The Las Cruces City Council decided earlier this week to draft a resolution that calls for a voter referendum next spring on a tax that would help pay for the development of Spaceport America, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. The resolution, which would have to be approved by the council in January, would call for a special election in early April for a quarter-cent sales tax, the proceeds for which would go to helping pay for the spaceport. Doña Ana County, where Las Cruces is located, is also planning a similar resolution, and two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, are expected to follow suit. The taxes would cover the local contribution to the costs of the spaceport, in addition to funds approved by the state legislature earlier this year and possible federal funding.

The article indicated that while there is support in general for the spaceport, the tax could face some opposition from residents who want more information about the spaceport before voting for a tax increase. One person attending the city council meeting noted that an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the spaceport has yet to be released, as well as additional technical and financial details about the spaceport. A Doña Ana county commissioner said that passage of the tax in Las Cruces and the rest of the county is crucial to getting similar tax resolutions passed in the other two counties, and to the spaceport in general. “If we don’t do this, the outlook for the spaceport is extremely grim.”

In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman addresses the potential threat to the emerging space tourism industry in the US posed by Rep. James Oberstar. The Minnesota Democrat is poised to become the chairman of the House Transportation Committee in January when the 110th Congress convenes. Oberstar led an effort two years ago to try and get more stringent passenger safety requirements included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, requirements many in the industry thought could kill the industry before it could get started. Oberstar submitted similar legislation early last year, but the legislation was referred to the House Science Committee, where it never saw the light of day. Some fear that with the power of a committee chairmanship, Oberstar would have the power to give his proposed legislation a better chance at passage.

The saving grace may be in Dinerman’s last sentence: “One hopes that the new Congress will have enough to do so that it just leaves space tourism alone, at least for the next five years or so.” Oberstar’s own committee has a broad purview, and commercial space transportation would presumably have a low priority compared to aviation, highways, and the like. We will find out soon enough just how important this issue is to both Rep. Oberstar and supporters of the existing regulatory system in Congress.

[Note: this entry is also posted on Space Politics.]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report yesterday titled “Commercial Space Launches: FAA Needs Continued Planning and Monitoring to Oversee the Safety of the Emerging Space Tourism Industry”. The report is a review of how the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) oversees the safety of commercial launches, and how the office is prepared to handle any significant increase in such activity should suborbital space tourism take off in the next few years. Overall, the GAO approves of AST’s current work and its plans for the future. The report does raise a few issues, including the office’s ability to hire additional qualified staff for safety oversight should launch activities increase, as well as the concerns about the dual promotional/regulatory nature of the office.

There’s a bit of a background to this report. The report was requested by Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar was one of the members of the House who opposed HR 5382 (the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act) two years ago, railing against what he saw as a “tombstone mentality” enshrined in the bill, which prevents AST from regulating crew and passenger before 2012 unless there’s been an accident or serious incident before then. Despite the bill’s passage at the end of the 108th Congress, Oberstar continued his opposition, first in a February 2005 hearing of the House Transportation Committee’s aviation subcommittee and, at around the same time, introducing HR 656, which would rewrite the CSLAA to include additional safety provisions. The legislation was referring to the House Science Committee, which never took action on it; it doesn’t seem as thought this GAO report would do much to revive the bill.

[Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: Yes, my employer does work for FAA/AST. No, we're not involved with licensing. Yes, Futron reports were referenced in the GAO report. No, I was not involved in the GAO study in any way, although I had heard about it months ago.]

It’s been a commonly-held belief that people who pay to fly as tourists on Russian Soyuz missions to the ISS are helping the cash-strapped Russian space program. While Roskosmos may no longer be as desperate for money as it once was, it’s not clear exactly where those monies have gone. Reuters reports that Russian officials are questioning exactly how the funding provided by space tourists have been spent. The article reports that senior Finance Ministry official Sergei Pavlenko was “astonished” to find that Roskosmos “did not properly account for the money it made on space tourism”. Will this lead to any kind of backlash against allowing paying passengers on future Soyuz flights?

Alan Boyle of MSNBC reports that the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has awarded an experimental permit to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ secretive suborbital launch venture. The one-year permit allows Blue Origin to begin powered test flights from its facility in West Texas, over 30 kilometers north of the town of Van Horn. As Boyle notes, there was little doubt that Blue Origin would get the permit, since there were virtually no environmental concerns and no local opposition. Blue Origin got the permit even though AST is still working through the rulemaking process for awarding such permits; the office was only granted the authority for such permits at the end of 2004 with the passage of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.

ABC News (that’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation, mate) posted an article earlier this week about the “legal mire” that space tourism is facing. The biggest issue the article discusses is the lack of an official demarcation of space: how high to you have to be to be in space? Says Steven Freeland of the University of Western Sydney: “If we look at space tourism … [people] are going to want a certificate that says ‘I’ve been in space’, not ‘hey you’ve been very high up in the air’.” The most common altitude is 100 km (also known as the von Karman line); that’s the altitude used for the Ansari X Prize competition as well as the official boundary of space in Australian law.

That and other issues (like the definition of “astronaut”) suggest to Freeland that current space law is antiquated and in need of an overhaul to reflect the realities of space tourism, as opposed to the government-run space programs of the 1960s. “You have to have legal certainty [about] what law applies, whether it’s international air law or international law of outer space or a combination of both.”

In an interview in this week’s issue of The Space Review, former House Speaker (and potential 2008 presidential candidate talks about a variety of space issues, including space tourism. It sounds like he’d be willing to buy a suborbital ticket, although it’s not clear how much he’d be willing to pay:

TSR: Beyond participating in the VSE, what do you think of the current attempts to establish private space ventures? Do you worry that if the first suborbital flight carrying paying passengers ends tragically, the private push into space could be stopped dead in its tracks, even if the technology is in fact ready for such commercial use? Would you take such a flight?

Gingrich: I would gladly take a suborbital flight. We should seek to establish standards comparable to hang gliding or mountain climbing and allow adults to take recognized risks.

In the same interview, he advocates tax credits “for developing commercial flights into near space for space tourism”. Tax credits for space transportation in general has been proposed in recent years, but according to Rep. Ken Calvert, who has introduced such legislation in the past, tax credits in general are tough to sell to members of the Ways and Means Committee.

The Bakersfield Californian [free registration required] reports today that the appropriations committee of the California Senate tabled a bill that would provide Mojave Airport with an $11-million loan that would be used to provide spaceport facilities there. It appears that the committee didn’t single out the bill: according to the article the legislation was tabled “along with nearly all other bills that have significant price tags.” The committee will reconsider the bill next month when they have a better handle on the overall budget. In the meantime, spaceport supporters are planning to ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to put the money into a revised budget proposal he will send to the legislature later in the month.

[Cross-posted from Space Politics]

As before, here’s a brief summary of some highlights of the Space Access ’06 sessions on Saturday relevant to space tourism:

You might remember the February 2005 announcement of the Personal Spaceflight Federation, a new industry group created to support the emerging space tourism industry. However, after that initial announcement, there was no other visible activity regarding the organization. Mike Kelly said at the conference Saturday that the federation is in the process of being relaunched. It will take on several issues, such as the development of voluntary industry standards (as noted in the February 2005 announcement) as well as other regulatory issues (FAA rulemaking, ITAR, etc.) and the public’s perception of the industry. He said that there are about a dozen companies involved with the federation, which will include vehicle developers and operators, spaceport operators, and orbital destination developers, but Kelly wouldn’t disclose which companies are involved; a formal announcement is planned for some point in the near future.

John Gedmark of the X Prize Foundation talked about the upcoming X Prize Cup 2006 in October in Las Cruces, NM. The event will feature NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge for developers of vehicles that can vertically take off, hover, translate, and land. (See yesterday’s post about Armadillo’s plans for the competition.) The exact rules and even prize amounts are in flux, and Gedmark would only say that a final announcement would be made about the competition “soon”. The XP Cup will also be the home of the Reusable Rocket challenge, for launching, recovering, and reusing sounding rockets or VTVL vehicles. Rules for that competition are still under development.

Speaking of prizes, Brant Sponberg of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program talked about several other prizes either in progress or under development. One of particular interest for the personal spaceflight community is a low-cost space pressure suit. The notional prize amount for this is $1 million, and the rules are still under development. NASA is also still studying a potential human orbital spaceflight competition, with prizes (first and second) totaling $100-150 million. In addition, Sponberg noted that NASA is looking into the possibility of purchasing suborbital spaceflight services from the commercial sector in order to fly microgravity payloads. One issue is that the microgravity environment of the coming generation of suborbital vehicles has not been quantified; Sponberg said NASA would first fly accelerometers on these vehicles (under Space Act agreements with the companies) to measure the quality of the microgravity, and then see what scientific interest there might be in flying payloads on those vehicles.

A couple of small companies discussed their COTS proposals that look to the space tourism market in addition to flying cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Len Cormier discussed his “Space Van 2010″ proposal, a two stage to orbit vehicle, with staging taking place at an altitude of 81.5 km and a speed of Mach 5.5. (An illustration of Space Van 2010, but no other technical details, is on his web site.) Space Van 2010 would be able to carry four or five passengers. George Herbert of Venturer Aerospace discussed his S-550 capsule proposal, which would launch atop a Falcon 9 to carry up to six people or several tons of cargo to the ISS. The main capsule would be reusable several times; only an external aeroshell would need to be replaced after each flight. Herbert estimated that a S-550 flight would be priced at $15-20 million plus the cost of the launch vehicle.

One of the livelier panels of the conference was a Saturday morning session on investing, featuring Joe Pistritto, Stephen Fleming, and Esther Dyson, all three of whom have made investments in companies in this field. One of the big issues about the so-called NewSpace industry is the difficulty lining up financing, particularly among institutional investors. Dyson in particular gave attendees a dose of tough love by noting how difficult it is for investors to figure out this emerging industry. “There’s an awful lot lacking here in terms of the space industry becoming a real industry,” she said, adding that if she was an investor with “real money” (i.e., a VC), and not an angel investor, “I would run fleeing from the room, because I can’t figure out how this industry works, who sells to whom, how the market works. It’s still not very visible.” However, she said later in response to a question about the difficulty of making investors aware of the industry, “I don’t think there’s a problem. I think we’re early. A two-year-old behaving like a two-year-old is not a problem. A five-year-old behaving like a two-year-old is a problem. We’re still very early in the cycle.”

In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman contrasted the commercial spaceport situations in New Mexico and California: while New Mexico was investing over $100 million into a new spaceport, attracting Virgin Galactic and the X Prize Cup, California has done little to promote Mojave Airport, an FAA-licensed spaceport that was the site of the SpaceShipOne flights in 2004. As Alan Boyle reports in MSNBC’s Cosmic Log weblog, things aren’t getting better for Mojave: an effort to secure an $11-million loan for a passenger terminal there failed to win enough votes in a California State Senate transportation committee hearing to advance to the full Senate. The facilities are needed, according to Mojave Airport officials, so that they can expand the number of flights from the spaceport to as many as 600 flights a year by the end of this decade.

The measure, SB 1671, apparently suffered from a report filed by Jennifer Gress, a consultant to the Senate’s Transportation and Housing committee. One concern expressed in the report is whether the East Kern Airport District, which operates Mojave Airport, “has fully explored alternatives to a state General Fund-backed loan.” The report also expressed concern that the funds would be used to support Virgin Galactic, “a company whose owner has a net worth in the billions.” (”Millions for a billionaire”, as the report pithily summarizes.) Stu Witt, Mojave Airport manager, told MSNBC that the bill isn’t dead yet: another committee vote is scheduled for next week.

Update 12:30 pm Wednesday: It turns out the reports of the bill’s near demise were exaggerated: Alan Boyle, in an updated version of his blog entry, reports that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Roy Ashburn, rounded up four additional votes for the bill a few hours after the hearing, giving it one more than the seven needed to be reported out of committee. So there’s still some hope yet for funding for Mojave.