A session of the Space Access ’08 conference last night dealt with “paths to rocket piloting”: how can people who are interested in piloting a number of the new suborbital vehicles under development prepare for getting those jobs. Some companies have turned to test pilots and/or former astronauts, but if this industry does grow, the pool of potential pilots will likely have to expand beyond that narrow niche. A number of the panelists, including several private pilots, talked about preparations such as acrobatic and high-performance aircraft flying that would have relevance to suborbital spacecraft.

A dissenting opinion came from John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace. He argued that the glamour associated by many with being a rocket-powered vehicle pilot will fall far short of reality. “I don’t think this is going to be an exciting career to go into,” he said, saying that the work involved with flying these vehicles is not like the “stick-and-rudder” work associated with conventional aircraft, especially for VTVL vehicles like Armadillo’s. “It’s going to be like being an elevator operator,” something that is just not that exciting. Armadillo’s suborbital vehicle design, the “six-pack” vehicle, does not even have a pilot on the vehicle: the vehicle is controlled from the ground; the single person on board does not any flight duties.

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.”

[Another catchup post.]

About a week ago ABC News published the results a poll about space tourism, among other space-related topics, with the key takeaway point that four in ten people woule be willing to fly in space for at least some amount of money. ABC also published the complete poll questionnaire and detailed results.

Unfortunately, the poll itself is not that useful for determining actual levels of public interest in space tourism. For example, the poll makes no effort to discern among suborbital, orbital, and other (like circumlunar) forms of space tourism; it merely asks, “If you had a chance in your lifetime to travel in outer space, would you do so, or not?” The various price points selected are also highly unrealistic, with the lowest (excluding zero) being “$1-499″ and the highest being $20,000+”. Given that even the biggest proponents of space tourism see those prices coming down to the $20,000-30,000 range only after several years—at least—of operations, those price points need to be recalibrated. Also, there’s no evidence that the polling firm tried to restrict the respondents to those wealthy enough to be reasonably able to afford such flights (not surprising given the price points they selected.)

Still, there are a few nuggets of information in the poll, in part because these questions have apparently been posed in previous surveys. Here, the responses are mixed for space tourism proponents. The poll found that 65 percent believed that it was definitely or probably likely that “in the years ahead ordinary people will travel in outer space”, compared to 33 percent who answered “probably not” or “definitely not”. That compares to 57 percent who answered in the affirmative and 41 percent in the negative in a 1999 poll (which asked about the chances for such flights “in the next 50 years” versus “in the years ahead”). However, the results show a declining trend in terms of people who would actually want to fly themselves: the 39 percent who said they wanted to fly in 2008 is down from 41 percent in August 1999 and 47 percent in April 1998.

The results also provided some demographic breakouts. The poll found that 54 percent of men said they wanted to fly in space, but only 25 percent of women. (It would be interesting to compare this with the statistics of actual customers signed up by companies like Virgin Galactic.) Only 19 percent of those over 65 years old want to fly, but 56 percent of those in the 18-34 age group said yes. And people with higher incomes were more likely to say yes.

I have a clear bias here, since I was involved tangentially in the original Futron-Zogby survey in 2002 that many in the industry still consider to be the gold standard for space tourism market research. However, as much as I would like to see another survey done to see how levels of interest in space tourism have evolved over the last six years, this ABC poll isn’t it.

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston hosted a session yesterday titled “50 Years of the Space Age: Looking Back, Looking Forward”. The session an eclectic panel: space historian Roger Launius (as moderator), former Soviet space scientist and advisor Roald Sagdeev, former astronaut Kathy Sullivan, and Andrew Aldrin of Boeing/ULA. With a panel this diverse, you could expect to discuss a wide range of topics. Interestingly, they focused a fair amount of time on space tourism, and they did not have the most optimistic assessment.

Sagdeev provided a little bit of history. In 1987 he accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev to a summit meeting with Ronald Reagan. During the summit there was a reception where various Soviet and American dignitaries and other famous people mingled. At the reception, Sagdeev recalled, he was approached by someone interested in flying into space on a Soyuz: singer John Denver. Sagdeev helped broker negotiations between Denver and the Soviet space program (which was just then beginning to be open to commercial arrangements like this). They settled on a final price for the flight—$10 million—and Denver tried to raise the money. He failed, as some people familiar with the pre-history of space tourism recall, and tragically died a short time later in an ultralight accident.

Sagdeev said Denver told him that he had been a “finalist” to fly on the ill-fated Challenger flight, a claim that Sullivan found dubious. “I can’t tell you how many, at least scores, of people who I have met—journalists, musicians, others—who are absolutely, positively convinced that they were on the short list to get on Challenger,” she said. “I never saw any of them in any training. John Denver never went through any simulations, let me tell you that.”

Launius, noting that despite the long interest in space tourism, “the reach has exceeded the grasp” in terms of actual accomplishments in the field, asked the panel what they thought about the prospects of space tourism. Sullivan declared herself a skeptic. “I don’t see what they’re doing,” she said, referring to suborbital vehicle developers, “that is going to enable us to fundamental changes in technologies that fundamentally change the cost equation or the safety equation.” The work she does see involves taking known technologies, making incremental improvements to them, and then “cobbling them together into new systems.” (She undercut that argument a bit later when she said the airline industry took off in the US after World War 2, built on surplus aircraft and former military pilots; that, certainly, did not require new technology, and we are beginning to see a similar shift from the government to commercial world as astronauts leave NASA to take positions with entrepreneurial space ventures.)

Sagdeev said that he believes a Soyuz flight to orbit could be as cheap as $10 million (although the going rate is now close to three times that figure.) The current passenger flight rate for those missions, one or two people per year, is a “miserable figure”, in his words. (Of course, those flight rates are constrained by ISS servicing requirements as well as competition for those seats from the Russian government.)

Aldrin, who said that “in most space communities I’m regarded as kind of a skeptic on this issue”, was actually more optimistic than his fellow panelists. argues that the suborbital space tourism market, based on existing market studies, is probably too small to interest big aerospace companies. The number of vehicles needed to service the market is small, so you can’t set up a big production line and get economies of scale as you can with airliners. “For publicly-held companies, it’s going to be tough to justify the expense and risk of getting into that business,” he said. “It really is going to require entrepreneurship and, perhaps from a shareholder’s perspective, irrational investment, to make this happen.”

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press reported this week that organizers of a charity auction have removed a suborbital spaceflight trip out of concerns it was too dangerous. The auction, part of the Naples Winter Wine Festival, would have included a spaceflight on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. However, in the wake of last July’s industrial accident at Mojave Airport that killed three Scaled Composites employees, the organizers dropped the prize from the list, deeming it too dangerous. “I just didn’t think it was a good idea,” festival chairman Don Gunther told the News-Press. Auction bidders will have to settle for less dangerous prizes like a pair of motorcycles, a Maserati, or trips to China, South America, Dubai, Morocco, and South Africa.

Another company is making an effort at developing a reality TV show with a space theme and prize. Isthmus, a paper in Madison, Wisconsin, reports that a pair of Univ. of Wisconsin alums are promoting a proposed reality TV series: “Geeks in Space” (featuring a trailer produced by Bo Ryan, the men’s basketball coach at UW). The concept: put a bunch of, well, geeks, in, um, space. Actually, a simulated spaceship here on Earth, where the contestants, in a bizarre array of costumes, would live together while competing in challenges. (Losing competitors are, humanely, not ejected out the airlock but instead put into a “freeze chamber” for the remainder of the show.)

The space tie-in comes from an agreement the producers have with Space Adventures. “They are willing to partner with us when the show sells and will provide many challenges and the ultimate prize,” said Megan Kaiser, one of the show’s creators, “a trip to the edge of space.” Since Space Adventures is not actively pushing suborbital spaceflight, one wonders how this would work if some network gives the show a green light.

Right now, though, the show is still a concept, despite pitches to some of the major broadcast networks and cable networks like, logically, the Sci-Fi Channel. “So far, every network has loved our show, but for one reason or another, has yet to make us an offer,” said Kaiser. However, if that writers’ strike drags on, you never know…

The introduction of this Arizona Republic article probably puts it best:

By day, Morris Jarvis works as an instrumentation and control engineer for Intel Corp.’s newest factory, Fab 32.

By night and on the weekends, he is Arizona’s version of the “Astronaut Farmer,” building a vehicle he hopes to launch into space someday.

Jarvis is building a small winged vehicle that can be launched by balloon or rockets (the article is vague whether the balloon is part of the launch system or just, as noted, a means to generate revenue before going to rocket-powered flights), eventually carrying four people to about 100 kilometers for $100,000 apiece. He estimates he needs only $5.4 million to begin rocket-powered flights (”only” in sense that other ventures have suggested needing far larger amounts—think of EADS Astrium and its €1 billion).

From the limited information in the article, though, it’s tough to take this venture that seriously. Jarvis has kept a low profile in the personal spaceflight community to date. At the very least, given his location, he should be presenting his project at the Space Access conference in Phoenix; if he did, people might be better able to judge his effort from a technical and financial standpoint, and even perhaps offer some assistance.

Some brief items in recent days associated with space tourism:

• Virgin Galactic is making inroads in India, establishing relationships with travel agencies there. Virgin is charging 8 million rupees for a suborbital flight, which works out to just over $200,000 at current exchange rates.
• Back in the US, how is one travel agency selling Virgin Galactic flights? “Everybody’s been to Iceland,” said travel agent Angie Lepley of Tangerine Travel, one of Virgin’s accredited agents. “This is all unknown.” (For the record, I haven’t been to Iceland or space.) As for the risks of spaceflight, “She never considered that selling space flights could have a downside,” the Seattle Times reported.
• It’s hard to believe, but Richard Branson actually oversells the suborbital spaceflight experience in a speech in Boston. “You’ll go from (zero) to 4,000 miles an hour in 10 seconds - which will be quite a ride,” he said. The acceleration required for that change in speed is a bit beyond the likely capabilities of SpaceShipTwo—and that’s a good thing for the health and comfort of the passengers.
• If you’re looking for a way to make a space flight affordable, Russian banks may be willing to give you a good deal on a loan. Just make sure the loan is in dollars or euros or rubles, and not QUIDs, possibly the most inane idea associated with space for quite some time.

I’m in Philadelphia today visiting the new NASTAR Center, the National Aerospace Training and Research Center. This facility is specifically designing to giving people, including potential space tourists, training in some of the aspects of the spaceflight experience. Last night there was a reception at the center in the room that hosts a centrifuge:

Later today there will be tours and speeches by Anousheh Ansari, Greg Olsen, and Buzz Aldrin. I’ll report more on this later today or tomorrow.

Forbes.com posted today a review of Michael Belfiore’s book Rocketeers published earlier this summer. Or, at least, the review is time-stamped October 2, 2007, at 3:24 pm Eastern time. The review’s lede: “At California’s Mojave Airport last week, an explosion killed three and critically injured two.” Last week? That accident took place over two months ago, of course. (And they also got the number of people injured wrong; it was three.)

So maybe they’re recycling a review published two months ago. Or maybe not. The start of the next paragraph: “A burgeoning industry was launched 50 years ago today with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union.” Erm, not quite: Sputnik was launched 50 years ago Thursday, the day after tomorrow. So either time is a relatively unimportant concept for Forbes’ traditionally well-to-do readership, or they’re unable to afford an editor.

(For the record, the review is generally favorable to Rocketeers, noting that “Belfiore’s writing is lucid and energetic, and his passion for all things space-related makes even technical discussions of aerodynamics easy reading.”)