Today’s Las Cruces Sun-News reports that a formal agreement between Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America could be signed as soon as today. The agreement would finalize Virgin’s use of the spaceport once it’s completed (although there has been at least an informal understanding since late 2005, and signed an MOU for leasing the spaceport in 2007), and it’s one of three requirements for the state funding the spaceport won in 2006. (The other two are a final cost estimate below $225 million, which has been achieved, and a FAA spaceport license, which is in the final stages of being awarded.) Signing the agreement today or tomorrow would be good timing, since it could be tied into the ISPCS now underway in Las Cruces, although there’s nothing on the conference schedule for this right now.
Immediately after the ISPCS will be the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (NGLLC), run by the X Prize Foundation with prize money provided by NASA’s Centennial Challenges program. It was only in the last few weeks that the date and location for the competition was finalized. Original plans called for the event to take place at Holloman AFB, where the 2007 competition (part of the X Prize Cup and Holloman air show) took place; there would be no public event this year, only the competition. However, classified activities will close the base on the planned dates of the event, forcing the organizers to scramble for alternative sites. They ended up at Las Cruces International Airport (home of the 2005 and 2006 X Prize Cup events and the 2006 NGLLC), keeping the same dates of October 24-25.
As with the 2006 and 2007 competitions, Armadillo Aerospace will be present, trying for both the Level 1 and Level 2 competitions. However, it appears that they may have some competition this year, at least at Level 1: TrueZer0 (yes, spelled with the numeral “0″) is here in Las Cruces and, assuming they are able to get an experimental permit from the FAA, hope to be ready to compete. However, as the four-person team notes on their site, they’ve still yet to demonstrate their ability to perform most of the key requirements of the competition, whereas Armadillo has flown LLC Level 1 profiles since last year (although not yet completely successfully in the competition itself, unfortunately.)
Although the event has moved off the air force base, the event is still closed to the public, save for ISPCS attendees and other VIPs. The event will be webcast, though, and if past experience is any prediction, that will provide you with a better view than you’ll get in person.
The 2008 edition of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) will be taking place the next two days in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (I’m writing this from a hotel room in Las Cruces, and will be at the conference.) The conference started in 2005 as simply the ISPS; the “and Commercial” part of the title got added last year. The first day of the conference, though, is focused primarily on personal spaceflight: after a keynote by Gary Payton, Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force Space Systems, on operationally responsive space, there are panels on suborbital and orbital human spaceflight and the “power of prizes”, as well as a dinner speech by orbital space tourist Anousheh Ansari. The second day gets more into broader commercial issues, including the roles of universities and associations, but there are sessions planned on personal spaceflight “industry indicators”, astronaut training, and spaceports.
I’ll be providing some coverage as time permits during the day, including brief news items on my Twitter feed, with some wrapups after each day.
Test flights of Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, which had been delayed from September until late this year, may begin in November. Richard Branson commented on the status of WK2, as well as SpaceShipTwo itself, in an interview with Forbes.com this week:
How’s your spaceship, Virgin Galactic, coming?
The mothership is finished and will be flying next month. The spaceships themselves are being built. The first ship will start test flights in 12 months. Hopefully within 18 months to two years we’ll take up our astronauts.
What will a flight be like? Just up and down?
Our first flights will be about a three-hour flight from liftoff going into space. People will go up to 60,000 feet attached under the mothership. The spaceship will drop away. Passengers will then unbuckle their seatbelts and float around, look out the windows and check out the earth.
I spent the day Wednesday at Space Investment Summit 5 in Los Angeles. I’ll provide a more detailed report later, but the brief summary of the meeting is that there is still investment taking place in the entrepreneurial NewSpace field, although the current financial crisis has put a damper on some activity, particularly anything involving larger amounts of money where institutional investors are traditionally involved. The audience was smaller than some earlier versions of this event, and perhaps more subdued if still optimistic about the long-term potential of the industry.
One company I didn’t notice at the event was Rocketplane Global (or, if they were there, kept a very low profile.) It turns out on Wednesday that Dave Faulkner, the company’s chief technology officer and program manager, was briefing the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority on the company’s status, the Oklahoma newspaper The Journal Record reported Thursday. Faulkner’s comments, as reported by the paper, appeared to indicate that technical development of the XP vehicle has ground to a halt as the company tries to raise money:
“I’m not going to give a timeline [for the first flight of the XP] until we get funding,” Faulkner said. “There are so many unknowns. We’ll have to ramp a team back up.” Rocketplane has scaled way back to the point where the company is now dedicated solely to fundraising, recently letting go of a few more part-time workers.
Faulkner added that Rocketplane is in talks with two potential investors for “small amounts of cash” to tide the company over until the market rebounds. He didn’t say how much the company was looking to raise, but said that the $18 million the company got from the state in 2004 in the form of transferable tax credits (which Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer has described in the past as “winning the ‘O Prize’”) covers only about 10 percent of the XP’s development cost. George French has put a significant amount of his own money into the company, but that suggests that there is still a large chunk of money that Rocketplane needs to raise to be able to complete the XP’s development—no easy task in today’s economic climate.
In an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, I look at the status of the Rocket Racing League (RRL), which was formally introduced to the public three years ago this month. The RRL took a big step forward about two and a half months ago, with its first public flights of the X-Racer vehicle at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh. Since then, though, there have been some interesting—perhaps even odd—developments, namely the RRL’s decision to go solely with the alternative engine developed by Armadillo Aerospace, and tested in late August and early September. RRL co-founder Granger Whitelaw said that XCOR’s engine, which by all accounts performed well at Oshkosh and in previous tests, did not meet the RRL’s “standards of safety, reliability, reusability, and performance”, according to one press account. That’s puzzled many observers, given XCOR’s good reputation as a developer of a number of safe and successful rocket engines.
RRL did not respond to my inquiries last week, but on Tuesday they did announce that they have won FAA approval to perform X-Racer flights at a number of airports in the US. The league plans to select eight venues of the 20 approved by the FAA for exhibition flights in 2009, to be followed by competitive racing in 2010. The venues include several airshows, including EAA AirVenture and the Reno Air Races, and other airports scattered around the country, including Mojave, Las Cruces, and Moffett Field near NASA Ames in the Bay Area.
One of those eight appears likely to be Oshkosh, Whitelaw tells MSNBC. Production of the racers—which use an airframe from Velocity Aircraft, now owned by the RRL, and an Armadillo engine—will ramp up early next year, with two to four planes ready by Oshkosh. Whitelaw also said that the RRL is looking into “vertical drag racers” (which, as it sounds, would be rockets taking off straight up for a short sprint to a predefined altitude) for next year as well, a concept that’s been promoted by Armadillo’s John Carmack for a few years.
The most intriguing part of the MSNBC story, though, is at the end, where Whitelaw hints that his partnership with Armadillo might extend beyond developing engines for the RRL. Whitelaw said plans for an RRL demo at next week’s International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) were cancelled because “we need to focus on winning the Lunar Lander Challenge.” [Emphasis added.] When asked if the RRL was in talks to purchase Armadillo, Whitelaw only provided a “no comment”. While the RRL might be interested in acquiring Armadillo to be vertically integrated (just as it acquired Velocity), it’s not obvious what Armadillo would gain from such a deal.
Richard Garriott is now the sixth commercial passenger to fly into orbit on a Soyuz taxi flight to the ISS. The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft lifted off on schedule at 3:01 am EDT (0701 GMT) and entered orbit nine minutes later. The flight is a realization of a long-term dream of Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who grew up in Houston immersed in spaceflight but unable to directly follow in his father’s footsteps and join the NASA astronaut corps because of his eyesight. Along the way, Richard Garriott has invested in a number of commercial space companies, including Space Adventures, the company that provided him with his flight to space today.
Garriott had this to say in a Space Adventures press release issued this morning after the launch:
“Today, my dream of following in my father’s footsteps to explore new frontiers is being realized,” said Richard Garriott. “Throughout my life, my sense of adventure has taken me to the ends of the Earth to embark on journeys few people have encountered. It’s with honor and appreciation that I launch on my greatest adventure yet, and step into a role assumed by only five private individuals before me.” Garriott continued, “I’ve dedicated this flight to not only scientific and environmental research, but also educational outreach. I’m thrilled to be able to excite students throughout the world and demonstrate how far our dreams can take us.”
There were a number of people who traveled to Baikonur to see Garriott’s launch, including, as Reuters reported, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who himself is planning to fly into space, perhaps on a dedicated commercial Soyuz flight to the station in 2011. Charles Simonyi, who preceded Garriott in the spring of 2007 and will follow him in a return trip to the station next year, was also in attendance.
It has been impossible in recent days to avoid the news about the current financial crisis gripping markets in the US and around the world, from bank failures to government bailouts to stock market plunges. Some have called this the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression or even “the end of American capitalism”. That may just be hyperbole—a near-term overreaction to the crisis—but it is clear that the economic situation is going to be rough for at least the next several months, if not longer.
So what does this mean for NewSpace? With credit tightening and portfolios taking a beating, it seems unlikely that personal spaceflight and other entrepreneurial space sectors will be able to completely escape the current financial turmoil. A quick examination suggests that companies are going to feel it in two ways, involving a somewhat overlapping group of people.
Investors: Earlier this week one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms, Sequoia, sounded the alarm about the current situation in a meeting with the CEOs of its portfolio companies. Sequoia’s message: if you’re not cash-flow positive, you need to get there as soon as possible if you want to have any hope of raising additional funding for the foreseeable future. Getting there may require some drastic cutbacks, but acting now, and quickly, is better than delaying and finding themselves in a “death spiral” where no cutbacks can save the company.
Given that NewSpace companies have, to date, had very limited luck in raising rounds of funding from VCs, this suggests that raising money will be all the more difficult in the near future, especially for those companies developing vehicles or other hardware that require years of work before reaching positive cash flow. Getting money from angel investors, more frequently used by NewSpace companies, may also be more difficult, as these investors, like so many others, have suffered big losses in their investment portfolios in the last several weeks. This could even affect so-called “mega-angels” who put very large sums into ventures, including their own. According to Forbes magazine, Jeff Bezos lost over $1 billion in September as stock market declines devalued his holdings. It’s too soon to say whether this will affect Bezos’s investment in his Blue Origin suborbital vehicle venture, but you could sure do a lot in space with $1.1 billion…
Customers: During Monday’s press conference by Space Adventures to discuss Charles Simonyi’s return trip to the ISS next year, the first question posed to him, from the New York Times, went like this: “Are you the last guy in America with money? Has anything happened in the past, say, two weeks to your assets that makes you think you might want to hold on to cash?” Simonyi responded that “the timing worked out the way it worked out” and that “either we do it now or we don’t do it”.
While Simonyi may still be forging ahead, it’s possible others considering purchasing tickets, a group that includes some angel investors, may have second thoughts now, especially if they’ve lost a significant fraction of their wealth in the stock market’s recent fall. In a healthy economy, spending $200,000 on a suborbital spaceflight might seem like money well spent to realize a dream of going into space; in today’s uncertain economy, the same trip might seem like an unnecessary extravagance. That mindset could be damaging for some space tourism ventures, especially if the downtown lasts for an extended period or if the recovery is slow.
This situation is certainly not catastrophic for NewSpace in general, particularly for those firms that are well-funded, have good balance sheets, and/or can diversify beyond personal spaceflight: think SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and perhaps a few others. However, for other companies, especially those who need to raise significant funds to develop vehicles that will be years away from entering revenue service, it’s going to be much more difficult to make those plans become reality in the near future.
SpaceDev announced today that its founder, Jim Benson, passed away this morning. Benson had been in ill health since last year, having been diagnosed with a brain tumor that was the cause of his death. That illness led to the dissolution of Benson Space Company, a space tourism venture that Benson founded in 2006 to develop suborbital vehicles, by early this year.
Benson, though, is best known in the space industry as the founder of SpaceDev in 1997. Benson was originally interested in developing a private mission to a near Earth asteroid (called Near Earth Asteroid Prospector, or NEAP). Over time, though, the company moved from that focus to developing smallsats, launch vehicles, and hybrid propulsion systems. That latter work led to the deal with Scaled Composites to manufacture the rocket motors used by SpaceShipOne in its successful bid to win the $10-million Ansari X Prize.
Along the way, though, it’s safe to say that Benson rubbed a few people the wrong way. In public settings, he was a shameless self-promoter and often blunt spoken, traits unlikely to win you Mr. Congeniality in any field. His best-known dispute was with Burt Rutan after the X Prize was won, a dispute so heated that it warranted a front page story in the Wall Street Journal in early 2007. It’s ironic, then, that two months ago a post-Benson SpaceDev signed a deal with Scaled to work on the rocket motors for SpaceShipTwo.
While Benson may no longer be with us, the company he created, SpaceDev, continues to make progress on some of the same goals of commercializing space that Benson had when he created the company. Earlier this week SpaceDev announced it had achieved another milestone in its unfunded COTS Space Act agreement with NASA regarding its Dream Chaser vehicle that, launched atop an Atlas 5, could carry cargo or crew to the ISS.
In a cabinet reshuffle last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown selected Paul Drayson as its new science minister. Drayson, as I noted over on Space Politics, is a strong supporter of human spaceflight, and is clearly in favor of overturning a long-running ban on funding human spaceflight programs in the UK. In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, he discusses that as well as commercial space ventures. “We’re seeing the beginnings of the commercialization of space from the point of view of people like Virgin Galactic and others, exploiting the fact that people are so excited about space they’re prepared to pay to go,” he said.
Drayson, the BBC noted, fits the profile of a potential space tourist himself: he’s a race car driver and a successful businessman with an estimated net worth well over $100 million. Would he go himself?
BBC: Are you going to purchase a Branson ticket?
[laughter]
Drayson: Ah, I haven’t done [that], but I do think it’s a really exciting time.
BBC: You fit his customer profile.
Drayson: I do, do I.