by claiming that each SpaceShipTwo flight would have one ten-thousandth the environmental impact of a space shuttle launch, or about the same carbon dioxide emission as a single Virgin Atlantic business-class passenger on a New York-to-London flight. Other suborbital vehicles under development will probably have environmental impacts of roughly the same order as SS2, given the relatively short duration of the powered portion of their flights (a few minutes of rocket power, and in some cases additional time under jet power.)

Even in the most robust market scenarios the number of flights will only be in the hundreds or low thousands per year for years to come, which means that the total environmental impact of suborbital spaceflight will be an almost infinitesimal fraction of the overall commercial aviation industry. Couldn’t the Telegraph’s editors reached that same conclusion with just a modest amount of research? Just wondering.

Given all the hype and hoopla surrounding many new commercial space ventures these days, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there are people out there not convinced that these companies, or the industry in general, are that real. A case in point: on the web site for Earth & Sky, a science radio show, space historian David S. F. Portree takes a highly critical look at NewSpace (or “Newspace”, without the intercapped “S”, as he writes it.) Portree is very skeptical that commercial human spaceflight will take off (so to speak), “mainly because piloted spaceflight is expensive and difficult” He brings up some legitimate concerns, such as what will happen to the industry in the wake of a fatal accident, as well as the dangers of extending analogies to early aviation too far. He also argues that NewSpace wants NASA to “get out of the way” while also asking it for public funding, which is something of a corruption of what most NewSpace companies are saying and asking for. He also argues that NewSpace is similar to the “1970s space colony craze” (remember “L5 by ’95″—as in “1995″?)

I left a comment critiquing his analysis (and, just checking now, it looks like I owe David a response to his reply). If you have something to add, you’re probably best served by commenting there, not here.

While Virgin Galactic got a lot of publicity in the Middle East last week when it announced its first customer from the UAE, not everyone is impressed. In an article in ArabianBusiness.com, Anil Bhoyrul sees the announcement, and Virgin Galactic itself, as little more than a publicity stunt designed to further the overall Virgin brand. Bhoyrul acknowledges that Virgin Galactic has attracted a lot of attention and customers to date (although it’s not clear they have really signed up 400 fully-paid customers yet, and even if they did, the $80 million in revenue would not be nearly enough to break even). However, “the real point here is that, whether it made a dollar or not, this is going to be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, and executed by one of the world’s greatest marketing men.”

When Dennis Tito flew six years ago, the question was whether or not a private fare-paying citizen could visit the International Space Station. By last year that controversy had disappeared and had been replaced by more mundane ones: was Anousheh Ansari the first female space tourist or not? So far, Charles Simonyi’s flight to the ISS has been free of controversy, so The Nation magazine tries to stir one up by suggesting that Simonyi should spend his money on charitable causes rather than a flight to the ISS. Author Richard Kim, a professor of American studies at Skidmore College, asks, “Is there a more perfect symbol of the excesses of global capitalism than Charles Simonyi’s 13-day joyride into outer space?” He sees Simonyi’s flight as symptomatic of super-wealthy Americans who would rather spend money on yachts, mansions, or, in this case, spaceflights than donate it to charity.

However, Professor Kim’s essay suffers from a fatal flaw: the false dichotomy. Either billionaires can spend their money on themselves or donate it to worthy causes, Professor Kim seems to argue. However, there’s no reason why they can’t do both. Even Professor Kim acknowledges in his essay that Simonyi has made a number of significant charitable donations. Moreover, Simonyi’s flight is hardly a selfish joyride: he is using his flight as an educational tool, including planning several amateur radio contacts with US high schools, and will conduct experiments for the Japanese, European, and Hungarian space agencies. Professor Kim, however, seems fixated instead on the single gourmet meal that Simonyi and his ISS crewmates will enjoy during the 13-day flight.

The web site of Smithsonian magazine includes a brief interview with Joe Sutter, author of a new book about the 747. There’s a brief but interesting exchange in the interview of relevance here:

If you were a young aerospace engineer just starting out today, what area would you be most interested in? The private space industry seems quite exciting at the moment, for example.

Space tourism is exciting, all right, but it’s just for the elite few. If you look at the world today, commercial aviation is where flying machines truly benefit humanity.

Sutter is correct: commercial aviation has orders of magnitude greater impact on the world than space tourism, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. However, recall that once commercial aviation was “just for the elite few”. A similar interview 80 or so years ago would have had someone like Sutter saying that locomotives or steamships, not commercial aviation, are transportation systems that “truly benefit humanity”. One must be careful about taking historical analogies too far—commercial aviation grew quickly since it could serve as a transportation system to link up existing destinations, an option not really available for spaceflight—but it does note that one should be careful about dismissing a technology as being just for the elite.

Today marks the second anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s capture of the $10-million Ansari X Prize with its second suborbital spaceflight in under a week. (Of course, they didn’t officially get the check until a ceremony in St. Louis the following month; details, details.) MSNBC’s Alan Boyle reflects on the anniversary and asks, in essence: dude, where’s my spaceship? There haven’t been any manned commercial suborbital spaceflights since SpaceShipOne’s final flight two years ago, and it will be a while before the next takes place. (I voiced similar comments back in June, on the second anniversary of SS1’s first space flight.) Boyle does find some optimism about the future from Peter Diamandis and Gary Hudson; Hudson in particular believes the number of self-funded ventures that don’t need to be constantly fundraising is the key difference between now and past false starts. “Investors are easily spooked,” Hudson said. “Zealots – and I mean that in the good sense – are not.”

That’s the suggestion of Jack Kennedy, a Virginia attorney, in an op-ed in the Roanoke Times this week. Looking at the boom in commercial spaceports in the US and elsewhere, he believes that the state is missing an opportunity to get involved by using an existing spaceport, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), co-located with the Wallops Flight Facility. “Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted,” he notes, “it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.” His recommendation: “Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia’s own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague… Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia’s spaceport should be made.”

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Rick Tumlinson writes about why visitors to the ISS like Anousheh Ansari should not be called “tourists”. The catch here is that this essay was actually written back in 2000, right after Dennis Tito signed with MirCorp to fly as the first passenger to pay his way to the Mir space station. (MirCorp? Mir? Yes, this is a little old.) While the essay is a bit dated, the key arguments here still hold up: this is still a cutting-edge and dangerous venture, so we shouldn’t call ISS visitors tourists any more than we call those who climb Everest tourists. Moreover, even terrestrial tourist destinations like Las Vegas and New York don’t advertise for “tourists”, so why should we use the label for visitors to space?

This analysis may hold up for orbital tourists, but it does raise the question whether the “tourist” appellation might be more appropriate for suborbital commercial passengers. The higher safety factors, lower costs, and greater anticipated demand for such services may well meet Tumlinson’s criteria in his essay about when the tourist label is appropriate. “We will certainly know it when we see it,” he writes, “but that time is not now, and we only hurt our cause by using the phrase prematurely.”

Orlando Sentinel columnist Eric Michaels recounts a trip on Zero-G’s aircraft he took earlier this year. It’s clear from his column that he enjoyed the trip; his stomach, not so much: “Trust me, I’ve never had so much fun making myself sick.” In his case, the queasiness didn’t come until after he completed all his parabolas. “I was lacing up my sneakers when the Action Stomach started sending hints up the pipe that it wasn’t happy. Seconds later, I watched a backward replay of breakfast. Thankfully, I had eaten lightly.” He notes that Zero-G claims that only one in 100 fliers will experience motion sickness, but “of the eight rookie fliers on my trip, six had to use air-sickness bags.”

Of course, Michaels could have avoided that unpleasantness by taking the motion sickness drugs Zero-G provides. However, “I’m not prone to motion sickness, and Nancy Reagan once told me to ‘Just Say No.’ So I stuck to her sage advice and passed.” In the end, though, “I wish I’d said ‘Yes’ to the drugs.”