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?

Zogby International has released a new survey that offers conflicting news for space tourism companies and proponents. The survey, conducted online in mid-March and released late last week, indicates that about 30 percent of Americans “are interested” in space tourism, although what “interested” means isn’t defined (interested in general? interested enough to participate if the price is right?) in the Zogby press release. However, the press release goes on to add that 41 percent said that “if money weren’t an issue, they would personally travel to the moon”, while 32 percent said the same about a trip to Mars.

Does that make any sense? If 30 percent of the public are “interested” in space tourism, why would a larger number be interested in going to the Moon or Mars “if money were no object”? Unfortunately, the press release doesn’t offer any further details, not a look at the survey instrument used for this poll, so it’s hard to gauge the intent of the respondents. (Other parts of this survey, which touched on a wide range of space issues, also suffer from a similar degree of vagueness.) While proponents of space tourism may be heartened to see nearly a third of the American public “interested” in space tourism, without knowing more about the poll, it’s difficult to say whether that figure means much of anything.

Last week Jeff Bell published an essay on SpaceDaily questioning the safety of rocketplanes planned for space tourism applications. His essay was not well-received in many sectors, including here. If you have questions you’d like to pose to Professor Bell about his essay (or congratulate him for his comments, for that matter), he will appear on The Space Show this Thursday at 10 pm EDT. As host David Livingston puts it, “here’s your chance to engage Dr. Bell in a constructive dialog.”

SpaceDaily has an essay today (it actually was posted late last night) by Jeffrey Bell titled “Rocket Plane Roulette”. In it, Bell argues that rocket-powered winged vehicles are inherently unsafe (based on their track record), and that they are likely to be involved in accident(s) shortly after their introduction as space tourism vehicles, which will, in turn, result in lawsuits and regulation that will kill the industry. Not exactly a feel-good article.

I will leave it to other more technically competent to pick apart Prof. Bell’s arguments (IANAAE - I am not an aerospace engineer) but I do see some flaws in his arguments. Much of his belief that rocketplanes are inherently unsafe is based on his examination of “the safety history of research rocketplanes in the US and UK”. Well, there’s a problem right there: experimental vehicles are going to have a much higher failure rate than operational commercial vehicles, because they’re pushing the envelope in terms of speed, altitude, and the like. Bell even concedes this: after going through the history of X-15 and rocketplane failures, he concludes, “Are these safety statistics relevant to the 21st-century commercial operators? Probably not.”

Prof. Bell later argues that “It is unlikely that any tourist rocket operator will be able to afford a comprehensive test program.” But what is a comprehensive test program? He hints at something approaching the much larger number of test flights needed for FAA aircraft certification, but doesn’t spell out the specifics. I will point readers to an article I published Monday in The Space Review that includes a section on when such vehicles will be safe enough for passengers, based on a session at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. These developers are very conscious of safety issues, and none showed any signs of rushing through testing to put vehicles in service. A sample quote from Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace: “Simple economic self-interest is going to force us to do our very, very best to get the vehicle that safe, and to do enough tests to convince ourselves that it is that safe.”

There are some other flaws in the article that suggest a lack of familiarity by Prof. Bell about the industry: at one point he lumps the DC-X in with various rocketplane designs, something the developers of the VTVL wingless DC-X would likely take umbrage with; he also claims that “SpaceShip1 [sic] suffered serious problems on all of its flights above 100km”, even though there were no signs of any serious problems on at least SpaceShipOne’s final flight on 2004 October 4. Prof. Bell is correct that safety is a critical issue for the emerging personal spaceflight industry, whether it’s done by rocketplanes or other vehicles. What’s not so certain is that the future is as dire as Bell makes it out to be.

Last year I noted BuyMeToTheStars.com, an effort to raise money for a suborbital spaceflight by selling ad pixels, a project modeled on the “Million Dollar Homepage”. Now there’s another entrant in this field. Last week Ben Riecken, a flight instructor in Florida, announced his own effort to raise money for a trip through a pixel-selling scheme. My Trip In Space is more like the original Million Dollar Homepage, with ad logos filling up a grid. (BuyMeToTheStars.com, by comparison, sells “stars” and “nebulae”.) So far Riecken’s site has only a handful of advertisers, just as Michael Halls-Moore has only sold a few stars on his site. Given that few copycats to the original Million Dollar Homepage have enjoyed even a small level of success, it doesn’t seem like this is going to be a tenable approach to raising money for a suborbital spaceflight.

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.

In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Steven Fawkes discusses the potential impact global warming concerns could have on space tourism. Space tourism activities, even in their most robust scenarios, would make on a very small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, but Fawkes notes that there could be the perception that even that is too much in the eyes of environmental activists. That “is a particularly high risk as space tourism, although small in extent, will be very high profile and it will be seen as an activity for ‘the rich’, which adds to its negative image in some environmental circles.” Fawkes’ recommendation is that space tourism operators make every effort to be “carbon neutral”, offsetting any impact through emissions trading programs or similar measures.

Virgin Galactic has been noting that their flights will have limited environmental impacts for some time, such as at the SpaceShipTwo cabin unveiling in New York in September. But that has not insured Virgin from criticism, even as Richard Branson announced a climate change prize earlier this month. “But what is the use of a trip that takes you nowhere but 70 miles above ground - with the “space” bit of the ride lasting just a couple of minutes?” asked Steve Connor of The Independent earlier this month in an article titled “Saviour of the planet - or a space-hopping hypocrite?” (This is the same article where Connor calls the company “Virgin Galactica”, so weight his comments accordingly.) Branson climate change prize, writes Connor, “is a commendable gesture in that direction. But how does he square that with his desire to turn us all into an army of carbon-crazed space cadets?”

An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the spike in sales of space memorabilia in the wake of the Lisa Nowak case mentioned in passing one other sale of interest to personal spaceflight enthusiasts:

Demand for memorabilia has spiked ever since billionaires started dabbling in private space travel and the Chinese government became interested in space. Aurora Auctions, of Bell Canyon, Calif., recently sold a brown M&M that left the Earth’s atmosphere in 2004 aboard the Paul Allen-financed SpaceShipOne. It went for $1,500.

“It was flown on the very first mission,” says Victoria Campbell, Aurora’s founder and chief executive. “That’s very important.”

Hmmm… I’ve got a whole bag of specially-branded M&Ms that were distributed at the X Prize flights in Mojave. Think that’s worth $1,500? Probably not. How about $1.50? It is a big bag, you know…