An article in Tuesday’s issue of the London (Ontario) Free Press reports that NASA Ames director Pete Worden believes that “Private flights to the moon may be available to non-scientists ‘by the end of the 2020s.’” Worden, speaking at the University of Western Ontario, played up the potential for private activity on the Moon, and even suggested that the private sector is “going to beat us to the lunar surface”, although the report doesn’t indicate if he meant that in the context of robotic or human expeditions.

On Tuesday shareholders in Russian aerospace company RSC Energia, which includes the Russian government, officially named Vitaly Lopota as the company’s new president. Lopota replaces Nikolai Sevastianov, who was effectively ousted last month. Sevastianov got into trouble in part by making bold pronouncements about plans to return to the moon, ranging from far-fetched proposals to mine the lunar regolith for helium-3 to proposals to fly Soyuz missions on circumlunar missions around the Moon. The latter, of course, has been something that Space Adventures has been trying to line up paying passengers for, at $100 million for each of two available seats.

Lopota appears to be distancing himself from those lunar mission plans. For example, Itar-Tass noted that Energia will coordinate its announcements with the Russian space agency Roskosmos because, previously, “Sevastianov often declared plans for manned space flights that disagreed with the official position of the agency and the federal space program for 2006-2015.” RIA Novosti reported that Sevastianov “has been repeatedly criticized, primarily for his daring projects relating to lunar exploration, branded “lunacy” by the Space Agency”. (The irony of branding lunar exploration plans as “lunacy” is apparently lost on Novosti’s editors.) These comments suggest that proposals to modify Soyuz spacecraft for circumlunar missions may be shifted to the back burner under Energia’s new leadership.

A large fraction of Canadians think that space tourism flights to other planets would be possible within the next 100 years, according to the results of a poll reported by the Canadian Press. A whopping 85 percent thought that such vacations would be possible in the next century “or more”, including 13 percent who believed that such jaunts could be possible in the next 50 years. However, “futurist” Mike Dover of Toronto consultancy New Paradigm tried to put the kibosh on such thoughts in the Canadian Press article: “I don’t see that it would be in the realm of possibilities for amateur or civilian travel for many, many centuries.” Of course, it depends on what’s meant by vacations to other planets—or, for that matter, what a “planet” is. After all, Space Adventures is recruiting passengers for a circumlunar flight that could take place in the next several years, not centuries.

Space Adventures’ CEO Eric Anderson believes that his company will have signed up the first tourists for their proposed circumlunar mission by the end of this year. Anderson made the comments last week at the Flight School conference in Colorado, according to SPACE.com. That’s a bit later than what Anderson said a month ago at the ISDC, when said he was working with a few prospective customers over the next few months to sign them up for the flight. The ticket still costs $100 million each, with two available for the flight.

Anderson added that, on the orbital front, his company is working with the Russian space agency Roskosmos to try and increase the number of Soyuz flights to provide more flight opportunities for space tourists. Also, he hopes that the first tourist spacewalk from the ISS could take place in 2009.

…has been selected, but hasn’t been announced yet, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said during a luncheon speech at the ISDC Friday. “The next [tourist] flight is next year,” he said. “We have the person who is going to go but we haven’t yet disclosed their name. But it will be another exciting one, it will be another first.” Anderson also said that the current cost of an orbital flight is $25 million, in line with earlier reports about Simonyi’s flight but more than the $21.8 million price quoted by Roskosmos this week.

Anderson was also revealing few details about Space Adventures’ suborbital flight plans. The company has kept a low profile about those plans since a flurry of publicity back in early 2006. “I prefer not to comment on that too much right now,” he said. “We are still working on it. Everything costs more and takes longer, so we’ll see.” At the other extreme, he said there is still strong interest in the company’s circumlunar space flight proposal. “I have a few people who are interested,” he said, adding that he plans to work with them over the next few months to get them to formally sign up.

PC Magazine, of all publications, has a summary article of the appearance by Space Adventures’ Chris Faranetta and SpaceX’s Elon Musk at the Future in Review (or FiRE) conference in San Diego. (See earlier post.) There’s not too much new here: both go over their plans, and discuss some far-future propulsion breakthroughs (Faranetta is fond of laser propulsion, while Musk is not; both are disdainful of the space elevator concept.) Musk, though, has his eye firmly set on low-cost passenger travel to Mars, and soon:

“I hope that we’re the primary mechanism for getting people to orbit in the world,” said Musk. “By 2020 I’d like to take someone to another planet.” He believes that within 12 years or so, the cost of taking someone to Mars will be little more than “the price of a median house in California,” or just a few million dollars each.

Of course, by 2020 a few million dollars may not buy you anything in the most overheated regions of California’s real estate market.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Space Adventures vice president Chris Faranetta discussed space tourism and the future of commercial space ventures during talks Tuesday at the “Future in Review” conference in San Diego, CNET News.com reports. There’s not much news in this report, other than a comment by Faranetta that Space Adventures hopes to sign up two passengers for its proposed circumlunar flight by 2008.

SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. (SEI) has posted an online survey regarding demand for orbital space tourism. Normally I am skeptical of any such online surveys, because the audience is self-selected: rather than a random sampling that takes into account various demographic factors of the audience (as is the case with traditional polling) online surveys can be skewed by the audience that is attracted—or compelled—to take them.

This survey, though, is a little different. Rather than ask people about their own willingness to fly in space, respondents are instead asked to try and gauge the size of the market for several types of orbital tourism activities: orbital flights with and without hotels, as well as circumlunar flights. The size of the potential market at several price points is requested, as well as the confidence the respondent has in his estimates.

I am curious to see how SEI plans to use these data. If it’s an effort to measure the size of the orbital tourism market, I’m skeptical about how useful it might be: few details are given (or available) about the various attributes of such flights, and price points may vary wildly from what’s requested in the survey. In any event, I suspect most people can only offer a gut feel for the size of the market at this time. However, if the survey is designed to gauge the perceived size of the market, then this might be more useful. How big, in numbers of passengers per year, do people believe orbital tourism will be?