Three, two, one - Commence bragging!

A quick and easy trip into space may be the next frontier for the been-there-done-that traveller

MATTHEW TREVISAN

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

July 18, 2007 at 9:18 AM EDT

It took John Criswick less than a week to make his decision. It was something he had always wanted to do, ever since his parents bought him a telescope when he was 10. Never mind that it cost $200,000 to get there. He wanted to bring some adventure back into his life.

He would go to space.

"I like to have a little bit of risk and not be able to predict what's going to happen," said the 43-year-old CEO of Magmic Games, an Ottawa-based company that publishes and develops games for cellphones and BlackBerrys. "It's not just about the launch. A bunch of things are going to happen to me between now and then because of it."

Criswick is one of four Canadians who have signed up for Virgin Galactic's trips to space, slated to start in late 2009 or early 2010. Worldwide, almost 200 people in 30 countries have signed up for the 2½-hour trip to the final frontier.

To promote this nascent industry in Canada, Virgin Galactic has appointed five Canadian travel consultants who will act as sales representatives for the London-based arm of the Virgin Group of companies. Last week, Virgin's head of astronaut sales, Carolyn Wincer, trained the "accredited space agents" in Vancouver and visited them in their respective cities.

"It's a unique product to sell and one that's quite complicated, with a lot of unusual questions and one that not a lot of people know about," she said from the company's Toronto office.

Right now, it seems Virgin will take anyone willing to slap down a $20,000 (all figures U.S.) refundable deposit for the trip. There are no prerequisites other than "good health and reasonable fitness."

"The problem is that until now, nobody's monitored normal, everyday people undergoing G-forces," Wincer said. "The only people that are monitored are people training to be fighter pilots, and they are already trained to be in peak condition.

"So we hope to know more very soon ... but having said that, the G-force profile is nowhere near what fighter pilots and astronauts going to the moon have had to undergo. It should be fairly okay."

Travellers will experience a maximum of 3.5 Gs during their brief sojourn to space, Wincer said. Fighter pilots regularly experience about nine Gs, and even intense roller coasters can generate five.

This fall, Virgin will be sending the first 100 customers to human centrifuge training in Philadelphia, where specialists will test their ability to withstand G-force pressures, which can cause blackouts and even redouts, in which capillaries in the eyes burst.

"After those first 100, the goal is that they can just turn up a few days before a flight and do it," Wincer said.

Make space travel simple: That's what British billionaire Richard Branson, the Virgin Group's founder, had in mind when he partnered with Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who designed the company's spacecraft, SpaceShipOne.

The vehicle was the winner of the $10-million Ansari X Prize, a competition for the first reusable, non-government, manned spacecraft.

Virgin will take its travellers on a brief, sub-orbital flight that reaches its peak 110 kilometres above Earth. They won't go fast enough to go into orbit, so the trip is essentially like throwing a gigantic ball into a parabolic arc and having it float safely to the ground.

The travellers will undergo a medical assessment six months before their flight. Wincer said they fly at their own risk and go through a process of "informed consent" before signing a waiver.

"At each stage, we advise what we know and what we don't know, and likewise the passenger has to advise the same thing," she said.

After two days of psychological, safety and G-force training, a mother ship will take the travellers' spaceship on a 40-minute flight to an altitude of 15,240 metres (the cruising altitude of the now-retired Concorde jet) and then release it.

The spaceship, full of viewing windows, will freefall for a few seconds before firing its rockets, which will propel it to more than 1,600 kilometres an hour and out of the atmosphere.

Once the rockets shut off, the spaceship will reach its maximum altitude, at which point the passengers will experience as much as five minutes of weightlessness.

From there, the spaceship begins a 90-second re-entry phase, creating drag in an effort to re-enter the atmosphere more slowly than a regular rocket. After re-entry, it will take 45 minutes to glide down from 21,300 metres.

Once the tourist flights begin, Virgin Galactic hopes to operate one flight daily. The company will have a fleet of five spaceships and two mother ships. Each spaceship holds six passengers and two pilots, and the entire fleet will cost $20-million.

Wincer says the extravagant cost will come down as more companies start to send tourists into space.

(European firm Astrium recently announced it wants to build a rocket-powered craft to send tourists to an altitude of 100 kilometres by 2012 for about $268,000.)

And, she adds, Virgin's price is a bargain compared with the $20-million that Space Adventures Ltd. charged travellers to join a Russian flight to the International Space Station 400 kilometres above Earth.

To finance his trip, Criswick will use the fortune he made in 1998 when Sun Microsystems bought his company, Beduin Communications, which designed software for consumer electronics.

For those who think they've seen it all, Wincer says, space travel is something genuinely new.

"These days travel is so easy and accessible. Even if you don't have that much money you can often have travel experiences. So to some people, particularly those with money, it's all a bit mundane."

For his part, Criswick has had some experience with the space industry.

The Vancouver native worked as a software developer on a telescope that was eventually launched in 1991 aboard a U.S. spacecraft. That research led to a master's degree at York University. He tried out for the second Canadian astronaut competition but didn't make it because, he jokes, "I didn't have enough PhDs." And he attended a summer session at the International Space University in 1991, where he met some friends who joined him in June 2004 to watch Mike Melvill fly SpaceShipOne over California's Mojave Desert.

He likes to call his trip a path of self-discovery.

"I'm not excited because it's so far away. But I'm sure two or three months before [the trip] my level of anxiety and excitement is definitely going to change."

Wincer adds that anyone who has been to space has returned "almost certainly a confirmed environmentalist" because of the view of Earth and its atmosphere.

"And because we're taking some of the richest people in the world up, who are also some of the most powerful people, we think that might have some positive effects for our planet."

For more information about Virgin Galactic's space flights, visit virgingalactic.com; to book a seat, visit http://www.virtuoso.com.

Parabolic Flights

The Physical Sciences in Space Program of Space Science has the mandate to promote research in a microgravity environment. Various platforms offer such an environment, including parabolic flights, which are relatively inexpensive and very accessible.
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Will Tourists Beat the Government Back to the Moon?

For $100 million, a U.S. company promises you the vacation of a lifetime: a week in lunar orbit
On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to grace the moon. Shortly thereafter, the Soviets, plagued by system failures of their Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft, abandoned all hope of doing the same.

Now the Russians may get to the moon after all, at least if the Arlington, Virginia, firm Space Adventures has its way—and you can tag along (if you start routinely winning the lottery). The company, which has sent two wealthy businessmen, Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, to the International Space Station atop Russian rockets, has announced a joint venture with the Russian Federal Space Agency (FSA) to embark one cosmonaut and two billionaires on a trip around the moon in an upgraded Soyuz craft by 2010. The ticket price: $100 million per person.

The 8- to 15-day mission, which would mark the first time humans have ventured beyond Earth's orbit since the last Apollo mission in 1972, might include a stop at the ISS after launching from Kazakhstan. Then the crew would rendezvous with a rocket already waiting in orbit to blast toward the moon. Traveling at more than 24,000 miles an hour, the Soyuz would use the moon's gravity to slingshot around to the farside and then return home. If the flight is a success, the company will launch increasingly more ambitious missions, says Space Adventures president and CEO Eric Anderson. "Eventually we'll land on the moon," he predicts.

He says that modifying the Soyuz will be far less expensive than building a new craft. Space Adventures plans to work with the FSA to improve the guidance and communications systems. To make sure their passengers get their nine figures' worth when they pass within 62 miles of the moon's surface (for about 30 minutes), Anderson says, "we're going to put in a bigger window."

Yet the most important upgrade, FSA deputy head Nikolai Moiseyev told the RIA Novosti wire service, will be reinforced heat shields that allow the craft to roar into Earth's atmosphere not once but twice upon returning—first to slow down using the drag from atmospheric gases and a second time (after ascending to cool off) to touch down back in Kazakhstan. In contrast, the life-support system will require less work, Anderson says, because cosmonauts have already spent as long as two weeks in low-Earth orbit in a Soyuz.

So which of the world's 2,000 or so sufficiently affluent people (by Anderson's reckoning) might book a ticket? "We're talking to a few key individuals," he says, but the only name he'll drop is Gregory Olsen, the scientist who has plunked down $20 million to become Space Adventures's third visitor to the ISS in October.

Money aside, you must also possess impeccable health, because a medical crisis midflight could prompt an emergency return to Earth. The Federal Aviation Administration's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute has issued health guidelines for the U.S. space-tourism industry but has no power to enforce them. (Even if it did, the FAA has no jurisdiction over this mission, since it occurs in foreign territory.)

Perhaps more vital is psychological fitness. The trip will require three people to share a space that Anderson equates to a large SUV. NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who has traveled in a Soyuz to the ISS, calls it "cramped" but notes that the passengers won't be stuck in their seats. "You can turn around, go upside down," he says.

The biggest challenge, according to Foale, is adjusting to "the complete dependence you have on your other crewmates being helpful and considerate." Which makes one wonder how billionaires will fare flying 500,000 miles in coach.
By Joshua Tompkins

Private-spaceflight bill signed into law

WASHINGTON - President Bush gave suborbital space companies an early Christmas gift on Thursday by signing a bill that helps open the way for commercial tourism on the final frontier.

The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, or H.R. 5382, puts a clear legislative stamp on regulations already being formulated by the Federal Aviation Administration. More significantly, the law would eventually let paying passengers fly on suborbital launch vehicles at their own risk.

The age of commercial space travel got its start this summer with SpaceShipOne's first private-sector spaceflights. Since then, hundreds of would-be tourists, including William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame and "Alien" actress Sigourney Weaver, have voiced interest in taking their own suborbital space trips aboard the successors to SpaceShipOne, which may be ready for flight in 2007 or 2008.

The backers of H.R. 5382 said the legislation was needed to reassure potential investors, such as Virgin Group billionaire Richard Branson, that they would not face crippling lawsuits in an inherently risky business.

Space policy consultant James Muncy, who has been following the legislation's up-and-down course closely, explained that the law would help the infant suborbital industry "get through the 21st-century equivalent of the barnstorming era."

Congressional staff members said Bush signed the bill on Thursday without fanfare. The FAA now has 12 months to draw up a new set of draft regulations that would provide for passenger flights. Final regulations would take effect six months later.

Safety concerns
H.R. 5382's trip through Congress to the White House was not a smooth one: The legislative language was the result of months of negotiations, and the bill didn't win final congressional passage until the final minutes of the session on Dec. 8.

The FAA's role in suborbital spaceflight safety was a key sticking point: Under the terms of the legislation, the FAA would regulate the industry over the next eight years primarily to protect the uninvolved public and the public interest. The agency would start regulating space vehicles to ensure crew and passenger safety only if the operation of those vehicles resulted in death, serious injury or a dangerous close call.

Beginning in 2012, the FAA could regulate suborbital spaceships however it saw fit.

The bill's backers said the eight-year period would give spaceship developers more freedom to experiment and also allow them to generate revenue by taking on passengers, as long as those passengers knew exactly what they were getting into.

That two-step regulatory regime rubbed some House Democrats the wrong way. During last month's floor debate, Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., said the legislation could encourage a "tombstone mentality," in which regulators would have to stand by until someone got killed or seriously hurt. Nevertheless, the bill was resurrected and approved by the House, 269-120, on the last full day of November's lame-duck session.

Final consideration in the Senate had to wait until an even later mini-session in December, which was required in order to approve an intelligence reform bill. The spaceflight bill went virtually unmentioned on the Senate floor, but the behind-the-scenes debate continued up to almost the last minute.

Firm opposition from even one senator could have stymied the bill, and if the Senate had not acted before ending its session, the legislation's backers would have had to start from scratch next year — potentially delaying the industry's development.

In the end, the legislation was tacked onto a package of House bills that were approved by unanimous consent in the Senate.

'Great victory'
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., said in a press statement that the legislation's passage was a "great victory for the future of America's space efforts."

“The people who will invest the type of big dollars necessary to make this a major new step in mankind’s ascent into space have been waiting for the government to lay down the regulatory regime and set the rules of the game, and this is the first major step toward doing that,” he said.

MSNBC special report
The new space race


Approval in the Senate came as a surprise even to some of the bill's biggest backers. When informed that the legislation had actually passed, Muncy responded with a mild expletive of wonderment.

"Never watch sausage or legislation being made," he told MSNBC.com. "It's been a long, tortuous road."

After collecting his thoughts, Muncy paid tribute to officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation, as well as members of Congress and their aides.

"Congress is clearly saying that it doesn't want to be a barrier," he said. "It wants to open doors and fly the American public into space."
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

We must escape Earth, warns Hawking

Mankind will need to leave planet Earth to ensure the long-term survival of the species, theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking warned today.

Prof Hawking said that space-rockets propelled by the kind of matter/antimatter annihilation technology used in Star Trek would be needed to colonise hospitable planets orbiting other stars.

And he disclosed his own ambition to go into space, and appealed to Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson - who is planning a "space tourism" venture - to make his dream come true.

Prof Hawking was speaking ahead of the presentation to him later today of Britain's highest scientific award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, previously granted to Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Captain James Cook.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that scientists may be within 20 years of reaching his prediction in A Brief History of Time that mankind would one day "know the mind of God" by understanding all the laws which govern the universe.

And he said that this knowledge may be vital to the human race's continued existence.
"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," he told Today.

"Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.

"There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.

"If we used chemical fuel rockets like the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey to the nearest star would take 50,000 years.

"This is obviously far too long to be practical, so science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination.

"Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light.

"However, we can still within the law, by using matter/antimatter annihilation, at least reach just below the speed of light.

"With that, it would be possible to reach the next star in about six years, though it wouldn't seem so long for those on board."

The science fiction series Star Trek has used matter/antimatter annihilation as an explanation for the warp drive which powers spaceships like the Enterprise through vast distances in short periods of time.

But in reality, some scientists believe that the radiation produced when matter and antimatter are brought together and destroy one another could in fact one day be used to accelerate craft to close to the speed of light.

Prof Hawking today said that his own ambition was to take part in a more conventional form of space travel.

"My next goal is to go into space," he

said. "Maybe Richard Branson will help me."
BBC news