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.”)

An article in an English-language section of the web site of German magazine Der Spiegel briefly discusses the New Mexico spaceport plans announced last week. But—and you knew there had to be a “but” here—the article weighs that against the “enormous” carbon footprint the suborbital spaceflight from there will generate. The key (and final) sentence from the article, after discussing the environmentally-friendly aspects of the spaceport: “But all the fuss about conservation comes across as a bit empty considering the enormous fuel consumption and carbon footprint of each rocket that will launch from the private spaceport, taking space tourists into orbit for $200,000 a pop.”

This is not the first time that the perceived deleterious effects on the environment by suborbital spaceflights have been brought up; an editorial from a New Hampshire newspaper made similar statements in July. Der Spiegel makes no attempt to quantify how big an “enormous” carbon footprint is (perhaps because it’s not so enormous after all), and that’s just plain sloppy journalism.

The satirical publication The Onion has its own take on space tourism today where friends of a space tourist ridicule him for taking a boring trip:

Despite having never visited outer space before in his life and being completely free from the everyday demands of work, family, and gravity, space tourist Dick Knowles spent his entire 19-day, $7 million vacation holed up inside the space shuttle Atlantis, sources reported Monday.

Among his sins: staying in the shuttle, never leaving orbit, not “sampling the local cuisine”, and, perhaps worst of all, failing “to meet or interact with anyone during his vacation who was not also from Earth.” As one “friend” put it, “He didn’t even visit the moon, for Christ’s sake. Who goes to space and doesn’t visit the moon?”

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Tim Pickens recalls his good friend, Glen May, one of the three people who died in the explosion Thursday in Mojave. The two had worked together on the SpaceShipOne propulsion development effort several years ago. “Anyone who has seen SpaceShipOne tested or flown should think of Glen,” Tim writes. “He was involved in about every aspect of that program.”

Last week’s accident raises another question: what will happen when there’s an actual spacecraft accident, one that may involve the death of the people onboard? I review a session of the recent NewSpace 2007 conference that covered this issue from the viewpoints of the investigator, insurer, attorney, and industry official. While it’s a scenario no one is fond of thinking about, it is something that has to be considered and planned for; fortunately, people in the industry are doing that.

According to local media reports, there has been a fatal explosion at a rocket test stand at Mojave Airport, home to a number of entrepreneurial space companies. Two people were killed and four people were injured. The company involved hasn’t been identified; according to an amalgam of the sketchy reports available so far, it involved a nitrous oxide “flash explosion” on a test stand.

Here are a collection of various reports available so far:

• Bakersfield Californian
• Tehachapi News
• KBAK-TV
• KERO-TV (with low-res photo of the explosion)
• KGET-TV
• KNBC-TV (which reports that a truck at the scene had the Scaled logo on it)

Update 8 pm EDT: According to KBAK-TV, the explosion took place at a Scaled Composites facility at the airport, but the TV station said they didn’t know yet if any Scaled employees were among the casualties.

If you are looking for something to do this Sunday afternoon, you can tune into The Space Show at 3:00 pm EDT, where I will be Dr. David Livingston’s guest on the 90-minute show. One thing we will be talking about during the show will be the NewSpace 2007 conference, which wraps up Saturday, but with all that time there will be opportunities to talk about space tourism and other topics. And if, for some reason, you actually have better things to do Sunday afternoon than listen to an Internet radio show, the show will be archived for later listening.

Today (assuming you’re reading this in the next few hours) is the third anniversary of the first flight into space by SpaceShipOne. A couple people emailed me to ask if I was going to post on this, and while I thought about taking a deep big-picture view of the significance of the anniversary, but realized what I wrote last year on the second anniversary of the flight is still valid today. Progress has been made (and continues to be made, as recent developments have demonstrated), but you still can’t fly into space on a suborbital vehicle. Perhaps by this time next year that will be different, at least if you’re a test pilot for one of the leading vehicle developers.

Yesterday’s Space Venture Finance Symposium didn’t devote much attention to space tourism itself, focusing instead on the state of financing (from angels through VCs to private equity and corporate deals) in the entrepreneurial space industry. One item did catch my eye: German consultant Joerg Kreisel described several types of space ventures. There was space-to-space (S2S) businesses (borrowing from the commonly-used business-to-business, or B2B, class of ventures), such as a number of on-orbit servicing ventures in the works. There are also the more common S2E (space-to-earth) businesses, like communications and navigation. Then there’s S2R. S2R? Space-to-rism, Kreisel explained. (Groan.) So what does he think of S2R, er, space tourism? “I think we will see many people die on the way, but that was the same in the early days of air flight.”

Earlier this week I ran across an article titled “Space tourism still distant” in The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper of UCLA. Reading this, you’d think the prospects for space tourism were pretty dim indeed, based on these misconceptions included in the article:

• A suborbital spaceflight “has a price tag of about $20 million”;
• Orbital flights not only cost even more but are “restricted to astronauts and researchers”;
• A suborbital spaceflight “does not allow for the floating-in-air experience that a flight orbiting the earth permits”;
• A hurdle to orbital spaceflight is that “just the logistics of getting their bodies fit is alone another barrier”;
• Large-scale space tourism may never happen because “we will run out of petroleum before we can get off the planet in any large numbers”

Yikes. Although you can quibble with some of the opinions above, there are clearly some major errors in the article. The biggest flaw, though, is that the article relies on “experts” who are actually professors and grad students in the physics and astronomy department at UCLA. While these are smart people who know a lot about space science, they’re not automatically going to be experts about space tourism or related applications. Unfortunately, many people assume that just because you study the universe, you know everything that is going on in space.

Fortunately, this story should soon have a happy ending. I contacted the author yesterday and pointed out some of the most egregious errors, and suggested some alternative sources in the LA area. I got an email back saying that my corrections had been passed on the paper’s managing editor and a correction would run in Friday’s issue of the paper (although it’s not been posted yet to the corrections page of the paper’s web site).

I ran across this week this article about space tourism from a publication called The Student Operated Press. Pretty harmless stuff, until you read the roster of space tourists who have flown to the ISS: Denis Titio, Mark Shattlvort, George Olsen, Anyshe Ansary, and, most recently, Charles Simony. Yeah, that’s right. One possible reason for this, ah, non-standard spelling might be that the author is Ukrainian, posing thus some translation/transliteration problems, but that’s why there are editors, right?