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”.

Rocketplane Global vice president and chief test pilot John Herrington has left the company, according to an Associated Press report, which refers to a press release issued by the Chickasaw Nation, of which Herrington is a member. Herrington left the company on December 21, although his departure was announced only this week. Herrington gave no reason for leaving the company, saying only that his decision “was a difficult one”. The company also didn’t respond to a request for comments from the AP, although Herrington is no longer listed on the Rocketplane Global web site.

Herrington didn’t go into specifics about future plans, but he did say that he wants to remain involved in the commercial space industry because “commercial space is the next great adventure in aerospace.”

Update 1/4: Herrington tells the Oklahoma newspaper The Journal Record that while he was impressed with Rocketplane’s technology, the difficulty the company has had raising money was “most frustrating point for me.” Leaving the company, he said, allows him to pursue “some really great opportunities that have come up for me in the near future,” although he didn’t specify what those are.

A few odds and ends from the last week of 2007:

• The Washington Times reported on Richard Garriott’s planned flight to the ISS in 2008 in an article published on Christmas Day. In addition to Garriott’s plans to perform commercial experiments on his flight, the article notes that “companies are invited to develop advertising campaigns or commercials that Mr. Garriott could shoot in space.”
• The British newspaper The Guardian reexamines Virgin Galactic’s plans to perform suborbital spaceflights from Kiruna, Sweden, allowing passengers to fly through the aurora borealis. There’s not much news here, other than that a sounding rocket flight is planned for November with cameras on it “to find out what being inside the aurora actually looks like”; it apparently never occurred to scientists to do this before.
• In Monday’s The Telegraph, also from the UK, Jim White feels a blast of nostalgia for the heady days of the 1960s space race thanks to Virgin Galactic (with an assist to Wallace and Gromit). Virgin’s planned suborbital flights will be expensive, but “for many of us of a certain vintage it might well represent the finest value for money: I’m getting all excited about the possibility just writing about it.”

Apologies for the short notice, but Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and his latest client for a Soyuz flight to the ISS, Richard Garriott, will be on WAMU-FM in Washington DC at 12 noon today on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, talking about space tourism. If you’re not in Washington and/or can’t listen at noon, archives of the show should be available on the web site later today.

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.

The newspaper Irish Independent has a profile of businessman Tom Higgins, best known for making millions with a psychic hotline. At the end of the piece Higgins discusses his other major claim to fame: being one of the first two Irishmen to sign up for a suborbital spaceflight for space tourism. It looks like, though, he needs his staff to clean their crystal balls or reshuffle their Tarot cards: “Next year will probably (he can’t say for certain — even the psychics aren’t sure) see Higgins in space.” In fact, next year is very unlikely, unless Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites have made far more progress on SpaceShipTwo than they have let on in public.

Higgins is vying with Bill Cullen to be first. “According to Higgins, he had his name down first and has paid, but Cullen is mates with Richard Branson, who owns Virgin Galactic, which is sending the spaceship into space,” the article notes. “Higgins, ever with an eye to publicity, wanted there to be a space quiz on the Late Late Show to decide the owner of the seat on the first space ride but Cullen apparently would not agree to this and now a draw is supposed to take place.” Shouldn’t those psychics be able to tell Higgins if he’ll go first?

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.