New Mexico and Virginia have been among the leading states in supporting entrepreneurial space efforts. New Mexico committed $200 million to develop Spaceport America and lure Virgin Galactic to their state; Virginia has supported the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), bringing Orbital Sciences’ Taurus 2 rocket there as well as passing laws to support space activities in the state. The two states, though, are continuing their efforts to support the industry, although in different directions.
In Virginia, new governor Bob McDonnell expressed his support for funding for MARS in a speech to state legislators Monday. “Governor Kaine committed to invest $1.3 million in the Virginia Spaceport,” McDonnell said, referring to his predecessor, Tim Kaine. “We can make Wallops Island the top commercial Spaceport in America, and I ask you to keep that money in place so that we can aggressively recruit aerospace companies and promote space tourism initiatives.”
A day later, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a staunch advocate of Spaceport America, mentioned the spaceport in his speech. “I’m pleased to report that Spaceport America is ahead of schedule and under budget,” he said in his “State of the State” address. “For those who doubt if the Spaceport will bring in business, you should know that Virgin Galactic has over forty two million dollars deposited for more than three hundred reservations.”
Richardson also called on legislators to “pass legislation allowing participants to assume the risks of spaceflight.” That’s a reference to the “Space Flight Informed Consent Act”, legislation introduced into the state Senate this year that would indemnify vehicle operators from claims of liability provided that spaceflight participants sign a waiver (with the exception of cases of “gross negligence”). Richardson noted the legislation is needed for New Mexico to stay competitive with Virginia, which was the first state to pass indemnification legislation, in 2007, as well as Florida and Texas, which also passed related bills since then.
As we noted here last week, Florida’s Cecil Field has its spaceport license but is still in search of customers, thanks to the limited number of companies whose vehicles are qualified to use it and the current state of the industry. Cecil Field will have to compete against a number of other current and planned spaceports to attract vehicle operators, like Mojave Air and Space Port in California and Spaceport America in New Mexico.
And yet more spaceports are in the planning and development stages. The Cecil Field announcement came along with word that two other sites in Florida, Kennedy Space Center and the little-known Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, a site in the Everglades with a single runway 3,200 meters long, are being considered by the state for spaceport status. Also last week, Indiana announced plans for its own spaceports, seeking to designate two airports as “primary” and “secondary” spaceports. HB 1227, introduced in the state’s House of Representatives, would also provide tax breaks for “space transportation technology” (and a tax deduction for the “loss of a space vehicle”) and require the state’s Department of Transportation to “develop policies and programs to encourage research and development enabling the ingress and egress into low earth orbit and near space from Indiana spaceports.”
People in Florida and Indiana—and other places contemplating spaceports—would do well to learn the lesson of Oklahoma, which a decade ago sought to lure companies to an abandoned air force base in the western part of the state. Rocketplane came to the state to take advantage of tax credits the state offered, and planned to fly from Oklahoma Spaceport, the former Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in Burns Flat. However, Rocketplane has since run into financial problems, and in an article in Sunday’s The Oklahoman, Bill Khourie, executive director of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority (OSIDA), seemed to suggest they were gone for good. “It’s basically old news,” he said in a video accompanying the article. “Rocketplane’s not around any longer.”
The state, while hoping to attract Armadillo Aerospace or XCOR Aerospace to the spaceport, is looking at more down-to-earth options for use of the spaceport. That includes aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul work as well as trying to get cargo companies like FedEx and UPS to make use of the airport. The article hints, though, that the facility’s future as a spaceport might be in jeopardy. OSIDA got just under half a million dollars in the state’s latest budget, but next year’s funding could come under scrutiny as Oklahoma, like many other states, grapple with fiscal problems. “I sure don’t think it will ever be a spaceport,” Rep. David Dank, a critic of the spaceport and the tax credits given to Rocketplane, told the paper.
In the Indianapolis TV station account of the plans to establish spaceports in Indiana, Brian Tanner, director of Space Port Indiana, a company planning to establish spaceflight operations from the state, claims that “it’s a near certainty that Indiana will become a hub for space research”. A decade ago, they were probably saying the same thing in Oklahoma.
Last week the British consultancy Fast Future released a government-commission report titled “The shape of jobs to come”. The purpose of the report was to identify potential new careers enabled by advances in science and technology. The report featured 20 such future careers (summarized in a separate fact sheet), ranging from “memory augmentation surgeon” to “weather modification police”. Included in that list is “space pilots, tour guides, and architects”:
With companies already promising space tourism, we will need space pilots and tour guides, as well as architects to design where they will live and work. Current projects at SICSA (University of Houston) include a greenhouse on Mars, lunar outposts and space exploration vehicles.
“Space pilot” is pretty easy to understand, as is “space architect”, even if that might seem a little too forward leaning. But what exactly would a “space tour guide” do? Here’s how the report explains it:
Space tour guides will draw on cosmology, astronomy, space science, geography, history and geology to help passengers get the most out of their journey. While the factual side of the tour is important, space guides also need to be excellent storytellers and imaginers to help inspire their charges and encourage them to experience the true awe of space travel. Regular tour guides will need to undergo a similar level of physical and mental preparation and testing as pilots before each trip.
That seems a little much, at least for suborbital flights when customers will only be spending minutes in space and weightlessness. However, there may be the need for the equivalent of flight attendants to guide customers, particularly on flights where people are able to float around the cabin during weightless portion of their flights. (Interestingly, the animations of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo flight experiment don’t include this, although ZERO-G does have flight attendants for their parabolic airplane flights.) Once there are regular orbital tourist flights and facilities to host customers in orbit, then we may see the need for such guides, although as much for safety reasons as for enhancing the tourist experience.
One other interesting aspect of the study is that the job category is the space jobs category is relatively interesting to the public. Asked to name their three most popular job categories in a poll, 19% of UK respondents and 24% of Europeans picked the category, good enough for fifth-highest among Europeans. The job category also ranked in the top five among both Britons and Europeans in terms of having the greatest impact on innovation and economic growth, as well as being the best paid (presumably the former justifying the latter). Finally, the category ranked first among “most aspirational” jobs; the report didn’t explicitly define what it meant to be “aspirational”.
An initial group of a dozen prospective scientist-astronauts will begin a two-day training program today at the NASTAR Center just outside Philadelphia in preparation for future flights on commercial suborbital vehicles. The training will include both classroom instruction and “altitude chamber training, multi-axes centrifuge training for launch and reentry accelerations, and several distraction factor exercises”, all designed to prepare people for the experience of suborbital spaceflight. As noted here previously, there’s growing interest in using suborbital vehicles being developed to service the space tourism market for scientific applications as well, something that will be the focus of a conference next month in Colorado.
Among those at the NASTAR Center for the training program are former CNN space reporter Miles O’Brien and SpaceRef’s Keith Cowing, who will covering the event at OnOrbit, including live streaming video during the training sessions. They also advise checking out the the blog of one of the attendees, Joe Hill, who writes that she is “desperately excited about this opportunity but more than a little afraid” that she might not be able to handle the G-forces or other factors that will be tested in the training. There’s also the Twitter tag #suborbital to follow, although there’s not much there now.
Also, attendees will get to sport a new “Suborbital Scientist” patch that NASTAR announced yesterday, the result of a student competition won by an MIT grad student.
After years of effort, Florida’s Cecil Field got some good news Monday: they got their commercial spaceport license from the FAA. The former naval air station outside Jacksonville, currently used primarily for cargo and general aviation, will now be able to host horizontal launches of reusable launch vehicles for suborbital space tourism and potentially orbital launches as well.
There’s just one problem: it’s not clear if anyone will use Cecil Field as a spaceport any time soon. The license covers only horizontally-launched vehicles, so vertically-launched suborbital RLVs, like those proposed by Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, and Masten Space Systems, would not be able to use Cecil. Also, the license apparently covers only some classes of horizontal vehicles, as a section of the final environmental assessment (EA) for Cecil’s spaceport license states:
Under the Proposed Action, JAA would offer the launch site to launch operators for two types of horizontal, piloted RLVs, referred to as Concept X and Concept Z launch vehicles. The Concept X vehicle contains two turbojet engines and two rocket engines powered by Jet-A fuel and liquid oxygen (LOX). The Concept Z vehicle consists of two components – a carrier aircraft mated with a suborbital launch vehicle. The carrier vehicle would have turbo jet engines while the launch vehicle would use a hybrid rocket engine powered by nitrous oxide and hydroxylterminated polybutadiene.
The Concept X vehicle sounds like Rocketplane Global’s XP vehicle (although the XP has one rocket engine, not two) while the Concept Z vehicle is clearly SpaceShipTwo. What’s not included here is a vehicle that takes off horizontally under rocket power, like XCOR’s Lynx.
The problem for Cecil is that Rocketplane Global is currently in stasis, with no guarantee that it will resume development of its vehicle (which would fly from Cecil 48 times a year, according to the EA). Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic is committed to Spaceport America, and Cecil Field hasn’t been included among the other sites the company has publicly stated it’s interested in, such as Sweden and the UAE. Moreover, the EA only anticipated four flights a year of the Concept Z vehicle.
Todd Linder, of the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, tells Reuters that his agency is working with “several potential customers”, but declined to identify them. “The big difference between Cecil Field and the New Mexico spaceport is that we have facilities already in place,” he said. That’s true, but arguably the bigger difference is that Spaceport America has a tenant signed up, and Cecil Field doesn’t. Infrastructure is necessary, but as facilities like Oklahoma Spaceport can attest, they’re alone not sufficient.
One final note: in a blog post announcing the license, Space Florida president Frank DiBello noted that Cecil Field isn’t the only facility that the state is contemplating developing for supporting suborbital spaceflight. “This capability – in addition to similar potential sites currently being researched at Kennedy Space Center and in Southern Florida – is critical to providing our state with the competitive edge it needs to be a key player in the U.S. space tourism industry,” he writes. KSC has the Shuttle Landing Facility, a runway that will soon no longer be needed for its primary mission of supporting shuttle landings. The southern Florida reference is less clear, as no specific proposal for a facility there has been announced.
In The Space Review last month I noted an emerging market for commercial suborbital vehicles: research and education. There’s growing interest among scientists in a variety of disciplines to take advantage of vehicles under development to serve the space tourism market to fly experiments at a fraction of the cost of sounding rockets and other options. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, created an advisory team, the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), to help promote the potential uses of suborbital vehicles to the research community.
A key part of this outreach effort is the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC), which will take place February 18-20 in Boulder, Colorado. The early registration deadline for the conference is in just a week, January 15, as the conference organizers state in the announcement below:
NSRC Pre-Registration Deadline: 15 January
Pre-Register for NSRC Before Jan 15 to Guarantee Your Seat: The early registration deadline for the Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (Boulder, Colorado; 18-20 February) is right around the corner next week—on January 15th.
We are encouraging those interested in attending to register early because attendance will be limited by the meeting facility size; early registration is also less expensive than full registration.
About NSRC: The Next-Gen Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) will bring together researchers from government, industry, and academia, NASA and FAA officials, and firms building next-gen suborbital vehicles. NSRC will provide a forum to learn about the experiment and EPO capabilities of these new suborbital systems and their revolutionary capabilities. NSRC will also provide an opportunity for attendees to make inputs on vehicle design requirements for science and education.
In this week’s issue of The Space Review I reviewed By Any Means Necessary!, a book by Greg Olsen in large part about his trip to the ISS as a private citizen in 2005. The book is broadly an autobiography, from his childhood to his post-flight activities, but it is largely centered around his efforts to get into space.
One interesting thing about the book is that it is published not by a conventional publisher but by Olsen’s own company, GHO Ventures, which he set up several years ago to manage his investments. That may make it a little difficult to find in brick-and-mortar bookstores; it’s also not available on the web sites of Barnes and Noble and Borders, but is available on Amazon.com. Interestingly, the copy I ordered from Amazon stated at the back that it was printed in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 19th—three days after I ordered it. The quality of the book, though, is quite good, indistinguishable from books released by large publishers.
An issue that came up in the comments of the review was Olsen’s hopes that his flight would, in effect, pay for itself through research he would perform on the mission. He doesn’t go into great detail about this in the book, but does discuss his (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to get an export license for an infrared camera his company, Sensors Unlimited, had developed that he wanted to take to the station. (He needed the license since he was training in Russia and launching from Kazakhstan.) He also wanted to perform some gallium arsenide crystal growth experiments using the “glovebox” on the station, but the glovebox “became unavailable”, he writes in the book. (Chris Faranetta, in the review’s comments, states that the glovebox furnace was broken and would not be repaired “due to concerns over the crew handling materials that contained arsenic”; there were also concerns about getting export approvals for the materials that Olsen wanted to fly.)
As I note in the review, Olsen is the first space tourist to write a book about his flight to space, but he won’t be the only one for long. Anousheh Ansari is working on My Dream of Stars with co-author Homer Hickham, of Rocket Boys fame. That book is being published by Palgrave Macmillan with a release date of March 2.
The efforts of the emerging NewSpace field to reshape the space industry have attracted the attention of a leading trade publication, Aviation Week & Space Technology, which named “The Space Entrepreneur” as its 2009 PErson of the Year in this week’s issue. “Collectively, they are in the vanguard of a new industry, poised to transform how humans venture into space in ways that most observers can scarcely imagine today,” the Aviation Week article states. “Space entrepreneurs had a big influence on aerospace in 2009, although it does not begin to compare with the impact they are likely to have in years to come.”
The article devotes a fair amount to Masten Space Systems, who won $1.15 million from NASA’s Centennial Challenges program in 2009 in the Lunar Lander Challenge. (Dave Masten is featured on the cover of the issue as well.) Also mentioned in the article is XCOR Aerospace, whose CEO, Jeff Greason, served on the Augustine committee that made the case for commercial crew transportation to low Earth orbit.
A contrarian view, though, is expressed by John Marshall, an aerospace consultant who serves on NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. He tell’s Aviation Week that he’s skeptical that there’s a big market for commercial human spaceflight, particularly to orbit. “There is a very small, unique industry that is potentially there,” he said of suborbital spaceflight, and acknowledged that there is a government market for cargo and crew transportation to orbit. “After that, I don’t see any market. I don’t see Hilton Hotels putting a vehicle in there to be able to accommodate space tourism anytime soon.” Commercial space companies, he added, “are a long way away from endorsing the same kind of safety culture that a mature airline has.”
Yesterday industry publication Web Host Industry Review reported that UK-based hosting company DediPower had been selected to host the Virgin Galactic web site. The announcement made it sound like Virgin was expecting a wave of traffic to come to the site in the future: it mentions that DediPower would provide a hosting solution “capable of handling the large volume of traffic expected for the site” and it was providing custom solutions “to accommodate the traffic volume”.
Other data, though, hasn’t indicated overwhelming demand for the site in the past. The ranking service Alexa gives virgingalactic.com a traffic rank of 79,100 as of Thursday morning; the rank is based on a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews. The site did see a spike in activity on December 7 for the SpaceShipTwo rollout, when it got into the top 5,000 or so of sites, but that traffic ebbed in the following days. Looking at two years’ worth of data, there have been a few similar, predictable spikes in traffic: the unveiling of the design of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in January 2008, the rollout of WhiteKnightTwo that July, and the groundbreaking of Spaceport America in June of this year. However, there hasn’t been any sustained, heavy demand that would keep the site regularly in the top 100,000 sites on the web.
However, the Virgin Galactic site has undergone a redesign in recent weeks, shortly before the SpaceShipTwo rollout, with a greater emphasis on interactivity, such as the ability for visitors to post comments on press releases. That, couple with increased visibility as SpaceShipTwo goes through its flight test program and heads towards commercial service, might indeed leave result in increased traffic on the site in the future.
KRQE-TV of Albuquerque published this week a three-minute video tour of Spaceport America from a recent tour of the spaceport, part of a new bus tour program being offered to allow the public to see the spaceport under construction. The video includes a number of aerial shots that shows the current progress on the spaceport’s long runway as construction crews lay down layers of concrete and asphalt.
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