When Space Adventures announced that Richard Garriott going to fly to the ISS next October and with some commercial sponsors, some wondered whether his employer, Korean computer gaming company NCSoft, would be helping pay for the trip. Not so, the company told the Korea Times on Monday. “It is a personal affair (of Garriott). We decided not to participate in the program,” a company spokesperson told the newspaper. There had been speculation that Garriott would use the trip to help promote the company’s online games, perhaps playing them while on the station. He could still do that, of course (communications issues permitting), but it would seem that there would be a lot more interesting things to do on the ISS than play computer games…

Space Adventures announced this morning that Richard Garriott will be the company’s next customer to fly to the ISS on a Soyuz mission. Garriott’s flight is scheduled for October 2008, the next scheduled taxi flight with an open seat. Garriott is billed as the first “second generation” astronaut: his father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut who flew on Skylab and the Space Shuttle.

In the Space Adventures press release, Richard Garriott said that he is devoting his flight to science: “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He already has one research partner: ExtremoZyme, a biotech company founded by his father.

Garriott’s selection was not surprising given some of the rumors going around in recent weeks. As noted here earlier this month, the South Korean press had reported that Garriott might be the next space tourist. Garriott is the CEO of the North American division of NCSoft, a Korean gaming company, which had been rumored to bankroll any trip he might take (NCSoft isn’t mentioned as a sponsor in the announcement.)

And, as you might expect, Richard Garriott already has a web site devoted to his trip.

Who will be the next commercial passenger to take a ride to the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft in late 2008? Most of the recent speculation has focused on a Russian, after the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, said last week that a “prominent Russian businessman-turned-politician” (as described in an article in The Moscow Times on Monday) was “next in line” to be a space tourist. That mysterious person has since been identified as Vladimir Gruzdev, a “tycoon-explorer” who is the co-owner of the Russian grocery market chain Seventh Continent. Gruzdev also participated in the recent Russian Arctic expedition, where, in a controversial move, a submersible planted a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. (There’s some images about that expedition on Gruzdev’s Russian-language web site.)

While Gruzdev may be the first Russian space tourist (he certainly has both the adventurous streak and the money to pay for the trip), is he going to be the next paying passenger to the ISS? Maybe not. An article in Thursday’s edition of The Korea Times discusses a Zero-G aircraft flight that the CEO of computing gaming company NCSoft, Kim Taek-jin, took this week in the US. Kim himself doesn’t appear to be a candidate for a Soyuz trip, but the CEO of the company’s North American division, Richard Garriott, may be in line for a trip. A source tells the Korea Times: “Garriott is rumored to be on board for a 2008 shot to the space station. It is to be announced in early October along with his new game, ‘Tabula Rasa.’ He can then play his new game from outer space.” Garriott doesn’t have the funds to pay for the trip himself, so presumably the company would be bankrolling the trip. Garriott also has an insider connection: he is on the board of directors for Space Adventures. In a 2005 interview with Sam Dinkin for The Space Review, he explained how he helped open the door for orbital space tourism around 2000, even if a financial reversal prevented him from going himself.

Space Adventures has, as usual, remained tight-lipped about their potential upcoming orbital clients. In a speech last week at the AGI Users Exchange conference in Washington, Space Adventures president and CEO Eric Anderson (himself a former AGI employee) did say that they hoped to have a space tourist perform a spacewalk during a trip to the ISS, perhaps in 2009.

By know you’ve probably read about the venture, first reported Friday by Reuters, that is planning to develop a space hotel by 2012. I had held off on commenting about this development, in part because I’ve been on travel the last few days, but also because I’ve been trying to find out more about the “Galactic Suite” effort.

In general I have been disappointed with some of the uncritical reporting on this, not only from Reuters, but also from other sources, like The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail in the UK and even SPACE.com. (One refreshing departure is MSNBC, which notes that “it’s not yet clear exactly how much backing is behind the design concept”.) I am skeptical about the claims that this venture will have a space hotel flying in 2012—or any time in the foreseeable future—for at least a couple major reasons:

• The original Reuters article claims that “a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.” “Most” would imply an investment of well over $1 billion, perhaps over $2 billion, which is very difficult to accept at face value. There are people putting tens or hundreds of millions into projects (Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Robert Bigelow, for example), but billions? Look at all the trouble Rocketplane Kistler is having trying to raise $500 million, for something that is a lot more realistic.
• It’s not at all clear how people will get to and from this space hotel once it’s in orbit. Artists depictions in the news reports and on the web site either show a winged vehicle, not like any orbital vehicle under active development, at the station; one even shows a space shuttle (!!) being used to assemble the hotel. A space hotel is no good if the guests can’t get there.

The conceptual design of this facility is certainly intriguing, and it’s clear a lot of thought has been put into this design. It is not at all clear, though, that this is anything more than a design project at this point in time. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Carl Sagan once said. Galactic Suite has certainly satisfied the former condition, but not yet the latter.

(Note: I have contacted Galactic Suite with some questions about this project, but have not received a response yet. If I do get any information from them that clarifies these issues I will pass it along.)

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.

An RIA Novosti article today reports that “more than 10 people” are interested in buying seats on Soyuz flights, following in the footsteps of the five orbital space tourists to date. “We are holding preliminary consultations with them, and there are no Russians among them,” said Roskosmos spokesman Igor Panarin. He also confirmed past reports that the cost of s Soyuz flight was going up from $20 million to $21.8 million, although many news reports of Charles Simonyi’s ISS flight pegged the cost as high as $25 million.

Odds are that, when you travel, especially to exotic, out-of-the-way locations, you’ll be charged with bringing back souvenirs for friends and family who didn’t get to go. That’s true even for space tourists. Only problem: there’s no gift shop on the ISS. So Charles Simonyi had to improvise when he brought “a plastic shopping bag bearing artifacts” to Seattle’s Museum of Flight on Wednesday. Inside the bag was a glove from the spacesuit he wore on his flight and the drogue parachute from the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft, in which Simonyi returned to Earth last month after his stay. Sure beats something like “Charles Simonyi went to the ISS and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”…

The Seattle Times has the first interview with Charles Simonyi since his return to Earth on Saturday. He calls the trip “absolutely worthwhile”, full of “rich, fascinating stuff”, although he didn’t call it a particularly spiritual event. He said the future of commercial spaceflight depends on making the experience less complex: “We also have to remember there’s nothing inherent in the spacecraft that makes all these preparations [mandatory]. These are not laws of physics that require preparations. It’s just a stage in technology.”

Simonyi is asked if he’s interested in investing or otherwise getting involved in commercial space ventures after his trip. Simonyi says no: “I think on the supply side there are great entrepreneurs [such as Amazon.com Chief Executive] Jeff Bezos, who has much more experience in understanding of that side.” Instead, he said, “What I feel I ought to do, given that I had this privilege of having done it, is just to communicate what it’s like. If it generates demand, that’s great.”

And for those reports that Bill Gates will be following Simonyi into space? “That’s typical. The Russian press is notorious for their fabrications.”

The fifth commercial visitor to the ISS, Charles Simonyi, is safely back on Earth, landing in Kazakhstan a few hours shy of two weeks after his launch from Baikonur. “It’s good to be back, to be back on Earth,” he said after landing, according to SPACE.com. Earlier, when he was leaving the ISS with NASA astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, he called the departure a “bittersweet moment”: “We are very sad leaving the station but we are looking forward, all of us, to continuing our work on Earth.”

Simonyi will be the last commercial tourist to visit the ISS for some time: the seats on the next two Soyuz taxi flights, in fall 2007 and spring 2008, will be occupied by guest cosmonauts from Malaysia and South Korea, meaning the next tourist flight opportunity won’t come until the fall of 2008. Despite various rumors, there’s been no announcement about who would fly next, although Space Adventures has hinted it would make an announcement in the next several weeks.