Monday’s issue of The Space Review features an interview with Richard Garriott, who is currently in Russia training for a flight to the ISS this fall. Garriott describes the not-uncommon issues associated with living and training there (learning Russia, the less-than-gourmet food) as well as his plans to perform experiments on the ISS and even do “the first art show in space featuring the art of my mother”, in Garriott’s words. The ultimate goal of his flight:

I hope to learn how to better make space a viable reality for everyone. To do that, I think it needs to be shown that the investment in space is worth it. That is why I hope that at least some of my experiments pay off. If even one does, it will mean that there are more that can be done, and thus justify further flights by private individuals and companies.

[Apologies for the long delay in posts - I’m catching up on a lot of other work.]

Last week Flightglobal.com reported that there will be no more seats for paying passengers on Soyuz flights to the ISS after April 2009 because of the increase in the station’s crew size from three to six. The article cited ESA officials, who said that the increase in crew size means that all the seats will be filled on the taxi flights, despite the increase in flight rate needed to support the larger crew.

I happened to talk for a moment with Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson after a speech he gave last Wednesday at the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Crystal City, VA. I asked him about the report and he said they had reservations secured for the April 2009 and were in negotiations for flight opportunities beyond that. (Something that was later added to the Flightglobal.com report.) [As Mr. Coppinger notes below, that statement was in the original article, and I simply missed it the first time I read the piece.] Asked if he would be interested in doing business with one of the commercial ventures planning to provide crew resupply services to the ISS under NASA’s COTS program, he said that he would be happy to talk with “whoever can provide safe and effective transport” to the station.

Space Adventures announced today that Australian entrepreneur Nik Halik will be the backup to Richard Garriott on Garriott’s fall 2008 flight to the ISS. Halik is paying $3 million for the privilege of being the backup; that money can be used later towards the cost of his own orbital or other spaceflight. Halik, 38, is described in the press release as “the CEO and founder of several companies including Financial Freedom Institute and Money Masters”. He is also an adventure tourist with plans to climb Mount Everest in 2009. He’s also an author of an upcoming book, The Thrillionaire, which the release describes as “an autobiography that also provides astute investment strategies.” Enough to make you feel lazy, no matter how busy you are.

Readers might recall that Halik claimed to have been selected as the backup two months ago, according to accounts in the Australian media. At that time Space Adventures said that no selection had been made but that Halik was one of the candidates. Evidently that premature announcement didn’t spoil his ultimate selection.

Space Adventures announced Monday that its latest orbital spaceflight client, Richard Garriott, has started training for his October flight to the ISS. Garriott is in Star City, Russia, where his training, including Russian language lessons, have kicked into high gear, he tells SPACE.com. “This year is definitely where all my priorities and schedules have rotated to where space becomes the top priority and terrestrial activities become secondary,” Garriott, a computer game developer, said.

Neither the SPACE.com report nor the Space Adventures press release, though, said anything about the selection of a backup for Garriott. Back in November, Space Adventures announced it was offering the backup flight opportunity for $3 million, which could be credited for a future flight. After one Australian claimed to be that backup candidate in late November, the company said no selection had been made, but that someone would be picked by January “at the latest”.

Wednesday’s Huntsville Times describes something that sounds at least mildly quixotic: an effort to recreate John Glenn’s historic 1962 spaceflight on the 50th anniversary, using private funding. The project is the brainchild of retired pilot Craig Russell, who has created a nonprofit organization to raise the money needed to refurbish a Mercury capsule and launch it with an astronaut on board. Russell estimates he need to raise $35 million for a Falcon 9 launch, but thinks that either refurbishing an unflown Mercury capsule or building one from scratch could be done for as little as $10 million because all the R&D needed to build the capsule was done decades ago (also, apparently, student labor would be involved.)

Russell is trying to raise money for the project now, but said he would abandon the project if he can’t raise “significant interest and funding” during the course of this year. NASA doesn’t appear to be interested: Russell met with an unnamed NASA associate administrator last June to brief him on the effort but did not get a positive response. “He was not very enthusiastic,” Russell said.

AFP reported yesterday that Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov suggested the end was near for tourist flights to the ISS on regular Soyuz taxi flights there. According to Perminov, the planned increase in the ISS crew size from three to six—expected by the end of the decade, when ISS assembly is complete—will leave no room on Soyuz taxi flights to the station for tourists. “I’m afraid that from 2009, tourism as we see it today may be discontinued,” Perminov said, according to the report.

Perminov did indicate that there is strong demand for such flights, enough that “we cannot satisfy all requests”. However, the article doesn’t address the possibility that additional Soyuz spacecraft could be manufactured, perhaps for dedicated tourist flights to the ISS (not to mention plans for circumlunar tourist flights). Space Adventures has reportedly been looking at what’s needed to increase the Soyuz production rate, so this report may be a little premature.

This week’s issue of Newsweek magazine includes an essay by Charles Simonyi on his flight to the ISS earlier this year. Simonyi described how he started down the path of being a “Spaceflight Participant” on a Soyuz flight to the station:

I was just an earthbound tourist, visiting Baikonur, the Russian spaceport, when I met Eric [Anderson, of Space Adventures] in 2004. I was amazed by the openness of the Russian space program—we could practically touch the fully fueled rocket on the launchpad as we saw the cosmonauts off to space. I was even more amazed when Eric, ever so gently, suggested that one day I might want to be on the departure platform where the cosmonauts were standing.

Simonyi said he went through a series of medical tests he passed without problems, and then got a surprise:

Eric was the first to congratulate me. He also said that, as opposed to what we had planned, the Russians wanted me to enter training as soon as possible and fly on the next spacecraft. I had to decide then and there. It actually wasn’t as hard as it seems in the abstract. I felt incredibly lucky and privileged just to have been asked. The answer had to be yes, come what may.

The rest is a fairly abbreviated, high-level discussion of his training and the flight itself (he does reveal that he didn’t get spacesick at all during the flight; he would simply recall his training on Earth when he felt “any unease”).

If there are questions about his flight that he didn’t answer in his essay, you can pose them to him in a live chat Thursday, December 6 at 2 pm EST.

News reports out of Melbourne, Australia over the weekend indicated that Space Adventures had selected an Australian-born millionaire to be the backup to Richard Garriott on his trip to the ISS next October. “Self-described ‘thrillionaire’ Nik Halik has been named as the back-up crewman for next year’s October commercial flight to the International Space Station,” reported the Herald Sun. Another paper, The Age, also reported that Halik said that he had been selected as the backup for the trip, putting him in “a good position to lead the next flight in 2009″.

There’s just one problem with all this, as you might imagine upon reading this far: Halik hasn’t been selected yet by Space Adventures to be the backup. According to company spokesperson Stacey Tearne, Halik is indeed one of the candidates to pay $3 million to be Garriott’s backup, but no decision has been made. A selection will be made in January “at the latest”, she said in an email this morning.

Little details like that aren’t stopping Halik from dreaming big, though. According to the Herald Sun he said he wants not only to go to the ISS some day, but also “be one of the first to colonise the moon”. “By 2018, the Japanese want to colonise it and have a moon base and use it to explore the galaxy,” he told the paper. (This may be news to the Japanese.)

It appears that Halik, who made his money through investments and investment seminars (”over 31,178 people have already attended his Mastery Educational Events”), has been pursuing this goal for some time, according to this 2006 article:

In 2003, Nik commenced his training through the Russian Orbital Space Program. Having completed his Edge of Space supersonic flight and Zero Gravity training flight just recently in Moscow, he will be the first recorded Australian civilian to fly Sub-Orbit soon, qualifying him the status of being certified as an astronaut. The next adventure after this will be his ultimate mission and destiny to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) for a fortnight orbital stay. Nik, alongside his sponsors is planning on executing the first history making stock market trade in SPACE.

In this week’s issue of The Space Review I have an article about Lori Garver and Lance Bass, who tried to be orbital space tourists in 2002. Most people in the space industry are familiar with Garver, and her talk at the ISPS last month in New Mexico didn’t have much in the way of new insights about her “AstroMom” bid to go to the ISS. Bass, on the other hand, while attracting all the media attention when his plan came forward (and later collapsed), has talked little about his attempt to fly in space in any detail. The former *NYSNC star does go into some details in his new book, Out of Sync, which I recap in the article, ranging from his surgery to correct an irregular heartbeat to the difficulty he had raising money (including being forced to pay for the rest of his training out of pocket, to the tune of nearly a half-million dollars, to stay on track for his planned fall 2002 launch.) Bass doesn’t say in the book if he has any desire to try to fly in space again, either on a suborbital or orbital flight; Garver, by contrast, says that “I guess I feel like I will still go to space”, although she has no immediate plans for a spaceflight.

Space Adventures announced today that, for the first time, it is selling the opportunity to be the backup crew member for one of its Soyuz space tourists. For $3 million, that person would go through the same six-month training program in Russia as Richard Garriott, the company’s next orbital customer; they are particularly interested in someone who can not only afford the training but also “is able to be an active participant in Richard’s mission, to include being featured in a documentary TV series,” according to Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson. (The press release also points out that Anousheh Ansari was originally training in 2006 as a backup to Daisuke Enomoto, but got to fly when Enomoto suffered some kind of medical problem.) And, yes, that $3 million can be “credited in-full” towards a future orbital or even lunar spaceflight, Anderson added. Time would appear to be of the essence, since Garriott plans to start training in Russia after the first of the year.