Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Space tourism tickets to skyrocket

Software billionaire Charles Simonyi, shown here doing a "Superman" act during a zero-gravity airplane flight, took a multimillion-dollar trip to the international space station.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - When it comes to complaining about poor exchange rates for the U.S. dollar, American tourists traveling to Europe have nothing on tourists headed into space.

The cost of flying to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship has increased from $25 million earlier this year to between $30 million and $40 million for trips planned in 2008 and 2009.

"It's mostly because of the fallen dollar," Eric Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Space Adventures, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. His company brokers the trips with Russia's space agency.

A U.S. dollar currently is worth about 25 1/2 Russian rubles, compared with 32 rubles in 2002.

Five space tourists have paid $20 million to $25 million to visit the space station via the Soyuz vehicles through trips arranged by Space Adventures. The company announced Wednesday that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009.

Anderson said the space tourists flying in the two new seats likely would be an American and an Asian, but he offered no further details on Wednesday.

Space Adventures said the identities of the would-be fliers would be announced sometime in the next few weeks. "We have finalized the contracts with those who will fly on future seats, but we are always willing to speak to multiple individuals for a specific seat and encourage other interested parties to step forward and contact us, because the most willing and committed ultimately gets to go first," Anderson said in Wednesday's written announcement.

In May, Anderson told MSNBC.com that the next space passenger would be an American male. He also said the flight would mark "another first." That was a reference to April's flight of software executive Charles Simonyi, the first billionaire to go into space.

Prospective space tourists must put down a 20 percent deposit, pass physical examinations and later undergo training at a Russian space facility.

About a dozen prospective space tourists are in the process of reserving flights to the space station, even as the number of available seats on the three-man Soyuz vehicles is likely to diminish after space shuttles are grounded in 2010.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

A library for Mars

by Alan Boyle
The Phoenix Mars Lander is equipped with instruments that could detect the signature of life on Mars - but it also carries signatures, stories and lots more for future generations. The nonprofit Planetary Society is sending along what's billed as the first library for the Red Planet: a silica-glass mini-DVD encoded with scores of stories about space exploration, audio and artwork from some of our planet's best and brightest, plus digitally encoded names submitted by thousands of Earthlings. Perhaps the coolest thing about the DVD is the label addressed to future visitors on Mars: "Attention Astronauts: Take This With You."It's not out of the question that some Marswalker will actually pick up and decipher that DVD someday: After all, one of the places moonwalkers have visited is the landing site for the Surveyor 3 probe, which touched down in 1966 and happened to be within walking distance of the Apollo 12 lunar module three years later.

Unfortunately, it will take humans much more than three years to get to Phoenix's intended landing site in Mars' northern highlands. Fortunately, the Planetary Society's DVD is built to last at least 500 years, and perhaps much, much longer.

What would a Martian traveler find on the disk? Assuming that he or she could figure out how to decode the DVD, the "library" would yield 80 forward-looking stories and articles - including literary classics penned by Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, science-fiction classics by Arthur C. Clarke and Kim Stanley Robinson, and many more goodies well worth adding to your reading list. Of course you'll find Orson Welles' radio retelling of "The War of the Worlds," as well as Mars-themed sci-fi art and photos of the real Mars, as seen by past space probes.

The DVD also includes audio-enhanced slideshows in which Clarke and other luminaries (including the late Carl Sagan) speak directly to future Martians. For Sagan's audio clip, go to this Web page and click on the link titled "Hear Carl Sagan's Message to the Future."

These presentations, along with many of the text/video/audio selections, were first placed on a CD-ROM titled "Visions of Mars" more than a decade ago. In an exercise much like the current project, the CD-ROM was placed on Russia's Mars 96 probe. That spacecraft, however, never got out of Earth orbit due to the failure of a booster stage. The first Martian library went down in flames, and the Planetary Society had to start from scratch.

"We were looking for several years for another ride, essentially," the Planetary Society's Susan Lendroth explained. The team behind Phoenix Mars Lander obliged, and so "Visions of Mars" project director Jon Lomberg updated the content for a fresh launch.

Meanwhile, the society put out a call for people to submit their names for digital inclusion on the disk - following up on similar "send-your-name-to-space" projects for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Selene, Stardust, and so on. About 250,000 people answered the call (including yours truly).

Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society, said the resulting mini-DVD is made of material that should last even though it's sitting on the exposed part of the spacecraft, in full view of Martian passers-by. That's the whole point, said the society's executive director, Louis Friedman.

"Since the Planetary Society's disk should last for centuries on Mars, we hope astronauts at some future date will enjoy the visionary works we have sent in this first Martian library," Friedman said in a news release. "These tales and images have inspired generations about the wonder of space, including many men and women who are now researchers and engineers in the space program."

What would you put on a digital disk destined for another world? Are there obvious choices that Friedman, Lomberg and the other folks behind "Visions of Mars" have missed? One audio expert has wondered whether "Visions of Mars" would be playable even a few decades from now, let alone hundreds of years - and that's an interesting point. Do you have any better ideas for preserving interplanetary time capsules? Feel free to leave your suggestions as comments below.

Friday, August 17, 2007

OSBOURNE'S SPACE DREAM

JACK OSBOURNE is appealing for a TV company to fund a $400,000 (GBP200,000) spaceflight after confessing he's unwilling to spend his own money. The Adrenaline Junkie star maintains a trip on Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic craft would be the ultimate extreme sport for his show, but he's refusing to foot the bill himself. He says, "I'd really like to go on the Virgin Galactic space trip. I actually had an invite to go up on the second trip, but it cost GBP200,000. I didn't really feel like spending the money on that. "I'm hoping to get a production company to pay for it. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge."