Speaking of Armadillo’s John Carmack, in his team’s latest update, he provides his own unvarnished assessment of the various companies in the suborbital spaceflight sector. The Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic partnership “is the safest bet for success”, but cautions that Virgin may need the field to itself in order to make a profit on SpaceShipTwo: “If a more highly operable vehicle is competing, SS2 probably won’t ‘earn out’.”

Some other summarized assessments:

• Blue Origin: “It looks like they want to play in the orbital space, and perhaps don’t want to get bogged down competing in suborbital space. I think that is a mistake.”
• Rocketplane Global: “They have burned through tens of millions of dollars of funding, and nothing has ever left the ground. Would another ten or twenty million dollars do it? I doubt it very much.”
• SpaceDev: “I also think the hybrid powered VTHL DreamChaser is about the worst design for commercial suborbital flights. They aren’t going to build it on their own dime, and it looks like it would be a very expensive development project that would end up with quite high operating costs if it was ever completed.”
• XCOR: “I think they can probably do it” with Lynx.
• Astrium: “Oh, please.”

And his own assessment? “I still think there is a chance we might be first, depending on how Scaled chooses to play things.”

[Catching up on news items while waiting on a delayed flight]

An AP article last week reported that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and spaceport authority executive director Steve Landeene made the rounds in Washington looking for additional federal support for Spaceport America. They met with, among others, NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who said he could not formally endorse the spaceport but “was crystal clear in his support for commercial space facilities,” according to Richardson. The two also met with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, but not with FAA officials.

If the purpose of the trip was to win funding for the spaceport, the trip wasn’t an immediate success. Still, the trip won the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News which, in an editorial, congratulated the governor for his efforts in support of the spaceport. “Richardson is good at telling our story,” the paper argues. “His recent national attention as a presidential candidate probably helps him open more doors in Washington – except maybe Hillary Clinton’s Senate office.” The editorial also points out the trip comes just a couple of weeks before a spaceport tax referendum in Sierra County, similar to the one passed in Doña Ana County last year.

An article in Tuesday’s issue of the London (Ontario) Free Press reports that NASA Ames director Pete Worden believes that “Private flights to the moon may be available to non-scientists ‘by the end of the 2020s.’” Worden, speaking at the University of Western Ontario, played up the potential for private activity on the Moon, and even suggested that the private sector is “going to beat us to the lunar surface”, although the report doesn’t indicate if he meant that in the context of robotic or human expeditions.

If you’re going to be in Washington, DC next week, you may want to consider attending a brekafast with Anousheh Ansari, to be held Wednesday morning, March 26, at the Library of Congress. The event is organized by Women in Aerospace, with registration fees ranging from $50-85 (not exactly cheap, but you are getting breakfast out of it, and it goes to support a good cause.)

Disclosure: the author is treasurer of Women in Aerospace.

Indian television network NDTV posted a transcript of a recent interview with Richard Branson. (The transcript is very rough; perhaps it has gone through multiple translations, such as from English to Hindi back to English, given the odd language found in it.) In the interview, Branson appears to indicate that SpaceShipTwo will be rolled out at the end of the year, followed by ninth months of test flights before beginning customer flights. He also says, puzzlingly, “In July of this year, we will fly them over ship for the first time”—a reference to the first flights of White Knight Two?

As for those occasional reports that William Shatner was offered (or had accepted) a flight on SS2, Branson said, “He definitely made it clear that he was quite frightened to go into the space and I got a feeling that he will never actually go into the space.” Regarding the risks of human spaceflight, he added, “anybody going into the space will have to accept that there are more inherited risks in the space travel than the airline travel. But we hope that within three years or so, it will be no great a risk.”

Actor Dennis Quaid is starring in a new movie, but he is eyeing a much higher vantage point, according to one report. Quaid, a pilot, tells the World Entertainment News Network that “The ultimate would be to fly in space”. The $200,000 ticket price for Virgin Galactic is “almost getting to be reasonable”, he said, but wants something more than a simple suborbital hop at that price: “They should have at least two orbits with an in-flight meal and all that stuff.”

I didn’t receive the original email blast from Scaled Composites about the health of Burt Rutan, but, like no doubt many readers, wanted to pass along my best wishes for a speedy recovery to him after undergoing open heart surgery earlier this month. Rutan was suffering from something called “constrictive pericardium”, which meant he suffered from “extreme fatigue” for five months—so much so, he tells MSNBC, that his participation in the Virgin Galactic design unveiling in New York last month was “real dicey”. (I last saw Rutan in person six months ago when he spoke at the Univ. of Alabama; at that time he appeared healthy.)

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.

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”.