An interview with Richard Garriott

An interview with Richard Garriott
by Sam Dinkin

Space tourist Richard Garriott during a zero-g airplane flight last year. Garriott is scheduled to fly to the ISS this fall. (credit: richardinspace.com)

[Editor’s note: the following is an edited version of an email interview between Sam Dinkin and Richard Garriott, a developer of computer games like Tabula Rasa who is currently in Russia training to be the next commercial visitor to the International Space Station this fall.]
Mind and skills

Sam Dinkin, The Space Review (TSR): Are you finding some parallels in your final training with the player experience in Tabula Rasa (TR)?

Richard Garriott: Interesting you should ask! There are definitely some overlaps! Learning to use new high tech devices in an alien environment, in an alien language…

TSR: Is it easier to learn Logos [an alien language in TR] or Russian?

Garriott: Logos was designed to be easy to read, no question it is far easier!

TSR: Are you wishing there was a way to skip the astronaut training the way you can skip boot camp if you want in TR?

Garriott: Not at all! Boot camp here is part of the experience I am thrilled to be part of!

TSR: Have any funny training anecdotes?

Garriott: How I long for the massive variety of food available in the USA, or even Moscow. Here in Star City, we eat at the military Flight Cantina. While the food is tasty enough, it appears we are having pretty much the same thing at every meal of every day!

Crafting supplies

TSR: Did you bring some nucleotides, nano mechs, and a TR “crafting station” to do your scientific research on the International Space Station (ISS)?

Garriott: Close! I will be bringing a variety of proteins up to the ISS to crystallize in microgravity, to then return to the X-ray diffraction “station” back in Huntsville.

TSR: Can you give a technical description of the experiments you’re doing?

Garriott: I have many, but the most interesting involves protein crystal growth. Getting an accurate atomic structure for protein molecules is very valuable for science and medicine. One of the best ways to image a protein molecule is to first crystallize it and then use a process called x-ray diffraction to see what its shape is. However, crystals grown on the ground are generally impure due to tiny convection currents in the fluid they are crystallizing in. In space there are no such currents. We believe we have a novel and, more importantly, better way to do this than has been tried before. If this works out, we can demonstrate a process of great potential commercial value!

TSR: Anything else cool that you’re bringing?

Garriott: In addition to many more commercial and educational activities, I will be doing the first art show in space featuring the art of my mother, who inspired half the brain that was required for me to be in the high-tech art business.

Body

TSR: How does the weather there compare to Austin’s 25°C and sunny today?

Garriott: Cold for me, warm by local standards. It snows almost exactly every other day!

TSR: How’s the food compared to Uchi [a Japanese restaurant in Austin]?

Garriott: Uchi, oh how I miss you! Tyson Cole, please send me a care package! Hudson’s, Salt Lick, Jeffries… yum. While the food in Moscow is great, out here I am on a military base, and while the food is good quality, it lacks variation, and Austin has some of the best cuisine in the world, as you know.

TSR: Are you doing a special Austin meal for the crew while you are there?

Garriott: Actually I do plan to throw an “event” later in the year, but I have to figure out how to pull it off. An interactive event, as I am known for in Austin, would be fun to do here!

TSR: Were you able to paint your space suit a custom color like you can in TR?

Garriott: Actually, yes! There is a gentleman I have heard that has made everyone’s space suit since Gagarin. I hear that when you meet with him, it’s sort of like a custom fashion designer session, and you get to select colors, style, and anything else you want!

TSR: What do you think the main environmental difference will be on the ISS?

Garriott: Beyond the obvious like weightlessness and being totally enclosed, due to the deadly vacuum outside the hull, orientation will be the main variation I expect. The ISS is now the scale of a 747, and has modules extending in all directions. Floors, ceilings and walls all have windows, equipment racks and storage lockers and bags. Since there is no up or down in pretty much every sense of the words, I think that will be an interesting adjustment.

Backpack

TSR: How much has the fall in the dollar vs. the ruble raised the price from what Dennis Tito paid? Did you bring a backpack full of $100 bills?

Garriott: Actually the unfavorable changes in exchange rates have significantly affected the cost of doing this trip!

TSR: It will be about $75 per second of zero G for you; wouldn’t it be cheaper to float in neutral buoyancy in Austin?

Garriott: Yes, and as much fun as floating in Lake Travis would be (and not a bad neutral buoyancy event either) something important would be different.

TSR: What does it cost to buy a candy bar in space, $1,200 per ounce? Is everything in space like a rare TR “purple item”?

Garriott: Oh, yes!

Spirit

TSR: How does it feel to be following your father into space to become the first second-generation astronaut?

Garriott: Great! It has also become a great opportunity to work closely with my father, which is a great bonding time for us as adults!

TSR: Once you have achieved your life’s ambition, what heights will you scale next? How about a flight around the Moon?

Garriott: There is still a lot of “exploring” to do here on Earth, and while I would love to go to the Moon, I will likely be happy with my time in orbit for the time being!

TSR: In the opening sequence of TR, people were oblivious, then the world changed radically over night. Does an asteroid strike or climate change worry you?

 

Garriott: While some day an asteroid will in fact hit the earth, in any given year the probability is so slight that it is not something to get too excited about other than to start developing the technology for the eventual day that it does arrive. Climate change, however, is very real, and will absolutely affect millions upon millions of people well within our life times. It is not that the world will end, but at the very least, many already impoverished areas will be further decimated, and the economic shifts could affect us dramatically!

TSR: Can you sum up the key theme of what you want the world to learn from your flight?

Garriott: I hope to learn how to better make space a viable reality for everyone. To do that, I think it needs to be shown that the investment in space is worth it. That is why I hope that at least some of my experiments pay off. If even one does, it will mean that there are more that can be done, and thus justify further flights by private individuals and companies.

Screening and training for commercial human spaceflight

by Jeff Foust

Virgin Galactic is using this centrifuge at the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia to make sure its customers can handle the accelerations of a SpaceShipTwo flight. (credit: J. Foust)

Since the beginning of the space age, governments have had their pick of highly-qualified candidates to become astronauts or cosmonauts. With the supply of candidates far exceeding the demand, space agencies have had the luxury of being able to choose the very best, based on both their skills and expertise as well as their physical condition. This was especially true in the early history of spaceflight, when the effects of spaceflight on the human body were relatively unknown, but even today there are strict medical requirements that ensure that astronauts are in the uppermost percentiles of health and fitness among the general population.

As a commercial human spaceflight industry emerges, though, it faces a very different situation. These companies do not typically have the luxury of choosing only a handful of the best, brightest, and fittest people. Indeed, for the business plans of space tourism operators to close, they need to be able to fly as many people with the means to afford such a trip as possible. That means accepting people with a more typical range of health and fitness levels, and with a variety of ailments, while filtering out only those whose conditions are so poor as to be at risk if they flew a suborbital spaceflight. It also means determining a training regimen for both passengers and crewmembers that ensures that they are prepared for the flight without bogging them down with months or years of preparation.

Screening

An obstacle for new spaceflight operators is the lack of a large body of medical data that they can refer to regarding how people react to acceleration, weightlessness, and other aspects of spaceflight. Fewer than 500 people have flown in space since Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, and those people were typically in peak health and fitness. “Do we know all the medical risks of flying in space? The answer is we don’t, particularly for people who have medical problems,” said Dr. Melchor Antuñano, director of the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, at the FAA’s 11th Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference earlier this month in Crystal City, Virginia. “We have not selected somebody who has had two or three stents, a bypass surgery, who has hepatitis, or who has diabetes.”

 

 

There is, though, some data finally starting to emerge about how a broader slice of public can tolerate the stresses of launch. Julia Tizard, operations lead for Virgin Galactic, discussed at the conference early results from a passenger training exercise. Virgin has taken a number of its early customers, or Founders, to the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia for centrifuge training. There, the Founders were put through a centrifuge test that simulated the accelerations they would feel during launch and reentry of a SpaceShipTwo flight.

“If you were working from scratch and guessing what proportion of the market that you would think be able to manage a spaceflight—in the specific context of a Virgin Galactic spaceflight, whose G forces range up to 6 Gs on reentry—you might guess 50 percent,” she said. “At VG, we’re hoping that 80 percent of the people we had sold tickets to would be able to go through the program.”

The results exceeded even Virgin’s hopes. Of the 70 people tested at NASTAR, 93 percent made it through the test successfully. Of the five who did not, she said, two had their training delayed and one their training curtailed, and only two were unable to continue at all. That group of people, she said, ranges in age from 22 to 88, and with varying medical issues, including heart bypass surgery in the last five years.

In the quest for more information about the health issues associated with commercial spaceflight, Antuñano spoke of the need for more people like Greg Olsen, who released details of the medical issues—a black spot that appeared on a lung x-ray—that initially disqualified him from a Soyuz flight to the ISS. Such openness allows the industry to gain experience and evaluate screening criteria, he said, as well as evaluate the use of analog testing environments on the Earth.

Training and regulation

The extensive training that NASA astronauts receive both after their selection to the astronaut corps and when picked for a specific mission, which can last for a year or more, is clearly not appropriate for suborbital spaceflights that will last a matter of hours or even minutes. However, exactly what kind of training is appropriate for such flights is something the industry has not standardized—and, for the time being, does not want to.

 

There are a number of training options available for commercial spaceflight companies. Glenn King, chief operating officer of the NASTAR Center, noted that his facility includes not just the centrifuge used by Virgin Galactic in its recent tests, but also a spatial disorientation trainer and a hypobaric chamber, both useful for preparing passengers and crews for a variety of environments associated with spaceflight.

Some of those environments, such as high-G training, can be provided by aircraft that don’t require the infrastructure and expense of a centrifuge. King argued that, particularly in the event of a medical emergency during a test, a centrifuge—which can be stopped quickly to allow for the rapid egress of an injured person and their transport to a hospital, if needed—was better than an aircraft, which would take time to land and transport a patient to medical care.

Additional training will be required if, as some companies are planning, customers will wear pressure suits during their flight. Jeff Feige, CEO of Orbital Outfitters, a commercial spacesuit developer, said that the training they envision for the use of their suits will range from basic classroom familiarization to simulated pressurization of suit and emergency egress from the vehicle while wearing the suit. Something as simple as testing putting on the suit can be useful for identifying people who have claustrophobia, he said. “A lot of people don’t realize they’re claustrophobic until that helmet is locked and they’re told they can’t take if off. And then all of a sudden they realize they are feeling a little uncomfortable and this isn’t exactly what they had expected.”

Some vehicle developers and operators, though, are concerned about moving too quickly to codify training requirements for crews and customers. “I am living in fear of the move to develop standards for crew and passenger training in this industry,” said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace. “I think it’s a mistake at this stage in the development of the industry.”

Greason sees three reasons why people might want to move press for standards this early. “The good reason is they want to help,” he said. “But it’s not like we haven’t thought of most of this stuff already.” The bad reasons, he said, were that some people stand to benefit by making training standards, particularly those people who provide similar training services for the government, and that “standards for the sake of standards” are helpful for the industry by making it look more mature. “We don’t know the answers yet,” he said. “Codifying our mistakes early is one of the biggest errors we could make.”

 

Tizard echoed that concern. “The goal obviously here is for a successful long-term business in commercial human spaceflight industry, and that gives us two really key requirements: safety and a booming market, and a booming market requires safety,” she said. “In the early years, it’s important that the operator proposes what those standards and those safety margins are, because they’re the ones with the information about their vehicle’s capabilities and what’s needed to ensure a successful business plan.”

“The learning that we’re doing, and the operational procedures and training procedures that we may apply to our operation may be completely irrelevant to some other vehicle that perhaps doesn’t have the same g-loads or has a completely different cockpit setup,” she added.

At the end of the panel session about training, someone asked what sort of training would be needed for someone who wanted to fly again. “At the coffee table, there’s been discussion about what you do to do when somebody want to fly a second or third time,” said Greason. “If this market is so robust that people get off the plane and they can’t wait to go again, we win.”

Audley Travel boss books space flight with Virgin Galactic

Audley Travel boss Craig Burkinshaw (pictured below) will experience the trip of a lifetime when he boards a Virgin Galactic spaceship.

The Oxfordshire-based businessman, who heads up the specialist tour operator, has spent £100,000 to be one of the first space tourists.

He said: “It’s a lot of money but I want to be among the first. I’ve done skydiving many times and travelled all round the globe, but this is going to be fantastic. I want to see the Earth the way astronauts see it.”

Launch and landing points will be in New Mexico and the journey will last an estimated 150 minutes. On each trip there will be just six passengers and the spaceship will reach a height of 100km, just past the Earth’s atmosphere.

source

Space flight experience at a bargain price

A promotional shot of Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two.

If a $260,000 flight into space busts your budget then maybe the $23,000 sub-orbital space flight training is more up your alley.

Open to the public for the first time, the simulation has been designed to mimic an intergalactic experience.

Three Australian travel agents have recently returned from the Virgin ASA Global Forum in the US where the Virgin brainchild was launched.

But the ride comes at a cost.

Virgin is planning on putting together half day (about $2030), full day (about $3390) and two-day (about $5645) packages for space junkies.

Edwin Spencer, director of Spencer Travel in Sydney, said that the simulation conveys what a trip in space is like, however the G forces on the ride are a little lower. He thinks that it is worth the cost.

"You get the exact same experience as if you were going to do one of the flights (into space)," Spencer said from the conference in Philadelphia.

"They (Virgin) are trying to promote this facility to give you the experience of what it would be like on a space flight. It's so deadly accurate."

Having said this, Spencer admits that it's not for everyone.

"I think by the time you package it all and you get them over here it's probably going to cost about $20,000, with airfares and accommodation.

"... It's not going to appeal everyone but it's brand spanking new ... it's something really really unique.

"The big boys toys kind of people. The guys that love the adventure."

The travel packages will include the sub-orbital space flight training in Pennsylvania and the longer sessions will also include training on a parabolic flight and fighter pilot training in Las Vegas.

Spencer Travel, accredited as a Virgin Galactic Space Agent, sold Australia's first fully-paid ticket to space last year.

The journey into space takes two and a half hours to fly up 15,240 metres. The mothership then drops the rocket and it is sent soaring to 116,000 metres.

To put it into context, a standard aeroplane flies at about 9000 metres.

Passengers then experience five minutes of weightlessness before being returned to earth.

The $260,000 journey takes just a day but involves two days training.

The first 100 visitors to go into space, deemed Founders by Virgin, are expected to make the trip in 2010. Most positions on the Founders team were invitation only, but one fully-paid female from Australia made the rollcall.

"She is determined to be in the first 100," Spencer said.

The space-loving customer wants to keep a low profile, but Spencer said that she is an adventurer.

He said that space travel hadn't aroused the same excitement here as it had in the US.

"It's not that big in Australia but in the US it's huge," he said.

"This is just the beginning. It's the ultimate experience in life.

"It's that whole concept of being able to see Earth out of the left hand porthole and space from the right hand porthole."

IF YOU GO:

Visit: http://www.spencertravel.com.au

Kiwi space hopefuls at Virgin Galactic unveiling (+photos)

Two New Zealanders who hope to become the first Kiwis in space were in New York last week for the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's launch system.

Christchurch real estate agent Jackie Maw and businessman Mark Rocket, a space enthusiast who changed his name by deed poll, have bought $280,000 tickets on one of British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson's space journeys, scheduled for late next year or early 2010.

The three-hour trip will take them 112km above the earth.

Established in 2005, Virgin Galactic successfully launched its SpaceShipOne craft into space in 2004, winning the $10m Ansari X prize for the first non-government organisation to launch a reusable manned space craft into space twice within two weeks.

With SpaceShipTwo and its "mothership" launch vehicle, White Knight Two nearing completion at the Scaled Composites plant in California, more than 200 people worldwide have signed up and paid deposits for space trips.

Ms Maw said the seriousness of the project hit home to her at the design unveiling in New York.

"It is not just about sending passengers into space as a commercial venture," she said in a statement today.

"While that is part of it, we are in effect a source of capital which is enabling developments and exploration which will change our world."

Ms Maw, who has already completed an astronaut training course at the National Aerospace Training and Research (Nastar) centre in Philadelphia, said it was "incredibly motivating and exciting" to know those involved were part of that exploration.

Mr Rocket, co-director of Rocket Lab, a company that hopes to put New Zealand's first rocket into space this year, was the first New Zealander to buy a Virgin Galactic ticket.

He classifies himself as a "space industry participant" as well as a Virgin Galactic founding passenger and said he was equally motivated by the unveiling and what it meant long-term.

The first 100 people to sign up and pay for their future flights were invited to the New York unveiling - a media event and cocktail party covered by 30 television channels.

Mr Rocket said while predominantly from the United States and Britain, people were there from all over the world, including small places such as Estonia and Morocco.

Coming from New Zealand "attracted interest, but was not seen as out of the ordinary", he said.

- NZPA

 

Source: nzherald.co.nz

The new form of travel - Virgin Galactic

Up, up and away ... Branson said he would like to see the company's second spaceport set up in Australia in 2006

INITIALLY dismissed as another Richard Branson publicity stunt, Virgin Galactic is starting to attract serious attention as the potential of the British entrepreneur's ambitious space venture hits home.

It may still be early days, but some observers are already cautiously predicting Galactic will be a turning point in the commercial development of space.

Virgin Blue chief executive Brett Godfrey is among those who believe the technology being developed by Branson's "spaceline" will quickly move beyond joy rides for the well-heeled.

Godfrey, who has paid $280,870 to be among the first to head into space when Virgin Galactic begins operations, can see the concept developing into a new form of travel.

The Virgin boss is far from starry-eyed about his pending trip into the fringes of space. He insists he did not have a lifelong dream to become an astronaut. Instead, he is keen on understanding a technological advance he predicts will produce important spin-offs. He believes there's no reason technology similar to that used by Galactic will not eventually be used for sub-orbital flights between continents.

Instead of cruising back down to the same place, passengers will be able to go to another spaceport on another continent, the airline executive predicts.

"The reason I've invested my money is that I want to be part of the technology and understand it as best we can because I believe this will be the way of the future," he says.

"If, in 10 or 15 years, we're not getting to London in 45 minutes from Sydney, then we will have gone backwards.

"And it doesn't have to be done at a higher fuel cost."

SpaceShipTwo unveiled

While Godfrey concedes that some people may see the venture as an excuse for rich people to spend money, he points to parallels when aircraft first started flying. "Now it's mass transportation," he says.

"I think we've got to look at alternative technologies."

He points out the value to business people of being able to cut down the time spent travelling between countries to just a couple of hours. "The blokes that own corporate jets today, what would they pay to be able to get to Los Angeles or New York or London within a couple of hours?" he says. "A fortune, I think."

Virgin Galactic passed an important milestone last weekend as it unveiled the design for both SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle that will initially take eight astronauts into space, and White Knight Two, the twin-hulled mothership that will carry SS2 to its launch altitude.

The system is a successor to SpaceShipOne, the Burt Rutan-designed craft that won the $11 million Ansari X Prize after it become the first non-government reusable space vehicle to make it into space.

The original project was backed by a $20 million investment by computing legend Paul Allen – said to be the same amount NASA spent developing a pen that could write in space – although the Microsoft founder was not interested in commercially exploiting the breakthrough. This was when Virgin Group moved in to license the technology. White Knight Two is now close to completion at designer Rutan's Scaled Composites facility in California's Mojave Desert and is expected to start flight testing in the northern summer.

Go green machine

The world's biggest all-carbon composite aircraft has the wingspan of Boeing 757 and is powered by four Pratt&Whitney PW308A engines. It has been designed with the idea of lifting other payloads, such as small low-earth-orbit satellites, into space at costs significantly less than currently available.

SpaceShipTwo is about 60 per cent complete. It also has the flexibility to accommodate scientific and commercial applications.

Galactic now has more than 200 individuals and 85,000 expressions of interest from people wanting to experience space.

This translates to a deposit base of more than $31 million and $50 million in income to the fledgling spaceline.

The plan is to take the astronauts to a height of 110km in a sub-orbital flight that will give them about four and a half minutes of weightlessness.

There will initially be one flight per week but it expects this to increase to one or possibly two a day after operations move to its new spaceport in New Mexico.

The 18m spaceship, which will carry six passengers and two pilots and is about the size of a Falcon 900 executive jet, will hitch a ride to about 50,000ft before detaching from the mothership and igniting its hybrid rocket.

This sort of air launch is less fuel-hungry and environmentally damaging than a ground-based launch, and this is what allows the use of lightweight composites.

Scaled Composites is also looking for a more efficient and environmentally friendly fuel than the rubber and nitrous oxide combination that powered SpaceShipOne.

Reach for the skies

The climb to the maximum altitude will take about 90 seconds as the spacecraft reaches three times the speed of sound.

Shortly before the apogee, the spaceship will fold its wings as it prepares to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The feathered wings are designed to act as an air brake, significantly reducing the forces and heat on the craft during re-entry, until they are deployed at about 60,000ft for an unpowered glide back to the ground.

One of the big questions for passengers and regulators will be the overall safety of the program, which has not been without its mishaps.

Scaled Composites is still trying to determine the cause of a rocket explosion last July that killed three workers and resulted in occupational health and safety fines of more than $28,000.

Rutan admitted at the launch that the accident was delaying the engine's development but said he was confident the spaceship would meet its demanding specifications.

He told reporters that the flights would at least be as safe as air travel in the 1920s and hundreds of times safer than government-funded space travel had been so far.

Galactic has ordered five spaceships and two carriers for its initial operations but Branson makes no secret of the fact that he sees this as just the start.

Branson's space mission

It was the famous physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking, who got Branson thinking about the project. During a BBC interview, Hawking said that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible.

"Our population is now heading to 9 billion people by the middle of this century – that's three times more than when I was born," Branson says.

"With the end of the oil era approaching, and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential not only for communications but also for the logistics of survival through things such as weather satellites, agricultural monitoring, GPS and climate science.

"I also believe that some day we will be able to use space as a source of energy for the planet, through solar power satellites, using the most sustainable source available &$150; our sun."

Branson also sees the potential for delivering satellites and for a sub-orbital, passenger-carrying vehicle, although he admits the later might not happen "for some time".

What part Australia has to play in the commercialisation of space, beyond supplying astronauts, remains to be seen. Branson said in 2006 that he would like to see the company's second spaceport set up in Australia.

By Steve Creedy, Aviation writer

Travel agent books seat into space

Travel agent Craig Burkinshaw is booked on a £100,000 trip out of this world.

The businessman, whose Witney company Audley Travel provides tailor-made holidays for anywhere on Earth, is going a little further himself, with a ticket to go into space.

He has paid a fee of $200,000 (£100,000) for Flight 32, seat 190, on Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, expected to become the world's first commercial spaceline.

Mr Burkinshaw, 37, last week took a training flight in the US to experience weightlessness.

He said: "We had just a short time of floating around, but on the real trip it will be up to five minutes.

"I can't wait, it's extre- mely exciting. I want that feeling again and to look at the Earth out of the window just like the astronauts."

The first commercial flight is now expected to be early in 2010.

Each trip will have six passengers, carried up to about 60,000 metres on an aircraft, when a rocket is released to zoom just beyond 100km, defined as the boundary of space.

The whole flight is expected to last no longer than two-and-a-half hours, costing about £11 a second.

Mr Burkinshaw said he was only too willing to pay.

"It's a lot of money but I want to be among the first," he said. "I've done skydiving many times and travelled all round the globe, but this is going to be fantastic."

And his girlfriend is quite understanding. "She knows I'm into astrophysics and all that sort of thing," he said.

"There's a lot of money going into commercial space travel and there's nothing to worry about."

Sir Richard's Virgin Galactic company unveiled a model of its vessel, SpaceShip Two, this year, and testing is due to start in the summer.

Its first flights are expected early in 2010, with take-off and landing in New Mexico, in the USA.

The first 200 passengers are now signed up to fly.

They have to undergo medical assessments, including whether they can withstand the G-forces of extra terrestrial flight.

An American company, Wyle, whose Life Sciences Group has four decades of supporting the space agency Nasa, has been brought in by Virgin Galactic to provide medical and management expertise to prepare passengers for spaceflight.

The cost of the 150-minute trip is £100,000, but Sir Richard, who has a house in Kidlington, has been quoted as saying it could go down to about £10,000 in a few years. If you fancy booking a flight, call the tour operator Elegant Resorts on 01244 897000.

By David Horne

Cosmic travel set to take off

Testing begins this summer on Virgin's new spaceship with launch expected to be in 2010

Last week, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle he promises will turn space tourism into a reality.

Fancy an out-of-this-world trip? Here’s the lowdown for potential high-flyers.

When can I go? Testing will start this summer. The first passenger flights were expected next year, but Virgin insiders say 2010 is more likely. How’s it done? While conventional rockets blast off from a static position on the ground, SpaceShipTwo will be carried up to 50,000ft by its launch aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo. After release, it engages its rocket engines to power on up to 360,000ft, or 68 miles above sea level, in 90 seconds.

What can I do up there? Float about, mostly. You’re high enough, at the apex of the flight, for the earth’s gravity to be pretty much unnoticeable. The period of weightlessness will be only five minutes or so during the 2½hour trip, but you’ll be encouraged to enjoy it – seatbelts off, and 7ft of headroom to bob about in.

Bad news for anyone wanting to test the carnal possibilities of zero gravity, though. Branson has made cracks about joining the 60-mile-high club, but, with eight aboard (six passengers, two pilots), there won’t be much privacy. There’s no loo to escape to, either – which means “Nasa nappies” may be used to prevent disasters. Hardly sensual.

What will I see? Don’t expect that humbling view of the faraway earth isolated in space that lunar astronauts found so moving – you’d have to go a lot further for that. But you will have a clear sense of the curvature of the globe, and views of 1,000 miles in every direction through the multiple 18in-wide windows.

Initially, that’ll be 1,000 miles of southwest USA – SpaceShipTwo’s Norman Foster-designed spaceport is being built in New Mexico. But Virgin Galactic has firm plans for launches from Sweden, and is in discussion with RAF Lossiemouth, in Scotland. If they go ahead, you’ll be able to fly straight into the northern lights – or take in the whole of the British Isles at a glance.

Who’ll be in the next seat? Stephen Hawking, Victoria Principal, the designer Philippe Starck and the environmentalist James Lovelock are among the 200 signed up to fly.

Do I have to be fit? You’ll have to go through a medical assessment and centrifuge training to see if you can withstand the G-forces. At one point, they’re expected to reach 6 g – “like an elephant sitting on your chest”, according to astronauts.

How safe is it? The maker, Scaled Composites, says that safety is at the heart of the design, and launch will take place only after exhaustive tests and approval by the US Federal Aviation Administration. But going into space is not the same as hopping on a jumbo. The company’s president, Burt Rutan, told reporters at the model’s launch that he was aiming at similar safety levels to the early airliners of the 1920s, rather than today’s standards. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you that a new spacecraft is as safe as a modern airliner,” he said.

What will it cost? You’re looking at about £100,000, though Branson says that the price may come down to as little as £10,000 in a few years. You could always use your air miles: Alan Watts, from Harrow, has paid for his entire ticket using Virgin Atlantic frequent-flyer points. He had 2m of them.

Anyone else doing it? Branson may be ahead, but there are plenty of others in the tourist space race – among them the Amazon.com tycoon Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, and EADS, the European consortium that owns Airbus. Its suborbital rocket is promised for 2013.

What’s the carbon footprint? It’s not good, but it’s not as colossal as you might think. Virgin Galactic claims that one astronaut’s emissions will be less damaging than those caused by a business-class return to New York – that’s about two tonnes of carbon. It’s looking at biofuel systems to lessen the effect.

How can I book? Direct with Virgin Galactic (www.virgingalactic.com ) or via its UK agent, the posh tour operator Elegant Resorts (01244 897000, www.elegantresorts.co.uk ). Yes, the same people who’ll take you to Sandy Lane.

Can’t I go a bit further? Possibly. The US company Space Adventures – which sent the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, to the Russian Soyuz space station in 2001 – is offering trips to the moon for a cool $100m, and says it could launch within four years of getting its first customer.

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