Space tourism

Cover Story

2008-05-21T12:52:00.001-07:00

Wanted: an Emirati space tourist

ANY Emirati with $35 million to spare is being encouraged by Space Adventures to contact the orbital space flight company to join them on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

CEO and president of Space Adventures Eric Anderson, who was in Dubai for the recent WTTC Summit, told TTN’s in an exclusive interview that the company would particularly welcome an Emirati recruit to go orbital.

“The kind of astronaut I’m looking for is someone who would go into orbit – spend two weeks on the International Space Station,” said Anderson.

“They would have to have a reasonable level of fitness; they will have to find a little bit of time in their schedule because there are about 12 to 14 weeks of training required.”

Space Adventures is targeting private individuals, business people, and has spoken to organisations and sectors of the government while here. “We are just starting discussions about it now,” said Anderson.

So far the company has had five private citizens visit the ISS, and the sixth, video game programmer and designer and Texas resident Richard Garriott, is due to take off from the steppes of the Kazakhstan space port on October 12.

“Garriott is unique as he is going to be the world’s second generation astronaut - his father is Owen Garriott is a former NASA astronaut,” he said.

Although the focus of the company is on orbital flights, they also offer sub-orbital flights costing around $200,000 for the blast. Rockets boost passengers 100 kilometres up to where space begins. After the engines shutdown, participants experience up to five minutes of continuous weightlessness, and can see Earth below.

Other space companies – Virgin Galactic for example, have signed up five Emiratis so far for sub-orbital flights. UAE national Adnan Al Maimani, a Space Adventures client, was the first to sign up and is on a waiting list for a sub-orbital flight.

“Sub-orbital is really the edge of an orbital flight. We think that if someone is going to pay $200,000 for a few minutes on the edge of space, we would love to see more people doing it. If someone is keen to go that far they possibly really want to go to the space station. It’s a teaser. So we are very supportive of sub orbital flights and we don’t really think of others as opposition,” Anderson said.

Space Adventures recently acquired another company called Zero Gravity. “We have come to realise over the last couple of years that this is the best space experience for the rest of us, so to speak. The Zero Gravity is a $4,000 per person space experience. It is not a space flight per se, but it is a two hour flight in a specially outfitted Boeing 727 during which participants have short periods of weightlessness,” he said.

“Zero gravity flights are really a much better option than sub-orbital because you get more weightlessness and you are in an FAA approved aircraft. It is also a lot less expensive.”

Another advantage of zero gravity flights was that these fly out of regular airports anywhere in the world. So what if we want to bring it to Dubai?

“Absolutely, we could bring it right here. We would have to have a group of committed customers before we did that, but we may well do that at some point,” he said.

The United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe share the ISS international project. Construction started in November 1998, and is scheduled for completion in 2010. It orbits at an average altitude of 354 kilometres at an inclination of 51.6 degrees to the equator and at 17,000 miles an hour.

by Cheryl Mandy

Virgin Galactic seeks space agents

2008-05-07T03:18:00.001-07:00

Virgin Galactic will be looking to appoint more Middle East sales agents for its sub-orbital space flights at ATM.

Virgin Galactic will be inviting travel agents to boldly go where no travel agent has gone before at ATM 2008.

Travel agents will have the opportunity to apply to sell space travel in partnership with the Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Office in Dubai, with selected applicants joining a shortlist from which the chosen sales agents will be announced.

"Travel agents play an integral role in the Virgin Galactic distribution process. As a trusted advisor and source of information for their clients, we are seeking the best agencies to sell spaceflights," said Carolyn Wincer, head of astronaut sales, Virgin Galactic.

"We want to create a network of agents in the Middle East who are knowledgeable, well informed and know how to deliver the highest levels of service when selling unique travel experiences."

Virgin Galactic has already sold more than 200 tickets globally and at US $200,000 per ticket has received $30 million in deposits and a projected future income of $45 million. Test flights are due to take place this summer with the first commercial flights taking off by the end of 2009.

"We anticipate finalising the appointment of agents before the end of the year and commencing the all important ‘accredited sales agent' training through the region.

It takes a very talented and skilled travel consultant to sell a trip to space," said Sharon Garrett, head of space marketing and PR, at Dubai's Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Office (Sharaf Travel).

Dubai firm becomes first to charter space flight

2008-05-03T06:31:00.001-07:00

An unnamed Dubai-based company has become the first in the world to charter a space flight for its top management.

'I cannot reveal any details about the company or the deal, other than (saying that) the flight they chartered can take up to six passengers but they might end up flying only two people,' The National newspaper quoted Sharon Garrett, the head of space marketing and public relations at Virgin Galactic's Dubai office, as saying.

She said the company deposited 1.8 million dirhams ($500,000) last week to charter one of Virgin's commercial aircraft

A part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Virgin Galactic is offering sub-orbital space flights and, in the future, orbital space flights to the paying public.

Virgin Galactic's mission is to fly passengers who are not professional astronauts to an altitude slightly over 100 km and allow them to experience weightlessness.

The first flight is planned for 2009.

According to the newspaper, the two-and-a-half-hour trip, on SpaceShipTwo, as booked by the company, will take off from the Mohave Desert Spaceport in California.

The spaceship will be attached to a base ship known as WhiteKnightTwo, which, after a runway take-off, will reach an altitude of 15,240 metres.

At that point, the SpaceShipTwo will be released and its own rocket will blast it to 4,000 kmph, three times the speed of sound, to reach 109,728 metres.

Once in space the passengers will be allowed out of their seats for four minutes to float around in zero gravity.

After seven minutes in space, the craft will return to earth, using a wing feathering technology, which will help reduce the intense heat generated by re-entering the atmosphere, before making a runway landing.

source

I pronounce you spaceman and wife: Branson to be the first man to marry a couple in space

2008-05-03T06:26:00.001-07:00

By NATHAN KAY

Virgin Galactic boss Sir Richard Branson is planning to set yet another record – by becoming the first man to marry a couple in space.

The 58-year-old billionaire intends to conduct a ceremony 70 miles above the Earth on the first Galactic sub-orbital flight next year.

He has already officiated at one wedding in mid-air. Last year he was ordained for the day in an online church to marry Virgin America marketing director Dimitrios Papadognonas and Coco Jones on a Virgin flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas.

Record breaker: Sir Richard

He also helped officiate at the wedding of Google co-founder Larry Page on his private island, Necker, in the Caribbean.

A spokesman for Virgin Galactic told The Mail on Sunday: "We have had two bookings involving marriage, one to get married in space and the other for the couple to have their honeymoon in space.

"It is possible that Richard could obtain a licence to conduct the marriage."

The couple who have booked in for a honeymoon on the £100,000-a-ticket maiden flight are Virgin Galactic adviser George Whitesides and his new wife, Loretta Hidalgo.

The Virgin Galactic space project is progressing at a dramatic rate and customers will take part in the first test flights this summer.

In January, Branson unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle he promises will turn space tourism into reality.

It is designed to hitch a lift on an aircraft to 50,000ft before blasting into the outer atmosphere.

So far 200 people have paid for the sub-space experience. Princess Beatrice, whose partner Dave Clark works in the marketing department of Virgin Galactic, has said she plans to be the first Royal in space.

Former Dallas actress Victoria Principal, the designer Philippe Starck and wheelchair-bound Professor Stephen Hawking have also paid for trips.

The spokesman said: "Customers will have a two-hour flight, go up to 70 miles above the Earth and experience amazing views of the planet, G forces and weightlessness after a three-day training programme."

Branson has been involved in a number of world record-breaking attempts.

In 1986, he set a record for crossing the Atlantic in a powerboat. And in 1991 he crossed the Pacific in a balloon, breaking all existing records.

North Norfolk man's space dream

2008-04-25T07:42:00.001-07:00

"EVERYBODY has a dream, mine happens to be expensive."

The words of Richard Burr, the north Norfolk man set to join an elite rank by becoming a 'space tourist' at the eye watering cost of $200,000 - around £100,000.

The 52-year-old property developer and businessman from Aylsham sits at number 205 on the list of people getting ready to board the first Virgin Galactic flights, which will allow ordinary folk to become astronauts.

Mr Burr has already stumped up £75,000 of the cash but still has something of a wait.

Those taking part will board a horizontally launched purpose built 'mothership' aircraft, which carries with it the spaceship, before being flown to a height where the spaceship can be detached and propelled into orbit. Two pilots and six passengers will be in the spaceship on each flight.

In January, Mr Burr travelled to New York to meet with other prospective astronauts, Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson and to attend the launch of the final design plans for the aircraft and spaceship.

The process now should see the finished aircraft and spaceship “rolled out” by July, tests conducted for several months, licences awarded and the first commercial flights by the end of next year, said Mr Burr.

“Because I am not top of the list I would expect to be up in early 2010, although that could change of course according to the process taking longer, or people dropping out.

“It's very exciting of course, but I wouldn't say I was excited in a schoolboy way, although that will probably come as it nears.

“The prospect of looking out of the window and seeing the stars and the earth is an incredible thought.

“People will think it is a huge amount of money, but bear in mind that if you look back to the first trans Atlantic flights, people were paying what would now be around £30,000 to get to America.”

The trip itself will be made from New Mexico and will last about two hours, made up of an aircraft climb of an hour, a spaceship boost into space in less than two minutes, a 'zero g' weightlessness experience of four to five minutes, a re-entry into the atmosphere of two minutes and a glided landing of 50 minutes.

Virgin Galactic have stated they hope to fly 500 people in the first year and 50,000 in the first 10 years.

Visit www.virgingalactic.com for more information.

Arab company charters space craft in world first

2008-04-25T07:40:00.001-07:00

A Dubai-based Arab company has become the first ever in the world to charter a space craft for its top management, ArabianBusiness.com can reveal.

The company last week handed over $500,000 as a deposit to Virgin Galactic, to charter one of the company’s commercial spacecrafts.

Details of the company are likely to be made public in July this year. Sources suggest the two hour flight in space will take place some time in 2010.

The total deal, the first ever of its kind, is worth $1.2 million. It is understood the deal was done through Sharaf Travel, Virgin Galactic’s UAE agent.

Virgin Galactic is expected to begin its commercial space flights next year, with tickets for the first 100 passengers going for $200,000 per passenger.

The Virgin Galactic experience involves boarding SpaceShipTwo which is attached to a mother-ship known as WhiteKnightTwo.

Following a run-way take-off the space craft will climb to an altitude of 50,000 feet where the spaceship will be released and the rocket ignited.

The rocket burn acceleration powers the spaceship to the speed of sound in just 10 seconds, and over three times the speed of sound in under 30 seconds.

The G-force surge will push the clients back into their seats as they head into the darkness of space to an altitude of 110 kilometres above the earth's surface.

When the rocket motor shuts down, all passengers, who by this stage are officially ‘astronauts', will experience the silence of space, and majestic views of earth as they float around the large cabin in zero gravity for four minutes.

The spaceship returns to earth, passing back through the atmosphere using a unique wing feathering technology to ensure stability and to minimize heat intensity, before making a normal runway landing.

In total the space flight will last for around two hours.

Entrepreneur talks space travel

2008-04-13T11:00:00.001-07:00

Greg Olsen, scientist, businessman and astronaut, came to the College on March 26 to tell his story in the New Library Auditorium.

Olsen nearly flunked out of high school, failing trigonometry and graduating with an overall average of 70. Coaxed into college, Olsen received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and a master's degree in physics from Fairleigh Dickinson University. A doctorate in materials science from the University of Virginia followed afterwards.

From 1972-1983, Olsen worked as a research scientist for RCA labs. It was here where he got the idea to start his first company, Epitaxx.

"I had no background in business вЂ¦ until 1983 when I got the idea to start this tech company," Olsen said.

With $1.5 million in startup funds, the company focused on making fiber-optic detectors and soon employed up to 55 people and made $5 million a year. The company was bought out by Japanese company Nippon Sheet Glass for $12 million in 1990.

"In 1990 everybody thought Japan was going to rule the world economically," Olsen said. "We all hear about India and China now вЂ¦ Anybody who thinks the U.S. is gonna get left in the dust, just remember what happened in 1990."

Olsen started his second company, called Sensors Unlimited, in 1992. Sensors Unlimited was sold for $600 million in 2000 but Olsen bought the company back a year later for $6 million and later re-sold it for $60 million in 2003.

It was in June of that year that Olsen got the idea to travel into space.

"The inspiration to go to the International Space Station (ISS) came from this," Olsen said, holding up his coffee cup. "Every morning you can find me at the Starbucks on Nassau Street (in Princeton) reading the paper."

It was a chance reading during one particular Starbucks trip that introduced Olsen to Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, the first two private citizens to board the ISS.

"Have you ever had that feeling where you've seen something and you said to yourself, 'I have to do this?'" Olsen asked.

By April of 2004 Olsen was in Russia training for his spaceflight. In June of that year he was disqualified for having a black spot on his lung.

"That was a devastating experience for me," Olsen said.

He got clearance from American doctors, and pressed the issue with the Russian doctors until he was allowed back into the program in May 2005.

"By February I didn't think that I would get to fly into space, but I just kept at it," Olsen said.

In October of that year, he and two other astronauts launched from Russia.

Olsen showed videos of his trip on the ISS with instructions on how to drink water and eat food. He also demonstrated basic properties of physics using a floating notebook.

Of his experience, Olsen said he was happy with how everything turned out.

"I don't consider myself an astronaut, but I feel like I was properly trained," he said.

Currently, Olsen is the chief executive officer of GHO Ventures and, in addition to managing a winery in South Africa and a ranch in Montana, he funds "Angel Projects," which are startup companies that he believes show promise.

"I love startups," Olsen said. "I thought, why don't I try investing in others?"

By Cameron Prince

Next Space Tourist Takes Break from Spaceflight Training

2008-04-08T11:05:00.001-07:00

By Tariq Malik

NEW YORK - The next space tourist bound for the International Space Station (ISS) is taking a breather from spaceflight training as he prepares to ride a Russian rocket toward the orbiting laboratory later this year.

American computer game developer Richard Garriott, 46, has returned to the U.S. after an intense six weeks of Russian classes and Soyuz spacecraft training for his planned October flight to the ISS. The one-month rest comes between a series of trips to Russia's cosmonaut training center in Star City, where he and backup Nik Halik have been wading through the intricacies of Soyuz spaceflight.

"In the Soyuz, all of the buttons and things are labeled in Russian, so you need to be able to read and understand a few technical words," Garriott told SPACE.com Friday, adding that he spent four hours each day learning the new language. "There's no question that learning Russian is a little bit of a challenge."

Based in Austin, Texas, Garriott is paying about $30 million to fly to the ISS with two professional astronauts in October under an agreement between Russia's Federal Space Agency and the Virginia-based tourism firm Space Adventures, which brokered the flight. He plans to conduct Earth observations and protein crystal growth experiments during his mission and launched an educational contest for British students to devise their own tests that he could perform.

In between language lessons, Garriott and Halik spent four hours each day studying Soyuz spacecraft training manuals and exploring Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

"One of the things that I didn't know was there while we were kicking around was that they have a wonderful planetarium," Garriott said, adding that he and Halik hope to visit the planetarium during their next training session. "It's a surprisingly open place."

The two entrepreneurs were careful to keep out of restricted zones and adhere to training protocol. Russian space officials recently replaced South Korea's first astronaut choice, artificial intelligence expert Ko San, for an April 8 launch due to regulation infractions. Ko's backup, female mechanical engineer Yi So-yeon, will take his place during the upcoming spaceflight.

Halik, 38, is an Australian entrepreneur who is paying $3 million to serve as Garriott's backup and experience genuine spaceflight training.

"Though Nik and I had not really known each other before training together in Star City, it turns out we've lived very parallel lives," said Garriott, adding that both he and his backup have taken adventure trips to Antarctica, rode aboard submersibles down to the wreck of the Titanic, experienced weightless on aircraft and flown Russian MiG jets. "Because we have that same adventurous spirit and similar background, training together has been actually really convenient and also given us a well-rounded opportunity to share this experience together."

Garriott developed the Ultima computer game series and co-founded the Origins Systems computer game company as well as the North American branch of the online game developer NCsoft. He hopes to spend his month off from training to catching up with his work. But, Garriott added, he did happen to be in Russia training for spaceflight in early February, when his most recent game "Tabula Rasa" hit stores in Moscow in its Russian packaging.

"Getting a chance to sit down with the players was actually great fun for me and hopefully they enjoyed it as well," Garriott said.

Garriott has expressed an interest in paying an extra $15 million to stage the first spacewalk by a private spaceflyer, though whether the activity could come together in time for his flight is up in the air. He has already been fitted for his Russian Sokol spacesuit, the partial pressure garment that he will wear during launch and landing, but not one worthy of a spacewalk.

"Of course I would love to do it if it could be done," said Garriott, adding that he hopes to put together some sort of simple, feasible science experiment in case it opportunity arises.

Garriott will be the sixth paying visitor to the ISS, but the first American second-generation spaceflyer to reach orbit. His father, Owen Garriott, is a retired NASA astronaut who flew aboard the U.S. Skylab space station and shuttle Columbia, and will serve as chief scientist for the coming spaceflight.

"One of the more interesting aspects of working with my father on this flight is what an appreciation it's given me for the challenges that my dad faced during his time with NASA," the younger Garriott said. "The sense of urgency to get all your ducks in a row and get things lined up appropriately has been high."

Richard Garriott is chronicling his spaceflight training and mission at his personal Web site: www.richardinspace.com.

Love in Zero Gravity

2008-04-08T11:02:00.001-07:00

Boing Boing fan Sarah McKinley Oakes says,
This past weekend I went on a Zero-G flight out of Las Vegas, and was thrilled to see that they use shots of your flight in the training video (I loudly said 'I know her' and then realized that that was, of course, a lie). Thought you'd like to know, it was very cool.

While floating around in no gravity, my boyfriend proposed.

It was great.
Congratulations, Sarah! Link to their lovely Flickr set.

source

Space Adventures' Orbital Spaceflight Client, Richard Garriott, Announces Educational Partnership with Challenger Center for Space Science Education

2008-04-08T10:48:00.001-07:00

Richard Garriott is a preeminent game developer and son of NASA Skylab Astronaut Owen Garriott. As the next civilian to fly into space, Richard plans to follow the lead of Educator Astronaut Barbara Morgan, STS-118, through interactive lessons that will motivate and inspire students. His flight is currently scheduled for lift-off to the International Space Station on October 12, 2008. Richard is a former student of Dr. June Scobee Rodgers, the Founding Chairman of Challenger Center for Space Science Education and widow of that flight's Commander, Dick Scobee. After the tragic loss of the Challenger space shuttle crew, Richard worked with Dr. Scobee Rodgers on the design of the first Challenger Learning Center. There are now over 50 Challenger Learning Centers in the United States, Canada, England and South Korea. Richard will continue the mission of Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe, as did Barbara Morgan, as he delivers activities and challenges from the International Space Station. Garriott's flight activities have the potential to reach children across the globe as he reaches out from the first Challenger Learning Center off the planet.

Garriott plans to spend time before, during and after his flight working with students, teachers and the 50 Challenger Learning Centers located in the United States, England, Canada and South Korea. He plans to conduct a series of interactive webcasts associated with his spaceflight training in Russia; conduct podcasts discussing activities related to both his training and spaceflight; hold amateur ham radio conversations with students during his flight; and perform experiments that can be replicated by students using everyday objects to demonstrate important concepts in physics. Students can predict what might happen during the same experiment in the microgravity (weightless) environment of space.

Dr. June Scobee Rodgers plans to present lessons to students over the web in preparation for Richard Garriott’s flight. “Like father, like son,” says Dr. Rodgers, commenting on her former student's plans. “Dr. Owen Garriott also taught student science lessons from space on his Skylab mission, as Richard plans to do on his flight.” Richard Garriott’s experiments, webcasts, and podcasts about his flight will be available on the Challenger Center’s national website, www.challenger.org.

Challenger Center for Space Science Education was founded in 1986 by the families of the astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger 51-L mission. It is dedicated to the educational spirit of that mission and impacts over 300,000 students and 25,000 teachers each year. Challenger Learning Center programs at 50 centers around the world continue the crew's mission of engaging teachers and students in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. To locate a Challenger Learning Center near you, visit www.challenger.org.

Explorer Anousheh Ansari brought space down to Earth

2008-03-31T12:21:00.001-07:00

She is the first to sniff space and declare that it smelt like a burnt almond cookie.

In September, 2006, Anousheh Ansari became the world's first private female explorer and, without realizing it, the voice of the quotidian observer of the unknown.

She brought space down to Earth.

The first Iranian-born person in space described the difficulty of washing her hair in zero gravity and of her "internal organs doing a cha-cha inside my belly" when the Russian space capsule, Soyuz TMA-9, started its orbit of Earth before docking for an eight-day visit to the International Space Station.

"What happened with my blog and all the attention I was getting was unexpected," she says during a recent visit to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. The daily blog, the first to be written from space, received more than 50 million hits and elicited comments from people around the world.

"A lot of people saw hope," she says. "They were looking at me as one of the most unlikely candidates to be able to do something like this."

In fact, her journey into space is less impressive than the one that got her to the launch pad.

Five years after the Iranian revolution in 1979, she and her younger sister immigrated to the United States with their parents, who wanted their children to get a good education. When they arrived, they lived with an aunt for several months. They were not a wealthy family. "When we left, we basically left with nothing," she says. "We just packed our bags and came."

The transition to American life was not easy. A teenager of 17, she didn't speak a word of English. "Teenagers are a species all by themselves," she says. "They can be cruel, not warm and welcoming at times. I was just in high school to study. I just went to classes and did what I had to do."

She even had to shelve the idea of becoming an astronaut, which had been a dream from childhood. "When I came here, I thought to myself, 'I can be an astronaut now. I'm in America.' That's what I wanted to do - study astrophysics and become an astronaut ... [but] I wasn't a U.S. citizen and I figured, 'Well, what are my chances of becoming an astronaut?' I knew it was not very high, and I knew I had to study something so that I could get a job immediately out of college to support myself and help my family."

So she completed a degree in electrical and computer engineering followed by a master's in electrical engineering. "I had read that electrical engineering and telecommunications, especially, were a grow- ing field," she offers with a shrug in her finely tailored clothing.

In the early 1990s, she persuaded her husband, Hamid, and her brother-in-law, Amir, to help her start Telecom Technologies with their combined savings.

In 2001, the company was bought by Sonus Networks for about half a billion dollars.

Ms. Ansari had still not lost her passion for space. "When we had employee meetings, I would make all my managers dress up in Star Wars costumes, and they would enter the room with Star Wars music playing," she says with only a suggestion of a smile breaking her serious composure.

It was a meeting with Peter Diamandis, chairman and founder of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit educational organization, that would lead to her space travel. Mr. Diamandis was seeking funding for a competition that encouraged entrepreneurial initiatives to build the first non-government piloted spacecraft. He had heard of her fascination with space.

Ms. Ansari and her family decided to be title sponsors with a donation of $10-million (U.S.). Subsequently renamed the Ansari X Prize, the money was awarded in 2004 to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and well-known aviation designer Burt Rutan for their Space-

ShipOne.

The family also announced a partnership with Space Adventures Ltd. and the Russian Federal Space Agency to create commercial space vehicles. To understand the training required for space travel, and as a back-up to a civilian adventurer who was scheduled to fly, Ms. Ansari spent six months at Star City, the Russian cosmonaut facility outside Moscow. Already fluent in English, French and her native tongue, Farsi, she had to learn Russian. "Only three weeks before the flight, they told me that the person who was supposed

to fly failed his medical exam, and I had the opportunity

to do it. It was a complete

surprise."

The flight cost her $20-million. "The most memorable moment was when I first saw Earth from Soyuz. It was very emotional. I was crying," she says. "It was beautiful, an amazing image. It has been a year and a half, and I can see it, still, when I am telling you about it. There's almost a warmth coming from Earth. It is sort of glowing, and it's surrounded by darkness. It gives you a certain energy. You can feel that it is alive."

Since her return to Earth, Ms. Ansari has continued her upward trajectory with a guest appearance on Oprah Winfrey's television show and other talk shows, frequent invitations to speak and a memoir under way.

Commercial space travel will have a profound effect on the way people see the planet, she says. "When you're up there, you do look at the world differently. You do see a lot of possibilities for people working together. You see it as one. You're not looking at your country or your hometown. You're looking at Earth."

In 2006, with her family, she started another company, Prodea Systems, which is developing products for "the digital home" that would integrate services through the television, as one example. "The goal is that new technologies and services would be accessible to everyone, regardless of their technological savvy," she explains.

While her motive is entrepreneurial, it is more social than economic, she says. "Technology doesn't recognize any difference in race or religion or age ... and it has made us closer. It has cut through language barriers and distances."

Her schedule is hectic, the 41-year-old admits. "I spend 10 or 12 hours in the office working, and I think, 'Why am I doing this?' And I remember that I am here for a reason. I have a purpose. ...

"I think that 20 or 30 years from now, people will look back at this time as a great era of evolution for our species."

SARAH HAMPSON

Source

Space planes 'to meet big demand'

2008-03-28T11:31:00.001-07:00

Aerospace giant EADS says it will need a production line of rocket planes to satisfy the space tourism market.

The European company's Astrium division, makers of the Ariane rocket, has plans for a commercial vehicle to take ticketed passengers above 100km.

Its market assessment suggests there could be 15,000 people a year prepared to part with substantial sums of money for the ride of a lifetime.

Astrium anticipates it be will be producing about 10 planes a year.

"To satisfy the market you will need more planes than you think, because once there is regular operation, the price will decrease which means there will be more customers," Robert Laine, chief technical officer (CTO) of the pan-European company, told BBC News.

"It will develop towards a classical aeronautical business model. Someone will build the planes; somebody will operate them; somebody will sell the tickets; somebody will provide the accommodation - like any tourism."

The first tickets will retail in the region of 150,000-200,000 euros (£115,000-160,000).

Mr Laine was speaking in London at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, where he was delivering the 99th Kelvin Lecture.

Astrium does not intend to run a space tourism marketing operation itself. Rather, it intends simply to supply vehicles to those who will.

And although production numbers will not be in the same league as, say, Airbus or Boeing, they will be significant nonetheless.

Mr Laine said development of Astrium's rocket plane was proceeding apace.

Wind tunnel testing has proven the aerodynamic shape; and the vehicle's Romeo rocket engine which will take the plane above 100km has been ignited for burns that have run up to 31 seconds.

The engine will be using the combustion of a liquid oxygen-methane propellant to provide the more than 1km/s punch needed to break through the top of the Earth's atmosphere.

About 50% of the mass of the plane at take-off would be fuel.

The intention is to produce a vehicle that seats five individuals - one pilot and four passengers.

The production model will use normal jet engines to take off and climb to 12km.

From there, the rocket engine will kick the vehicle straight up, taking it beyond 60km in just 80 seconds. By the time the rocket shuts down, the craft should have sufficient velocity to carry it above 100km - into space.

As the plane then begins to fall back to Earth, the pilot will use small thrusters to control its attitude, keeping the plane's belly flat to the Earth.

"If you enter with the belly flat down then you expose a very large radius to the aerodynamic flux and that contains the temperature to an acceptable limit," explained Mr Laine.

"We calculate the temperature will be less than 100C on the surface of the wings."

When the plane slows to subsonic speed in the atmosphere, it will use its jet engines again to return to the airport.

The total journey time will be about one-and-a-half hours.

Mr Laine said the planes would have about a 10-year lifetime. They would be designed for ease of maintenance, with an operational schedule of one flight per week.

Although the rocket planes could take off and land from any airport, Astrium believes it is likely that special spaceports - possibly 10 worldwide - will operate in a few, restricted locations.

Northern Europe probably would not host one of these, Mr Laine speculated, because of the high density of other air traffic and because cloud would too frequently obscure the view of Earth.

"In Europe, I'd say the most likely location is around the Mediterranean. Why? Because there are blue skies most of the time, and because from 100km you can see mountains, the sea and the coast."

Cheaper space

The Astrium CTO acknowledged that Virgin Group boss Sir Richard Branson would be first into the market with rocket planes based on the award-winning and record-breaking SpaceShipOne concept.

But Mr Laine was confident an Astrium-fed business would be second, with a commercial service that began exactly five years after the agreement of a one-billion-euro financing deal.

He even hoped Sir Richard would be an Astrium customer - just as his airline business is a customer of the EADS Airbus division.

The CTO would not say how soon the initial financing would be in place, or reveal details about the identities of parties that were in discussion.

Long-term, Mr Laine said, space tourism had a major role to play in reducing the overall cost of space access.

He sees rocket planes being used for homeland security purposes as "quick satellites"; and as forerunners of superfast intercontinental passenger transporters.

"Today we don't know how to go to space cheaply. Being able to climb on a regular basis to 100km will give us the motivation to develop the plane that goes, not just up and down to the same place, but from here to the other side of the Earth.

"When the Ariane 5 takes off, 15 minutes later it is over Europe; and 45 minutes later it is over the Pacific. The fastest way is to go outside the atmosphere and that will be the future."

BBC

Next Space Tourist Takes Break from Spaceflight Training

2008-03-25T09:33:00.001-07:00

American computer game developer Richard Garriott, 46, has returned to the U.S. after an intense six weeks of Russian classes and Soyuz spacecraft training for his planned October flight to the ISS. The one-month rest comes between a series of trips to Russia's cosmonaut training center in Star City, where he and backup Nik Halik have been wading through the intricacies of Soyuz spaceflight.

In between language lessons, Garriott and Halik spent four hours each day studying Soyuz spacecraft training manuals and exploring Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

Halik, 38, is an Australian entrepreneur who is paying $3 million to serve as Garriott's backup and experience genuine spaceflight training.

"Getting a chance to sit down with the players was actually great fun for me and hopefully they enjoyed it as well," Garriott said.

"Of course I would love to do it if it could be done," said Garriott, adding that he hopes to put together some sort of simple, feasible science experiment in case it opportunity arises.

Richard Garriott is chronicling his spaceflight training and mission at his personal Web site: www.richardinspace.com.

Branson and his rocket

2008-03-25T09:23:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, an Australian stand-up comedian who is beyond cure, told a small frigid gathering in Mumbai, "How can they call an airline Virgin. It's terrifying. You know what virgin means? Never done it before." He surveyed the room with a blank face and said, "I want my airline to be called Slut."

In the past, far more serious men have wondered if people will feel comfortable flying at nearly the speed of sound, 10 kilometres above the earth, in a pressurized metal capsule called Virgin. Especially if they knew that the airline is owned by one Richard Branson who has escaped death on several occasions while trying to set speed records in planes, balloons and boats. He rappels down buildings too, and has aborted at least one such attempt midway after a sudden backache that wise women will call ‘age'. Yet, thousands have paid him good money against a promise that in about three years he will send them to space. Over 60,000 people have registered with his Virgin Galactic, 200 of them have even paid the entire ticket price of $200,000. One man exchanged his Virgin Atlantic frequent-flier miles for his seat. They hope to leave a golden desert in California and shoot 100 kilometres into space. "They will return too," Branson says, "Virgin Galactic is not where you send your mother-in-law on a one-way flight."

He is in his suite at the Hilton in Mumbai. Somewhere behind him, through the large indestructible glass window, I can see the Arabian Sea ablaze in the afternoon sun. Some people are hovering around in the room, one of them is his blonde secretary whose stretch pants seem aghast at the tightness of it all. And she sounds like a man.

Branson looks pensive and unremarkable. Even mature. But the folklore around him is inescapable. A 57-year-old Englishman who is believed to be worth about $8 billion; head of an empire that is involved in aviation, rail, energy, telephony, condoms, pickles and leisure, who famously said that he did not know the difference between net and gross; once a lover of many; a rare celebrity who has featured in a list of Britain's most beloved and also the most hated; a spectacle whose autobiography is foolishly called Losing My Virginity, and more admirably, a man whom Donald Trump hates for reasons other than the fact that Branson has hair. "I don't believe he is a billionaire," Trump once said. Nobody believes that about Trump, either.

In the opulent suite, Branson tries to be polite and measured but he is evidently tired. That morning he had strung himself 20 floors above the ground and glided down to launch Virgin Mobile in India. He was in a few meetings after that, all vouchsafed with stringent time slots by his assistants. But he was five minutes late for this interview because Sameera Reddy, the buoyant nymph, had spotted him in the hotel and had wanted a chat.

Branson readily admits that his flamboyance endangers the image of Virgin as one of the most respected brands in modern times. He looks at the floor and chuckles as he remembers the day when his balloon crashed into the Pacific. "We took out full page ads in newspapers that said, ‘Next time, Richard, take the plane." (Strangely, in an interview to the New Yorker he had said that the wording of the ad was, ‘Come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic'.)

"In this time and age, the things I do," he says, "is achro...anarcho...sorry... anachronistic. Actually, I am dyslexic." Taare Zameen Par missed this one. He is overtly embarrassed by the ordeal of pronouncing anachronistic. This shy face of Branson, so different from the image he has often tried to portray, this boyish sheepish face, I have seen before from as close.

Just over two years ago, his executives had agreed to play a cricket match with Mumbai's press club team. Branson arrived on the Oval Maidan flanked by a dozen white girls, all dressed in Virgin Atlantic's cabin crew uniform. They walked like doe. When Branson eventually got ready to bat there was a feeling that we will not measure up. The rumour was that the backyard of one of his homes was a cricket field complete with a pitch and all that. But he was bowled by the first ball. Since it was Richard, the umpire smiled kindly and called the delivery a no-ball. The second ball was slow. Branson was bowled again. He was bowled by the third ball too. I was at the Third Man position and as he walked back, I saw his face clearly. Beaming but demolished by embarrassment. However, for a man who did not know how to bat, he got a lot of publicity for playing cricket in Mumbai. He didn't field even.

"I am actually very shy," Branson says, "I was incapable of delivering a public speech until I was 25. Now I make half a million for just talking for charity. Not bad, eh? But I am still shy." Yet, he has received media space worth millions of dollars through relentless stunts. Once when British Airways, his bitter aviation rival, offloaded him from a flight, he held a press conference in the airport and made it a huge media event. British Airways was also involved in spreading propaganda against him. When he sued and won £610, he distributed it among his employees as "BA bonus". On another occasion, when his flight was delayed and he had to hire a chartered plane for $2,000, he divided the cost by the number of seats and went around the airport with a board that said something like, "Virgin Atlantic: Beef Island to Puerto Rico for $39".

Branson, through the creation of Virgin Galactic, comes across as a visionary today. So far, only 450 humans have ever been to space, almost all of them professional astronauts. Branson says he will send thousands out there. But some observers have voiced the concern that Branson's interest in space tourism is merely another attempt to seek publicity if not for himself, for the Virgin group. With an investment of about $120 million, an amount that is not very distant from how much global firms spend on brand building, Branson has bought the tag of space pioneer. A steal. But he says, "I am truly very excited by space tourism. I believe that the future of mankind is in space. Virgin Galactic will send 50 people to space every month. I expect this number to grow." He also believes that the future of aviation itself is inextricably linked to suborbital space travel. "In just 10 years time if everything goes well," he says, a plane from New York will head to space and use the gravity of Earth to fling itself above Sydney. "If we can bring that kind of technology to aviation, New York to Sydney is possible in 30 minutes."

His involvement in environmental concerns too is bitterly suspected by environmentalists. They claim his interest is not genuine, that he merely wants to throw money to buy a halo. Throughout the interview Branson consciously attempts to veer the conversation towards environment. He reminds me that he has pledged $3 billion over the next 10 years to aid the research and development of cleaner fuels. He has also announced a $25 million prize for anyone who can find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

"Increasingly, private enterprise is doing what governments used to do," he says, "Also, while the life of an average head of state is just a few years, a business chief can go on for decades. So companies are able to exhibit more stability than governments. But nothing can replace the good that an honest government can do."

It will be interesting to watch how Branson's future unfolds. Will his space tourism succeed? Will his billions clean the air? After all the publicity, if he fails to deliver then he will begin to feel as though the world has got a whiff of the liquid component of his SpaceShipOne's hybrid engine—compressed nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas of course.

Lottery-winning beneficiary: I'm heading to space

2008-03-20T08:19:00.002-07:00

An Auckland beneficiary who bought a lottery ticket on a whim is more than $5 million better off and hopes to travel into space.

The man, who wants to remain anonymous, was on a bike ride when he had a spur of the moment drink stop outside the Westview Superette in Titirangi, NZ Lotteries said.

After seeing an advertisement for the Big Wednesday jackpot, he bought a ticket, and yesterday discovered he was the big winner.

He won the first division prize package valued at $5,247,140, comprising $3 million in cash, an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, an Audi Q7, a $250,000 credit card, $250,000 worth of luxury travel, a $500,000 bach, a $750,000 luxury apartment and a boat.

He also won Big Wednesday's second division of $221,478 by covering heads and tails on his ticket.

The man collected his prize in Wellington today.

"People have always told me that you can't win these big prizes - but now I'm the lucky bugger this week", he said.

"I also want to look at travelling in real style - by booking a trip into space. It would be great to one of the first kiwis to make that trip."

Virgin founder Richard Branson is finalising plans to take paying passengers into space next year.

Virgin Galactic will take people 112km above the earth for about $200,000 per person.

The winner said his first call was to a family member to share his good news.

The next call? To Winz to cancel his benefit.

NZPA
source

BOXLEITNER KEEN TO GO INTO SPACE

2008-03-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

Movie & Entertainment News provided by World Entertainment News Network (www.wenn.com)

BABYLON 5 star BRUCE BOXLEITNER is desperate for Virgin bosses to drop the price of their upcoming shuttle trip - so he can afford to blast off.
The actor is on the Board Of Directors at the National Space Society but that's not helping him get a cheap space flight when the first Virgin Galactic shuttle takes off in 2010.
He moans, "I wish they'd hurry it along and make it cheaper. I'd love to do it, but it's like $200,000 per person.
"We should get a Screen Actors Guild ride going! I have a feeling it'll be the Scream Actors Guild.
"I've always been fascinated with the wide open spaces; it's the unknown. The closest I've been to space is Babylon 5 but I never actually left the planet." So far, the only celebrities onboard the first flight are Bryan Ferry and former Dallas star Victoria Principal.
Virgin Galactic director Alex Tai has revealed 80,000 people from 120 countries have shown an interest in the first space trip.

You may now float about the cabin

2008-03-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

'SPACE: The final frontier, to seek out new life and civilisations." So said Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise as he surveyed the expanding cosmos.

But exploration, discovery and adventure are not the sole domain of science fiction: they have always been defining elements of the human psyche.

Once mankind satisfied the lesser, more fundamental requirements such as food, shelter and community, we looked beyond the horizon and wondered, "What if?"

Sure, it took thousands of years for our sluggish and humble species to progress from canoes to steamships, yet much less than one hundred to go from powered flight to space travel.

From a traveller's perspective, now is the most exciting time in our species' existence.

Such have been the astounding technological advances that, in one lifetime, man has flown to the moon and now transverses every continent at an altitude of 30,000ft in the company of hundreds of others, enjoying the latest movies and gourmet meals in pressurised comfort. To many, it's even mundane.

Space travel fell somewhat flat after the Apollo program. Many pundits, such as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, predicted we'd be sticking flags in Mars and holidaying on the moon by now.

Somewhere along the way we were sidetracked – probably because our expensive, clumsy rockets weren't as reliable as we'd hoped. This is World War II technology, after all.

Riding what amounts to a ballistic missile still hasn't deterred some, despite a pricetag equivalent to the GDP of a small African republic.

At time of writing, there have been five "spaceflight participants" aboard the Russian Soyuz craft, each traveller paying a reported $20 million for the week-long joy ride to the International Space Station (ISS).

Tickets are now being sold for a planned flight to orbit the moon. Price? $100 million each.

Affordable space flight? Enter the X PRIZE Foundation, a non-profit body offering multi-million dollar awards for technological breakthroughs. The 2004 Ansari X PRIZE was won by famed aerospace designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen, who led the first private team to build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people 100km above the Earth. Pounced upon by Virgin supremo Sir Richard Branson, commercial flights are now tantalisingly close.

Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceline expects to launch about 500 passengers annually.

His proposed fleet of five spaceships will have a crew of two and just six passengers, paying US$200,000 ($215,000) each, flying to an altitude of about 110km – the very edge of space – to experience almost 10 minutes of weightlessness.

Unlike NASA's Space Shuttle, which uses huge and dangerous solid fuel rocket boosters, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo will launch from a jet-powered mother ship called WhiteKnightTwo, and use a single hybrid rocket motor to reach its peak sub-orbital altitude. And because the craft will only travel at around 4000km/h, it will not require heatshields for re-entry.

Branson appointed "space agents" last year, and Gil McLachlan of Harvey World Travel in Manly is one.

"There are at least 10 Australians fully paid up for the flight," said Mr McLachlan, "and there will be more in the next 12 months, for sure."

One such passenger eagerly awaiting his moment on the launch pad is Wilson da Silva, editor of Australian science magazine Cosmos, whose ticket was one of four bought by Dr Alan Finkel, the publication's chairman.

"Hard to believe that it's really going to happen," says da Silva with obvious delight. "It's been a dream of mine since I was a kid."

In Clarke's seminal 1968 work 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr Heywood Floyd settles into the Orbiter Hilton for a family video call at a rather clunky terminal.

The choice of the Hilton name for that movie was no coincidence; it was a carefully engineered piece of product placement. William Barron Hilton I, the hotelier and grandfather of the famous Hilton sisters, bravely predicted in 1967: "When space scientists make it physically feasible to establish hotels in space and to transport people, the hotel industry will meet the challenge."

Beyond an orbiting hotel, his plans extended to the Lunar Hilton. "To start, we'll have only three floors, which will eliminate elevators and minimise power requirements," he said.

"The multi-storied underground hotel will come later.

"But – and this is very important – in almost every respect the Lunar Hilton will be physically like an Earth Hilton."

But Hilton appears to have lost the inside running to Branson and Robert T. Bigelow, a rival hotelier who is now an aerospace magnate. His Genesis modules are already in space, testing the concept of inflatable habitats for possible "hotel" adaptation.

For most of us reading this far, the reality of space flight will remain a fantasy, experienced vicariously in the Sensurround stadium of the cinema.

But the excitement of weightlessness can be achieved at Kennedy Space Centre, in Florida, on a Zero Gravity flight aboard G-Force One, the plane used to train NASA astronauts and film star Tom Hanks for Apollo 13. For $3500, you even get a DVD of your flight. I predict, however, that theme park, holodeck-style virtual reality will cater for the masses long before actual space flight does.

After all, it was to such a synthetic environment that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's homesick space adventurers went to "get away from it all".

As for the visionary Roddenberry ... his one-way trip into space was in an urn.

The Sunday Telegraph

Sharaf Travel & Virgin Galactic Mid East tempt would-be astronauts with 'a taste of space'

2008-03-13T11:54:00.001-07:00

Dubai headquartered Sharaf Travel and the Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Office in the Middle East has launched “A Taste of Space”. The new package has been designed to tempt would-be astronauts for the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital flights slated to commence end of 2009.

“Following the Global Accredited Space Agent Forum earlier this year where I underwent the Virgin Galactic astronaut training in the centrifuge for myself, I wanted to make this experience available to the people of the Middle East. ‘A Taste of Space’ is definitely for people looking for something unusual for their next short break and will give potential customers the opportunity to quell any fears with the nearest thing to real-life space travel without leaving earth,” said Sharon Garrett, Head of Space Marketing & PR, Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Office, Middle East.

According to Garrett, the training for the sub-orbital space flight at the Nastar Centre will equip participants with the skills they require for Anti-G Straining Maneuvers and to fully understand the physiological effects of space flight before they even set foot into the centrifuge.

“The training is fascinating, yet easy to understand. The team at the Nastar Center make you feel incredibly comfortable and instill confidence. I know that everyone who decides to take advantage of ‘A Taste of Space’ will sign up for the real thing with Virgin Galactic,” she said.

Explaining her own experience, Garrett says, “…the experience was one of the best of my life. I was a little anxious but once I underwent the training and stepped into the centrifuge, which is kitted out with full visuals and sound I had the most wonderful time. I felt as though I really was an astronaut !”

XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES ANNOUNCES 'WORLD'S FIRST SPACE CRUISE' WEEK...

2008-03-08T13:05:00.001-08:00

SPACE CRUISE PLANNED IN APRIL 2009... XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES is bringing a few famous astronauts aboard the yacht Sea Dream to select several passengers for a future sub-orbital spaceflight. Participants will experience weightlessness on a Zero-G flight from the Kennedy Space Center and G forces during space training.

A Florida company is bringing several U S Hall of Fame Astronauts on the luxury yacht Sea Dream to select future sub-orbital space participants during their 'Space Cruise' week event in April 2009. According to Mitchell J Schultz, it's Director, “ninety-six possible participants from around the globe are expected to register and become a part of space history.”

As the opportunity for commercial human spaceflight approaches, XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES will enable a number of their participants to be selected and take part in this newest advent of excitement and exploration for man......by becoming a passenger on a future sub-orbital spaceflight.

Schultz further elaborates “with chances no greater than one out of sixteen and with a week full of stimulating space related events, participants will thrill to the experience of a lifetime as they schmooze with others of similar interests and mingle with U S Hall of Fame Astronauts that are all part of the festivities.”

In addition, XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES will bring participants to Kennedy Space Center for a variety of special events including a chartered Zero-G flight, where each person will receive a personalized flight suit along with photos and a DVD of their experience. Participants will also receive a special two day space training program at NASTAR, near Philadelphia, where NASA has trained several Astronauts.

Ever since the dawn of early human spaceflight in the 1960's, mans desire to experience the awe of space, weightlessness and feel the power of rockets and G forces has excited many to wonder if and when will this opportunity be within reach. Now, it appears that the time is almost at hand with the successful flight of SpaceShipOne in October 2004 and entering the world into a commercial sub-orbital space race.

With costs ranging from $98,000 to $250,000 for a seat, XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES has put together a program for $35,000 that Schultz claims “will allow all our participants an opportunity to not only taste the flavors of a space trip, with their space training and weightless flight experience, but will also send up to six lucky participants on a future sub-orbital spaceflight with an authorized FAA licensed carrier or provide for a payment of $150,000 to each of the six if there are no scheduled flights or departures by April 30, 2012.”

Mitchell J Schultz is an experienced adventurer, world traveler and avid space enthusiast. Traveling for over 40 years, he has visited over 50 countries and has founded XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES, LLC to market the making of 'Dreams to Reality' for the true space adventurer. Discriminating travelers with the inclination and the budget to take the space cruise will participate in the world's most exhilarating week of space related events and activities culminating with sending participants on a future sub-orbital spaceflight that will forever become one of their most memorable experiences.

For more information visit www.XtraOrdinaryAdventures.com

The Stars: Our Destination

2008-03-04T09:41:00.001-08:00

Vacations in space and time

Forty years ago it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Now it is a small step for anyone who dares.
For the last four decades, space flight has been neglected as a primary conduit to human evolution. Popular opinion sees space flight as a sidebar to human development. Even NASA, with their use of aging, decrepit and obsolete shuttles, appears to believe the same. But fear not, for our savior has arrived in the form of a virgin. Well, the Virgin Galactic program that is. Virgin has taken the initiative in commercializing space

Image courtesy of virgin galactic, design by sky 26
travel as a luxury for those who can afford it

The dream of everyday space flight has been around a long time. But, while science fiction has been escalating in the last decade with advanced computer-generated graphics, society has largely forgotten actual space exploration. In the mid-20th century, the United States and the former Soviet Union were feverishly involved in pushing space exploration. It seemed that, like in Star Trek, space exploration was best executed by the government.
In the 1980s, NASA began to launch shuttles that took off from and landed on Earth more than once. These shuttles cut down on the cost of development. The down side of the shuttle, however, was they offered no progression. The need to develop new models was minimal.
Since then, however, the idea of international cooperation has inspired multiple governments to join together and build the International Space Station. Bent on scientific discovery rather than territorial expansion, the station has ended much of the exploration being done by governments. The weight of exploration is now left to the private sector. With little room being left on Earth to expand empires, corporations like Virgin have seized the opportunity to expand their market into space. It offers free expansion as no one currently owns space.
Further initiative came from the Ansari X prize. It inspired innovators and dreamers to build the first commercial sub-orbital space craft. Many competitors strove to reach the goal and win the prize: $10 million. It was a company named Scaled Composites, founded by Burt Rutan, that eventually designed the winner. Named SpaceShipOne, it flew at an altitude of more than 100 kilometres. The design of SpaceShipOne is simple and efficient, which makes it significantly less expensive than NASA’s fuel-guzzling shuttles.
SpaceShipOne uses a form of biofuel. The fuel is practical enough to allow the ship to reach sub-orbit, but requires less than half of what a normal shuttle does. To achieve optimal efficiency, Scaled Composites attached the SpaceShipOne to WhiteKnightOne, an aircraft. Instead of launching from the ground, ShipShipOne launches after becoming airborne. This technique allows for even more efficiency.
The ship’s efficiency was what drew Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson. The company was inspired to begin its own attempts at building a commercially viable passenger space craft. Based on the SpaceShipOne’s design, SpaceShipTwo has become Virgin Galactic’s platform for allowing private citizens to visit space.
“It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue when he explained clearly and concisely to the BBC that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible and start doing things up there that we have been doing on planet Earth, but in a much more efficient manner,” Branson said at SpaceShipTwo’s unveiling.
Branson seemed sincere when he said that space flight is essential to human development. Without prospects of commercial success, however, Virgin Galactic would be unable to justify their investment to stockholders.
That profit requirement means a ticket to space does not come cheap. Current pricing places the cost of a ticket at $200,000 US a seat. The ticket will buy tourists a several minute journey at sub-orbital altitudes.
Though the initial price of a ticket will prove far out of reach for most consumers, it is expected to incrementally decrease as the program continues to pick up speed. After a few years and a few hundred people, the price of a ticket will most likely go down to $20,000 US a piece.
There are others, however, who are finding a way around paying the hefty fee. A British businessman was able to exchange two million Air Miles points for a ticket aboard one of the first flights. However, for the majority of people, $20,000 is far too expensive, even if it is to witness something as spectacular as seeing planet Earth from space.
Yet Branson sees this as just the beginning of better things to come for the industry.
“With the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilization 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.”
Not only would space be a reasonable way to guarantee survival of the species, it would also guarantee optimal profit should Virgin Galactic hold a monopoly on commercial space flight. However, without a profit, there would be no motivation for space tourism in the first place.
Several companies, such as Rocketplane Limited, Space Adventures and EADS Astrium, have announced their intention to be commercial spaceflight agencies. There is no doubt that in the future, spaceflight will become a standard of travel.
For Virgin Galactic, however, tourism is just the beginning. The company will most likely expand from tourism to a more lucrative industry like transportation from one side of the Earth to the other. Instead of taking a day to travel to Japan, a spaceship capable of holding up to 100 passengers could cut that time significantly.
The advantages of commercial space flight are numerous. Its ability to push innovation is already taking the place of NASA. Government will always play a role to some degree, but ventures such as asteroid mining, solar energy collectors and colonization will be ideal for corporations to invest their time and money into because of the potential for maximum profit.
Although governments could plan and build environments on other planets to house humans, it would be capitalism that forces the economy and infrastructure. What drives people to exotic places is not just a sense of adventure but, like with any new frontier, the possibility of discovering a better life with better job opportunities. Those jobs will be provided by companies like Virgin.
Relatively speaking, there are still more than enough complications prolonging spaceflight developments. While interplanetary exploration is accepted as a future prospect for mankind, interstellar spaceflight is a bit more complicated with the vast gaps between stars. It would currently take centuries to get to the nearest star systems using the most powerful propulsion methods currently available. Though most of us will not be able to see the interstellar steps, we will be alive to see the first true steps of space exploration.

Written by Brent Rose, Contributor

An interview with Richard Garriott

2008-02-20T22:44:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-20T22:33:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-20T21:39:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-13T02:22:00.001-08:00

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)

2008-02-09T12:52:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-08T11:32:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-05T10:51:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

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.

Source

Space Adventures’ Orbital Spaceflight Client, Richard Garriott, Begins Cosmonaut Training for October Spaceflight Launch

2008-01-28T10:23:00.001-08:00

Garriott’s mission to include scientific and environmental research,
and educational outreach

Space Adventures, Ltd., the world’s leading space experiences company, announced today that famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia in preparation for a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) currently planned for October.

“I am quite excited to be in training now and I look forward to all aspects that it will entail,” said Richard Garriott. “But, I am particularly enthusiastic to be here in Star City, as a resident, with its amazing history of space exploration. I’m honored to surround myself with its people and I am determined to learn as much as I possibly can, inside and outside the classroom.”

Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight will be the first in a series of missions that will accommodate commercial activity aboard the ISS. Involvement from the private sector will include scientific and environmental research and educational outreach programming.

“Since announcing Richard’s intent to fly, we have been contacted by numerous corporations and non-profits seeking ways in which to participate in his space mission,” said Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures. “It is a very rare occasion when so many commercial opportunities are available during one spaceflight. In the coming months, we will be announcing Richard’s mission partners and details on his planned on-orbit activities.”

Space Adventures made history in 2001 by organizing the mission of the first private space explorer. Now, the company continues to bring innovation to manned spaceflight by enabling corporate and non-profit entities to participate in commercial endeavors on the planet’s only orbiting outpost.

Interested parties, including commercial and non-profit entities and space enthusiasts, can get involved in Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight via his web site (www.richardinspace.com). Mr. Garriott will be updating the site continuously via photos, blog entries and individuals can submit questions and suggestions for his mission activities. “I want to involve as many people as possible in my mission,” said Mr. Garriott.

About Richard Garriott:

Richard Garriott is best known as a key figure in the computer gaming field. He was one of the earliest and most successful game developers. Mr. Garriott developed the Ultima series which remains the longest running computer game franchise, and with his brother, Robert, he founded Origin Systems, one of the most respected PC game developers and publishers. Richard also created Ultima Online, which ushered in the new massively multi-player online (MMO) genre, the fastest growing segment in computer gaming today. More recently, he co-founded the North American arm of NCsoft (www.PlayNC.com), the world’s largest online game developer and publisher. In November 2007, his latest game, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, launched in North America and in the European Union. For more information, please visit www.rgtr.com.

About Space Adventures:

Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world’s first private space explorers: Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

Serge Dive Interviews: Carolyn Wincer, Head of Astronaut Sales, Virgin Galactic

2008-01-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

Sir Richard Branson always fantasised about space travel. So when Dr Peter Diamandis dreamt up the $10m (£4.8m) Ansari X-Prize - the inspiration for private space travel - aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Branson teamed up. In June 2004, SpaceShipOne successfully completed her first test flight.

- What exactly is the Virgin Galactic experience?

It is a sub-orbital spaceflight which will be available to the paying public. Following astronaut training the space tourists take the SpaceShipTwo flight. The climb up to 50,000ft for the air launch will afford amazing views. After a brief freefall when SpaceShipTwo drops from her mothership, the rocket burn will push them back in their seats as the spacecraft accelerates to supersonic eye-watering speeds within 10 seconds of ignition, then to almost four times the speed of sound in 30 seconds. The sky turns from blue to black as they are propelled almost vertically out of Earth's atmosphere and into space.

The rocket engine will be shut off to reveal instant silence. Astronauts will have 1,000km visibility with the thin blue line of the atmosphere, the blackness of space and the curvature of Earth plain to see, all while floating weightless around the cabin. After a few minutes, they will begin to feel Earth's gravity pulling them back home, peaking at 6 Gs during a carefree and relatively heat-free re-entry. After a 45-minute glide back to the spaceport, they will greet their loved ones and be given their Virgin Galactic astronaut wings. All for just $200,000 (£96,900).

- How have Virgin Galactic sales gone to date?

Since 2005, more than 200 people from 31 countries have paid a deposit, and some 70,000 people from around the world have expressed interest. We also have over 82 'accredited space agents' in 17 countries, currently accounting for 50% of sales.

Tell us about the involvement you have had with Philippe Starck and Stephen Hawking...

Philippe is amazing to work with and we feel incredibly privileged to have his creative input. He provided the inspiration for our brand and ensures all aspects of design maintain brand integrity.

Professor Stephen Hawking has a deep desire to go to space and we hope to help him fulfil that. He has contributed so much to our understanding of the universe and inspired people to look for answers to some of the biggest questions ever asked - namely, how did we get here?

- Is space travel the future of luxury travel?

I think it is the new frontier of luxury travel. Within 10 to 15 years, people will be visiting hotels in orbit, shortly followed by holidays to the moon and hopefully beyond. I hope that in 40 or 50 years' time we will have managed to create a vibrant industry enabling tens of thousands of people to work, live and holiday in space, and one that has made positive contributions to the issues facing our planet.

- Which country will use Virgin Galactic the most?

The US is the most important, with around 50% of sales to date. Thankfully, our price is in US dollars so Americans are still comfortable with buying.

- Which luxury companies do you respect?

I hugely admire Virtuoso. Matthew Upchurch has created a dynamic and innovative organisation. He has unbelievable foresight: about 10 years ago when everyone else was saying that travel agents were a dying breed, he instinctively knew that travellers were always going to need them.

- What mistakes have you learned most from?

Thinking if successful companies do things a certain way there is a good reason for that, and we should do it that way too. It couldn't be further from the truth.

- What is the key driver for luxury travel?

Accessibility. As a destination or experience becomes more accessible, the high end of the market drops it like a hot cake and moves onto something more exclusive, or at the very least, more expensive. Only product innovation, coupled with courage, can keep a company exclusive in the eyes of the luxury traveller.

- What advice would you give the industry?

Define your values as a company. Words like 'honest' and 'exciting' make excellent brand values.

- Serge Dive is one of the three founding members of the International Luxury Travel Market, held in Cannes.

ETC's NASTAR Center Announces the Launch of New Air and Space Adventure Programs

2008-01-20T07:50:00.001-08:00

Southampton, PA: January 16, 2008 - Environmental Tectonics Corporation's (AMEX:ETC) ("ETC" or the "Company") National Aerospace Training and Research Center (NASTARSM Center) announced today that it has launched its Air and Space Adventure Programs, a series of programs designed to provide realistic flight experiences for astronaut and fighter pilot enthusiasts alike. The NASTARSM Center is now offering 2-hour, half-day, full-day, and 2-day combo programs that simulate fast jet flights and space voyages.

NASTARSM Center is doing this with the same technology it uses to train military fighter pilots and Virgin Galactic space passengers. With these programs, the general public can come to the NASTARSM Center and find out what it is like to fly a high-performance jet or blast off into outer space. They can do this just for fun, or to enhance their knowledge and test their aptitude pulling G's for those interested in signing up for a real space launch or becoming a fighter pilot.

Glen King, COO of the NASTARSM Center, commented, "We are proud, and excited to bring these programs to the general public. Adventurers who have always wanted to fly a fast jet or launch into space can test their personal limits, and push the envelop of their aircraft or spacecraft in a safe environment. We provide each adventurer with the training and the tools to maximize their experience and successfully engage a bogie, or sustain the G's of re-entry from an Orbital flight."

The NASTARSM Center is providing this service on the world's only High Performance Human Centrifuge, which realistically replicates the flight dynamics of a high-performance jet, while providing a realistic cockpits and visual environments, and the actual sustained Gs one would experience while in flight. Gs are the variable force one feels while flying; one G equals the pull of Earth's gravity, and customers engaging the Air Adventure programs can experience up to 6 Gs, or 6 times the natural pull of the Earth.

For the Space Adventurer, customers can experience an authentic space launch profile, complete with the thrill of boosting into space, a visual overview of the Earth, and simulated weightlessness, and then the G forces of re-entry. As the official space-training provider for Virgin Galactic, the NASTARSM Center has trained many their customers already to properly prepare themselves for their actual space launch. The NASTARSM Center brings the same level of high-quality simulation to the launch experience, giving Air and Space Adventure Program customers a thrill they'll never forget.

The NASTARSM Center has several programs to choose from that accommodate different goals and desires. Customers can sign up individually, or in groups. For more information, and to view the Air and Space Adventures video, visit

www.NASTARcenter.com/adventures.

The first Indian space tourist

2008-01-13T13:11:00.001-08:00

Ahmedabad: A 21-year-old science graduate from Ahmedabad has won the `Bindaas Go to Space Contest' on a TV channel. And with that he will also become the first Indian space tourist.

Meet Hardik Gajjar – he has own won the `Bindaas Go to Space Contest' on a TV channel.

Congratulatory messages are pouring in ever since news spread that he's won a TV channel contest to secure a chance to go into space.

His passion for song, dance, humour and mimicry has won him several awards. But this surely is the highest honour that he could have ever imagined.

Asked in the initial rounds of the contest why he wants to go into space, Hardik said, “I told them its because I wanted to know how one answers nature's call in space."

But the contest to become the first Indian space tourist was not easy. Seven finalists from across the country battled it out, testing their wit, general knowledge and ability to adapt to different situations.

Hardik, who will be formally declared winner on Sunday, will train at NASA. The rocket plane XP commandeered by former NASA astronaut John Herrington will take him into space next year. Hardik is still at a loss of words to describe his luck.

“I have no words to express myself, may be my expressions can, " Hardik added.

And the family is overjoyed as well.

Hardik's sister Amita said, "We are all excited and happy. Its great that he will go into space."

Hardik’s feat is not just about winning a talent competition. In doing so, he has come one of a billion Indians to be able to visit space.

Source: ibnlive.com

Do you want to join the 68 - mile high club with Richard Branson?

2008-01-08T10:25:00.001-08:00

By Damon Syson

The ultimate holiday destination is not longer a seven-star hotel or a remote Caribbean island. In fact it is only 68 miles away - yet it will cost you £300k to get there. Richard Branson takes LIVE on an exclusive tour of his space centre

Hi, I'm Richard Branson and my hobbies are… "mad sports, I suppose."

Branson, his 22-year-old son Sam and I are sitting in the classroom of the National Aerospace Training and Research Center (Nastar) in Pennsylvania.

We're preparing to experience a simulated suborbital space flight.

Our instructor, Glenn King, complete with military-style short hair, has introduced himself and now it's the turn of his pupils.

Richard Branson in the cockpit of the space flight simulator

King is a former jet pilot and US Special Forces HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) skydiving instructor, with 1,200 jumps to his name.

Beside him is a lugubrious-looking doctor who will be monitoring our hearts with an electrocardiogram during the flight.

"I'm here to ensure you have a safe day," he says solemnly. "But if you have an unsafe day, we can handle that as well."

This is the "academic" part of today's programme – a crash course in the effects of G-force.

During today's "flight" in the £15 million centrifuge chamber, we will be subjected to a maximum of 6G.

King explains that high G-forces cause blood to pool in your lower extremities, depriving the brain of oxygen.

This can result in G-loc – loss of consciousness.

"Just enjoy yourself," he says.

"You'll feel your face pulling and your voice will change – but that's all normal.

"Try touching your nose. But be careful not to poke yourself in the eye, because at 6G your hand is six times heavier."

We troop upstairs to a viewing room above the chamber while Branson takes his place in the gondola at the end of a 25ft-long rotating steel arm.

Settling into the seat, he looks nervous.

He runs his hand through his hair and chews his lower lip. A "launch attendant" tightens his straps, clips a pulse oximeter on to his index finger and gives him a final good-luck pat on the shoulder before closing the metal door with a resounding clunk.

Branson is now alone in the cockpit. He's still chatting and cracking jokes but beneath the trademark grin his teeth are gritted.

There's a mild jolt as the 4,000hp engine whirs into action, and then a synthetic-sounding female voice comes over the intercom: "Release from White KnightTwo begins in five… four… three… two… one."

The cockpit lurches forward. "OK, Richard, you're in flight at 50,000ft,~" says King. "Enjoy your ride."

The massive steel arm begins its sweep round the chamber, and Branson's body is pinned back into the seat, his mouth pulled into a taut grimace.

As his vocal cords are pushed against his spine, his voice sounds strangled. But this doesn't stop him breaking into a huge grin. "Yes!" he shouts. "We're going to space!"

Then it's my turn. I'm taken into a medical room, where the doctor takes my pulse before attaching ECG pads to my chest.

On the way to the chamber I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about but I have to admit I am nervous.

As I'm strapped into the pod, a familiar voice comes over the intercom. "It's Richard here. I just wanted to wish you luck. Have a great trip."

The gondola then pitches forward and I'm off. The initial "ascent" lasts 70 seconds and feels like the most intense curve of a truly gut-churning roller-coaster.

I find myself grimacing involuntarily and my chest feels as if it has a heavy weight pressing on it.

I concentrate on pushing down with my feet and tensing my legs as I have been taught.

Thankfully, before I know it the worst is over and I'm able to relax and enjoy the ride.

The most surprising thing are the visuals.

With three screens in front of you and various cool-looking dials, you really do feel like you're in a spaceship.

The rear-view screen is especially impressive – I watch the coast of southern California vanishing behind me before everything suddenly goes quiet and black and I'm in space.

On the way down, the feeling is even more bizarre.

My cheeks are pulled back and it feels as if a hippo is sitting on my lap.

But it's only a minor discomfort, and by concentrating on my breathing I'm able to relax and enjoy the weirdness of it all.

I have experienced a simulation of space travel, but within two years, customers will be doing it for real on Branson's space-tourism venture.

Two hundred people have already signed up to go into space with Virgin Galactic.

Those who have stumped up the $200,000 (£100,000) for the first 100 seats will have a three-hour round trip and join a seriously exclusive club.

The vessel, SpaceShipTwo, will not be able to achieve orbit but will carry passengers on brief ballistic arcs outside the atmosphere, 68 miles above Earth.

There they will experience four minutes of weightlessness, the total silence of space and one hell of a view.

Unclipping their seatbelts and floating around the cabin, the "tourists" will be surrounded by the darkness of space but able to see the curvature of the Earth and 1,000 miles in any direction.

So from the north of Scotland you could see Iceland, the Norwegian fjords and the length of Britain.

The experience will be brief.

The "slingshot" method means the craft skims the edge of space then falls back.

The spacecraft will pass back into the atmosphere, gliding to Earth and making a normal runway landing.

On the inaugural flight, Branson has decided to take his family – his parents, Eve, 83, and Ted, 91, his daughter Holly, 26, and his son, Sam.

The final seat will be occupied by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who designed Virgin Galactic's prototype spacecraft.

It's not every day you see a knight of the realm, a man with a personal fortune of £4 billion, standing before you wearing only socks, pants and a grey vest.

But then again, Sir Richard Branson is no ordinary multi-billionaire.

It's Sunday night and he's just flown into Philadelphia from Necker Island (the 74-acre private retreat in the British Virgin Islands that he bought for £180,000 in 1978) and come straight to the hotel room for his Live photo-shoot.

With David Bowie's Space Oddity playing in the background, the photographer gestures to the space suit we've provided and asks hesitantly, "We were wondering if you'd wear this, Richard."

Branson starts unbuckling his belt…

We'd been warned that he was tired, but you wouldn't know it.

The veteran of thousands of photo-shoots, he gets to work without fuss.

"Can we have you smiling, please, Richard?"

"It's a lot easier when there's a pretty girl behind you," he says, grinning cheekily at the make-up artist, the first of a succession of minor flirtations he conducts with several attractive females in the vicinity.

Branson is an old-school ladies' man. If it moves he will flirt with it, even though he has been with his wife, Joan, for more than 30 years.

Although you wouldn't know it at the time, he confesses later that he felt uneasy about donning the space suit.

He is no stranger to dressing up for the cause but this time he thinks the product is dramatic enough without him needing to try too hard.

He's also aware of claims by some that he is a chancer who survives on publicity stunts.

"I think we can be pretty cool about this one," he says over dinner that evening.

"I think it will promote itself. Once we unveil what the spaceship looks like, it's so breathtaking it'll sell itself."

This uncharacteristic coyness could also be the result of a nasty scare six weeks ago when Branson jumped off the 407ft Palms Hotel in Las Vegas in a parachute harness to promote the launch of his no-frills US airline Virgin America.

Instead of gliding smoothly to the ground, he smashed into the side of the building.

When I ask him if he still considers himself an adrenaline junkie, he replies: "Was I ever an adrenaline junkie? Maybe I was. Well, having nearly killed myself when I jumped off that building, I guess not any more.

"I hit the building once, fortunately on my backside. Then I hit it again, and the second time I thought, “****, I've broken my back.”

"When I got to the bottom I felt like a rag doll. I had no idea what damage I'd done. Fortunately, it was mainly just to my ego."

Branson may have a reputation as a daredevil but he needs to play that down over the next couple of years.

Convincing the public that you can safely transport them beyond the Earth's atmosphere in a massive firework is a lot harder if people think of you as someone who has a habit of crashing into things.

As things stand, there is no insurance available to Virgin Galactic's customers, although companies are looking into it.

Because space tourism is in its infancy, underwriters are still assessing the risks involved.

But Branson is keen to stress that his latest endeavour is the opposite of an adrenaline ride.

"Virgin Galactic is all about making space travel comfortable and safe," he says.

"That's the only way we're going to pull it off.

"It's potentially like being at the beginning of transatlantic air travel. Those flights were very expensive in the Twenties.

"But after 20 or 30 years most people had a chance of experiencing it once in their lives.

"It's our aim to get the price down to a level where people can think, “Am I going to go to Australia on holiday – or am I going to go into space?”"

Will Whitehorn – president of Virgin Galactic and one of Branson's most trusted consiglieri – claims that making Virgin Galactic a profitable business will take about three years of flying.

"Our business plan depends on us taking up about 40,000 people in ten years.

"But if we're successful in filling all the flights, we'll be profitable within three years.

"Once we've achieved that we can start to bring down the price.

"Our ambition is to begin reducing the price by year five so that by the end of a ten-year programme the cost in today's money will be about $75,000 (£38,000). At that point the market will grow exponentially."

Whitehorn dimisses the suggestion that space tourism already exists in the form of Space Adventures, a company that will arrange a stay on the International Space Station – assuming you have £10 million and nine months of your life to spare.

"Space Adventures allows people to join a Russian mission as private individuals – for a large fee," says Whitehorn. "That's not tourism."

The long-term plan is for Virgin Galactic's space craft, SpaceShipTwo, to be able to take off from any number of locations.

It is already planning flights from Kiruna in northern Sweden, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which they hope will be able to travel through the aurora borealis.

"Nobody knows what that looks like from inside," says Whitehorn.

"Although people have fired test rockets underneath it and the Space Shuttle has photographed it from above, no human being has actually been through the aurora borealis.

"We imagine it will look very ethereal, like a mist of ionised particles."

But environmentalists are far from excited by the prospect.

Friends of the Earth has branded Virgin Galactic's plans "elitist and irresponsible".

Whitehorn counters that the CO2 emissions per passenger for a suborbital space trip will be 25 per cent lower than a return flight from London to New York.

"The carbon-composite structure of WhiteKnightTwo [the mothership that carries the spacecraft up to 50,000ft] is extremely light and therefore very efficient," he says.

"It has the wingspan of a Boeing 757 but you can stand at one end and lift it."

Branson himself is a relatively new convert to the environmental cause.

Formerly a climate-change sceptic, his Damascene moment occurred when Al Gore popped round for dinner and gave him a two-hour lecture.

Since then Branson has been filled with evangelical zeal.

In 2006, as part of the Clinton Global Initiative, he pledged to direct all the profits from Virgin's transport sectors, including Virgin Atlantic – an estimated £1.5 billion over ten years – to Virgin Fuels, dedicated to developing alternative, environmentally friendly fuel sources.

But it can't be easy being an environmentalist when you own an airline; life must have been much simpler before the scales were lifted from his eyes.

"Yes, much simpler" he agrees.

Branson has also set up the Virgin Earth Challenge, which is offering a $25 million prize to anyone who comes up with a viable means of extracting CO2 out of the atmosphere.

"Every single scientific institution in the world should be working on nothing else," he says. "It's that critical."

As well as being a very public sop for his conscience, if the prize does result in a breakthrough then Branson will be perfectly placed to market it and earn a handsome profit, while at the same time coming across as the saviour of the planet.

He's quick to admit that "doing good" and "earning shedloads of cash" don't have to be mutually exclusive.

"You have to have a passion and believe you can create something you're really proud of," he says.

"But the chances are that, if it follows those criteria, an enormous number of people will be as interested and excited as you are and therefore it's likely you'll be able to pay your bills."

The next morning, Branson's press officer calls at 6:45am. "Richard is having breakfast and wondered if you'd like to join him."

Branson is waiting in the hotel restaurant in an open-necked white linen shirt. His attitude to fashion is famously laid-back.

He was once photographed wearing shoes that didn't match, and his old British Airways sparring partner Lord King sneeringly referred to him as "the grinning pullover".

His clothes today (brown jacket and jeans) are smart enough but his shoes (battered black slip-ons) look distinctly high-street.

Still, it's a step up from the early days of Virgin, when he would hold meetings with his Coutts & Co bank manager barefoot.

They once told him that, if he ever turned up wearing shoes, they knew he was after a really big loan.

Thirty-seven years on, there's still a bit of the barefoot hippy about him, even though that's at odds with running 250 companies with a combined turnover of £10 billion.

It's part of the Branson enigma. Whitehorn describes him as "ruthlessly capitalist in business but socially communist".

For the next hour, until it's time to depart for the Nastar centre, we talk about his hopes for Virgin Galactic.

At the start, Branson is surprisingly nervous and inarticulate, his speech peppered with ums, ahs and unfinished sentences, as if he gets bored with what he's saying before he's finished saying it.

He stares down into his tea, tugs nervously at his napkin and fiddles with his signet ring (worn unconventionally on the fourth finger rather than the little finger). But after a few minutes he relaxes.

His phone rings – he must be the only person in the world who still has the original Nokia ringtone – and he has a brief conversation during which he asks:

"Have you been to see the Bank of England yet?" No prizes for guessing what they're talking about.

Virgin Galactic may be the main focus today, but there is also the little matter of trying to buy a bank to be getting on with.

Are you in the middle of Northern Rock negotiations, I ask when he comes off the phone.

"Yes," he says.

"It's certainly the most complicated deal we've ever done and we're crossing our fingers it'll all get sorted soon." The conversation returns to Virgin Galactic.

Back on safer territory, Branson visibly relaxes.

He describes how in 1991 he registered the name Virgin Galactic "just for fun, because I loved the name".

But at the same time he set himself the task of meeting all the scientists who might be capable of building a re-usable space ship.

"I met some wonderful, weird people," he says.

"The best way of going into any new business is to be bold and get out there and try to make sure that if there's any breakthrough you're there for it.

"The same applies for our clean-fuel business.

"We've put ourselves up as the company that's going to come up with an alternative fuel, so anybody who does come up with an idea is likely to come to Virgin. The same applied to space travel."

So how much will it cost him? So far, Virgin has spent about £35 million, though by the time it starts making test flights it will have invested more than £50 million.

To bring the programme to commercial viability will involve a total investment of about £125 million – which sounds remarkably low when you consider that Nasa's annual budget is about £8 billion.

But will there be enough people who can afford the experience – and who feel excited enough about what is such a brief thrill – for Virgin to make money out of the venture?

"Yes," he says.

"And the dollar's gone down about 35 per cent since we set the price. So it's a great bargain for British people!

"No, seriously, there are certainly people who could afford it at that level but, obviously, to get hundreds of thousands to be able to afford it, we've got to get the price down.

"That's going to be the challenge over the next ten years.

"I've basically led my life on the basis that saying yes is a lot more fun than saying no. It's led me into some very interesting situations."

Nonetheless, Branson must be nervous. All it takes is one major setback, one unfortunate incident, and the business will be dead in the water.

"If you're pioneering something as large and exciting as this, you have to accept there are going to be knock-backs," he says.

"In attempting to go around the world in a balloon I ended up having to be pulled out of the sea five times by helicopter, so I'm not the sort of person who gives up easily.

"But because SpaceShipOne has proved it is possible to go to space and return safely three times, we know this is do-able.

"And we've got the best rocket scientists working on it. Yes, there will be horrible hiccups along the way but hopefully not too many. I'm convinced we can succeed."

He looks up, suddenly filled with visionary zeal. "I really believe we're at the birth of something big," he says. "This is just the beginning.

"We're starting with suborbital flights, and then we'll move on to orbital flights, then in time I'd hope to see a Virgin hotel just off the Moon where we can set up small spaceships that can be programmed to take guests round the Moon using the Moon's gravity."

So, in his mind's eye, does he imagine sexy, Barbarella-style flight attendants in Virgin uniform, floating around the cabin? "I have no problem fantasising about that at all," he chuckles.

"The Spaceport is going to be the sexiest building on Earth. The spaceship is going to be the sexiest spaceship ever built.

"The mothership is going to be the sexiest mothership. And yes, we may well have crew on board who will be reminiscent of Barbarella…

"There may even be cabin crew on the spaceship. It's not beyond the realms of possibility – and we've got lots of girls who've already put their hands up and said they'd love to do it."

While Virgin Galactic's job for now is simply to get punters to and from space safely, it is also researching other possibilities for the future.

Branson believes the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo system could be used as a super-fast method of travel.

"At present the Virgin Galactic flights are suborbital," he says.

"But if we could make a bigger SpaceShipTwo, with more power on the rocket motor, we could take people beyond the Earth's atmosphere, and transport people in space. New York to Sydney could be completed in two-and-a-half hours rather than the 26 hours it now takes."

Sceptics have poured scorn on this idea, arguing that the speed necessary to punch right out of the atmosphere and reach orbit would be 17,500mph, while SpaceShipTwo's top speed is 3,500mph. But Branson is unconcerned.

Part of the secret of his success is his unflinching optimism. He never believes things will go wrong until he's dangling from the rescue helicopter rope or being lowered down the side of a building.

Branson doesn't think he's part of a space race, but there is an element of national pride at play.

"For a British company to be the one offering the world flights into space would in itself be fantastic.

"I think it can be a successful business.

"The fact that we've already got $30 million in deposits in the bank indicates that it can. And 80,000 people have already expressed an interest via the website."

On a final note, I ask him what it is about space that inspires him, 38 years after he watched the Moon landing on his fuzzy black-and-white TV in a squat in Notting Hill.

"Everything," he says. "The view, the weightlessness, the sheer majesty of it. I love to do things I've never done before. It's certainly the biggest thing Virgin's ever done – and it's my biggest adventure." Visit virgingalactic.com

Eight-Year-Old Boy Enjoys Adventure of A Lifetime as Youngest Person in History to Experience Zero Gravity Flight

2008-01-04T11:37:00.001-08:00

Eight-year-old boys dream of being superheroes -- flying high above the clouds with nothing to limit themselves but their imaginations. For young adventurer Danner Cronise, Zero Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G (R)), the first and only FAA-approved provider of commercial weightless flights, turned this dream into reality and enabled Danner to fly like Superman and enjoy 10-times more hang-time than the world's best basketball player -- all while making history as the youngest person ever to experience a weightless flight.

Danner's adventure truly was a family affair, as he was joined by his father Ray, and older sisters Erin (10) and Alex (12). A NASA engineer for more than 15 years and a co-founder of ZERO-G, Ray Cronise had a unique and personal reason for wanting to see his children enjoy weightlessness first hand. "It is awe inspiring to be able to take your kids on such a memorable experience. Being exposed to these kinds of adventures kindles curiosity and keeps them dreaming," said Ray. Each of his three children had different reasons for loving their ZERO-G experience:
-- Danner loved being tossed like a ball across the plane cabin and was
fascinated to see how droplets of water hovered in the air before his
eyes during zero gravity. On being the youngest person ever to
experience a weightless flight, Danner said, "It makes me feel good and
very lucky. The flight was so cool. I was floating and flipping, just
like the astronauts in space." He added, "I showed my friends pictures
and they all want to go now too. Can I do it again next week?"

-- Erin, an aspiring gymnast, said her favorite part was "being able to do
a back flip without needing someone to spot me like in class; I felt
like the best gymnast in the world! During one of the first weightless
moments, I did a back handspring -- I was so excited!"

-- Alex, the eldest of the three, loved every moment and was especially
amused when her coach told her to release a handful of M&M's into the
air so she could watch them float before her and chase them down like
PacMan. When asked if she would do it again, Alex responded, "Of course
I would! It's the most fun thing ever that I have ever done -- more fun
than Disneyworld!"

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, CEO and Co-Founder of ZERO-G said, "The most important part about the Cronise's family adventure is that it underscores what is at the core of the ZERO-G philosophy. We break the paradigm of this incredible sensation of floating being reserved for fairy tales or second-hand experiences and enable people to really fly and feel and see it first-hand. There is no comparison for the experience that ZERO-G delivers -- it is pure exhilaration from the moment you arrive, throughout the flight, and lives on through many talks with others that have never been."

The experience offered by ZERO-G is the only commercial opportunity on Earth for individuals to experience true "weightlessness" without going to space. The ZERO-G Experience consists of a brief training session for passengers followed by a 90-minute flight aboard G-Force One. Each ZERO-G mission is designed for maximum fun. The aircraft's interior is a zero gravity playroom, complete with padded floors and walls and video cameras to record the unforgettable moments. The flight includes 15 weightless experiences (parabolas) that last approximately 30 seconds each and range from low-gravity environments typical of the moon (1/6 G) and Mars (1/3 G) to complete weightlessness; ZERO-G delivers twice the amount of weightless time achieved in a typical sub-orbital flight into space. ZERO-G operates under the highest safety standards as set by the FAA (Part-121) with its partner Amerijet International of Ft. Lauderdale Florida. Aircraft operations take place under the same regulations set for large commercial passenger airliners.

Weightless flight is an experience that few have tried, but those who have call it amazing and life-changing. Martha Stewart, Professor Stephen Hawking, Princess Beatrice of York, Amy Grant, Billy Bush, Burt Rutan, Miles O'Brien, and cast members of "The Apprentice," and "The Biggest Loser" are just a few notable passengers who've flown with ZERO-G. Numerous astronauts including Buzz Aldrin and Anousheh Ansari also have experienced ZERO-G voyages. ZERO-G has played a major role in several blockbuster hits including Matrix 2 and Matrix 3. Since launching the ZERO-G Experience to the general public in September 2004, the company has conducted more than 100 weightless flights and flown over 3,000 passengers, including celebrities and media personalities, corporate charters, science and math teachers, and individuals age 12 to 93.

About ZERO-G

Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Las Vegas, ZERO-G is led by a world-class team of veteran astronauts and experienced business leaders. The company was co-founded by X PRIZE Chairman and space visionary, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis; and veteran astronaut, Dr. Byron K. Lichtenberg. The duo spent more than a decade working to bring the marvel of weightless flight to the public.

The ZERO-G Experience (TM), which includes training led by a professional astronaut, a flight of 15 parabolas, flight suit, complimentary merchandise, awards, a post-event party, photos, and a DVD of the flight, is offered at a price of $3,500 per seat. For the current flight schedule, more information or to book a seat, visit http://www.GoZeroG.com, http://www.sharperimage.com or call 1-800-937-6480.

ZERO-G flights also may be chartered for private events. Since 2004, individual groups of family and friends to top- tier consumer brands like American Express, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Cadbury Schweppes have chartered ZERO-G flights. The ZERO-G Experience builds deep common memories that no ordinary gravity-bound exercise can equal. It is a unique way to express gratitude to important clients and partners. Flights can be rewards, incentives, celebrations and even revenue mechanisms for charitable institutions.

http://www.GoZeroG.com/

Ticket to ride - The Washington Times

2007-12-26T11:58:00.000-08:00

Richard Garriott always knew he would fly into space. But unlike his astronaut father, his less-than-perfect eyesight dashed any hope of a government mission.

So Mr. Garriott turned to the private sector, where $30 million bought him a ticket aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station in the coming October.

As the sixth amateur to make the trek, he hopes to prove that 10 days orbiting the Earth is worth such a considerable price tag.

"I'm personally a big believer [that] if there is justification for people being in space, then it sure ought to pay dividends commensurate with the investment put into it," said Mr. Garriott, 36, a Texas-based multimillionaire who founded and sold several computer game companies.

His father, astronaut-scientist Owen Garriott, spent more than 20 years at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, completing two spaceflights in his career. Now, decades later, Richard Garriott's mission is being booked by Space Adventures Ltd., a Vienna, Va., company that buys extra seats on Russian spacecraft headed to the International Space Station.

Space Adventures has sent five private citizens into space. American businessman Dennis Tito in 2001 was the first. Software pioneer Charles Simonyi was the most recent one, lifting off this spring.

Mr. Garriott has the unmistakable credentials of an adrenaline junkie. He participates in sky diving, hang gliding, caving and rock climbing. His thirst for terrestrial exploration has taken him to the depths of the ocean to study bacteria on hydrothermal vents, and to Antarctica to search for meteorites.

But Mr. Garriott said he is more than a space tourist. He has long been an investor in space privatization and sits on the board of Space Adventures. To demonstrate the commercial value of private spaceflight, he plans to conduct several scientific experiments in space that, unlike NASA-sponsored research, are focused on making a profit.

source: http://washingtontimes.com
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Green tea

Recipes: Chocolate Raspberry Torte

Carsplace: Auto news, autoshow, concept cars.

From CEO to Space Tourist

2007-12-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

The software guru decided to see if he had the 'right stuff.'

Touchdown: Simonyi after his space-station visit

By Charles Simonyi

How does one decide to visit space? Until recently, no one had faced such a decision. Rare people with the "right stuff" could dedicate their lives to becoming astronauts and cosmonauts and compete for the crew assignments, but the decision of who would fly always rested, rightfully, with the respective space organizations. Then along came Eric Anderson, a young, visionary aerospace engineer who cofounded Space Adventures, making it possible for nonastronauts to buy "taxi" seats aboard Russian spacecraft and travel to the International Space Station. Three cheers for Eric—and hats off to Dennis Tito, the California businessman who in 2001 became Space Adventures' first Spaceflight Participant—or, as most people call it, "space tourist."

I was just an earthbound tourist, visiting Baikonur, the Russian spaceport, when I met Eric in 2004. I was amazed by the openness of the Russian space program—we could practically touch the fully fueled rocket on the launchpad as we saw the cosmonauts off to space. I was even more amazed when Eric, ever so gently, suggested that one day I might want to be on the departure platform where the cosmonauts were standing.

The trip would cost $25 million, which I considered money well spent for the cash-strapped Russian space program. I was intrigued enough to make the first exploratory steps and deal with the uncertainties: What about my health? (I'm 59.) Was I strong enough, physically and mentally, for spaceflight? The good news is that for Spaceflight Participants, the standards aren't as strict as they are for the professionals. But even those minimum standards are too high for most of us. And, frankly, the space doctors have not had much experience working with people without the "right stuff" to know what the real minimums are. I had to visit more than 50 doctors, including psychiatrists, some American and some Russian.

One of the strangest tests was the "vestibular chair," where I had to sit with eyes closed in a rotating seat and bob my head in a steady rhythm. This creates some unusual sensations in the inner ear that are thought by the Russians to be similar to the "space sickness" many spacefarers experience during their first days in orbit. I did not like the chair at all at the time, and although I smiled broadly, inside I was unsure if I could take much more.

To my surprise I kept passing the tests, even the unpleasant ones, and one day in Moscow I was declared fit for "special training." Eric was the first to congratulate me. He also said that, as opposed to what we had planned, the Russians wanted me to enter training as soon as possible and fly on the next spacecraft. I had to decide then and there. It actually wasn't as hard as it seems in the abstract. I felt incredibly lucky and privileged just to have been asked. The answer had to be yes, come what may.

Canceling all appointments for the next 10 months and moving into a dorm room on the Russian military base where cosmonauts are trained was quite a change for me. (After spending two decades at Microsoft, where I oversaw the creation of Word and Excel, I cofounded Intentional Software Corp. in 2002.) I had tutors in many interesting subjects, including the wonderful Russian language. I ate at the officers' mess, where one of the regular dishes was called, simply, myaso—that is, meat. I had a regular exercise program and swam more than I ever have before. I made lots of new friends, including many American astronauts who also train there.

There were many tests, each one harder and harder. I learned how to don and doff my spacesuit even while wearing a gas mask against fire. I spent two hours motionless in the suit in a vacuum chamber. I was spun around in a giant centrifuge to experience the G-loads of the rocket. I was flown in a transport plane to exercise in a state of weightlessness.

Finally, launch day arrived: April 7, 2007. My Russian crewmates and I met with our families—speaking through glass, since we were in quarantine (lest we carry some bugs to the space station). The launch preparation itself is full of traditions: for example, before we climbed the stairs to the elevator, the chief designer himself kicked us firmly in the behind to get us going. Once ensconced in the capsule, we could feel a powerful quiet and peace, which ended with the rumble of the launch. In just eight minutes we were in orbit, weightless.

The window blinds remained drawn for the first few hours: just seeing the Earth go by below could make us sick. But my training worked well. I did not get spacesick at all: any unease I felt reminded me of the chair and how I could tolerate it.

The arrival to the space station at sunset, when the most incredible colors appear, was the high point of my trip. Framed by the empty blackness of the sky and the brilliant blue of Earth, the first permanently settled outpost of humanity in space is an incredible view—at once unexpected and inviting.

Working in space for the next two weeks and watching the Earth from that vantage point filled me with a new sense of hope and pride. From our low orbit, the Earth looked like the most beautiful blue sky I have ever seen—it is big, it is peaceful and it is adorned with white clouds. Traveling around the globe over the years, I have seen many beautiful places. But only as a space tourist did I discover just how beautiful the world truly is.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

Professional Artist to Draw in Space

2007-12-20T00:33:00.000-08:00

New Zealander Makoure Scott, one of the first 100 Founder Astronauts for Virgin Galactic, plans to spend his space flight drawing. It's no surprise given that he is a professional artist who has already included space themes in his art (along with Maori and other indigenous influences).

I had the pleasure of meeting Makoure at his centrifuge training which was recently covered by New Zealand's One News. Scott is no small man, so I wondered how he was going to be able to take being six times his normal weight. I think he was wondering too. However, when the time came, he was smiling and even able to touch his nose at 6 Gs- something I don't think I even attempted.

Although I don't have the image of Scott at 6 Gs available at the time of posting, I do have one image I can share with you...

And that is of me at 6 Gs! As you can see, I weigh well over 750 lbs in this picture and the experience is a lot like melting off the seat. (It's actually easier than it sounds).

Makoure marks the start of a new era of space. An era where we will see a much broader range of humanity touch t
he stars. I am incredibly excited to see it myself and will be writing about other space "firsts" that the suborbital flights will bring in future posts.

For now though, I am just happy to see the first New Zealanders getting in the game (Makoure is not the only one!) and artists.

If there is one thing that Virgin knows how to do well, it is to craft their offerings as full sensory experiences. I think that many artists (and non artists) will be able to bring that other-worldly experience back to Earth. My commitment is that we inspire a generation of dreamers, builders, and explorers that expand not just the length of our life- but also the depth.

By Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Astronaut's Son Ready To Fulfill Lifelong Dream

2007-12-14T12:47:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON -- When he was growing up in Houston, the son of an astronaut who lived in a neighborhood filled with astronauts and aerospace engineers, Richard Garriott always assumed that he would fly in space. After all, it was an experience his father described in very fact-of-the matter terms as a "nominal" experience.

Garriott, now a multimillionaire video game developer, will achieve his life-long goal of traveling into space in October 2008, but it was not an easy road -- or inexpensive.

Garriott, 46, is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who participated in two space missions including the 1973 Skylab 3 mission that orbited the Earth for 59 days and smashed the previous record for manned spaceflight duration. The younger Garriott is scheduled to become the sixth paying space tourist and the first offspring of an American astronaut to visit space.

Growing up near the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Nassau Bay, Texas, Garriott's neighbors on three sides were all astronauts. Everyone he knew was a NASA engineer in one way or another, so it seemed inevitable to him that he would grow up and go to space.

"It was a shock to me that as I got older, there were lots of reasons why going into space was such a rare commodity," Garriott said Tuesday in a media roundtable event in Washington sponsored by the Space Foundation.

His poor eyesight alone was enough to disqualify him from a NASA space mission. So he understood early in life that if he were to go into space, it would not be as a government astronaut, it would be through a private enterprise.

Passion for World Building

Garriott's passion for computers and building worlds to explore within them made him wealthy from a young age. He developed his first video game when he was in high school, one that generated $150,000 in personal revenue. He is also the creator of the popular Ultima series of online games and has started and sold two video game companies.

Garriott paid $30 million for his trip to space tourism firm Space Adventures of Vienna, Va., a company for which he sits on the board of directors. A Russian Soyuz rocket will launch him up to the International Space Station where he will spend several weeks. Garriott is contemplating paying another $15 million to take a spacewalk.

In January Garriott will leave for Star City, Russia, where his mission training will begin. He will learn spacecraft operation, survival and experimental training there as well as undergo medical testing to ensure he is ready for space.

The hardest part of his training will not be the physical rigors, he said. As a high-school computer prodigy, Garriott was permitted to develop his own self-taught computer curriculum in lieu of the two-year foreign language requirement. So learning his first foreign language, the Russian he will need to operate his space capsule, will be his greatest challenge.

Bonding with Dad

The thrill of being one of the first 500 humans to leave the planet is not Garriott's only goal. He is a true believer in the commercial value of manned spaceflight and will be taking with him a series of experiments he hopes will generate profit. In one experiment his father helped design, protein crystals will be made in the zero-gravity environment. The crystals form perfectly under these conditions, and accurate images of their structures are extremely valuable to pharmaceutical companies, he said.

"We're in the search for more and more of these activities that are not just research," Garriott said. "We're trying to find something that has resale value."

Owen Garriott is now serving as his son's chief scientist for the mission, helping his son find and verify the best commercial and scientific research activities for the mission.

"It's a great father-son bonding time," the younger Garriott said. "We haven't had the chance to really work closely together like this. So it's very cool from my perspective that I've got one of the world's leading experts close at hand who also happens to have such a deep personal relationship [with me]."

Expert Advice

Several weeks ago Garriott had a conversation with astronaut Alan Bean, who flew with Garriott's father on Skylab 3. Bean emphasized how important he thinks it is for people who are not military pilots to go up and experience space travel, as they will be well-suited when they return to talk about space travel and how it can be expanded in an entrepreneurial way.

Bean also told Garriott he does not expect him to experience the emotional letdown some astronauts have felt after achieving their long-time goal of getting to space. Garriott has had similar conversations with all five previous space tourists who told him the same thing.

"The feedback I'm getting from those I consider close to me imply this is going to do nothing but add to my life experience," Garriott said.

Garriot said his father is separated enough from his time in NASA's space program that he now regards the experience as more than just a nominal.

"He clearly gets a much bigger gleam in his eye when he reflects on some of the early pioneering work he had the chance to do."

Source: Space.com

Spaceflights now for sale; scary part is price

2007-12-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Considering space travel on one of Virgin Galactic's new ships?

The sales pitch goes like this: The first hour will be relatively painless, a graceful ascent in a spaceship attached to a mother ship. Once the vessels reach 50,000 feet, the ship containing you, five more tourists and two pilots will detach and fall for a moment.

Then, the thrusters will propel it up for 90 seconds, traveling three times the speed of sound. All of the spacecraft's fuel will burn away, leaving its tanks empty.

The G-forces on your body will push your blood toward your feet. It is hoped that you won't black out, but if you do, you'll come to when you're at zero gravity.

Once above the undefined line that delineates Earth from space, your craft will arch to a height of 360,000 feet for about four minutes. You will be weightless and have stunning views of Earth's curvature, 1,000 miles in any direction.

And then gravity will beckon the vessel down to Earth, the human bodies within it feeling pressure six times their weight, sort of like a "big, hairy, fat cat sitting on your chest."

Total approximate time: two hours and nine minutes. All this for only $200,000 -- a lot of money to most folks, but a mere fraction of the millions spent by previous space tourists.

Bothell travel agent Angie Lepley is getting quite good at making the pitch: Earlier this year, she was chosen as one of 45 agents countrywide who are permitted to sell Virgin Galactic tours. She is the only agent in Washington, Idaho and Oregon who sells the trips.

"People do yachts and private villas and first-class airfare," Lepley said. "In the scheme of how people travel nowadays, I don't think (the price) is a lot."

Being chosen is a boon for Tangerine Travel, which Lepley founded in 1988. Her company, originally named ETI Travel, is one of 907 licensed travel agencies in Washington.

Last Thursday, Tangerine held a stylish client-appreciation event at a still-under-construction, 12,000-square-foot office in Bothell. Her business, with 57 employees, has outgrown its Kirkland location.

Guests were told that a Virgin Galactic representative would be on hand to answer questions. The representative turned out to be President Will Whitehorn. The Londoner said he was in town to visit Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who kick-started funding for Virgin Galactic's ship with 25 million British pounds, which converts to about $52 million at present exchange rates.

Space tourism is real

Ten years ago, space tourism was considered far-fetched and sensational. But as the noise from screaming headlines died away, the entrepreneurs determined to make it reality have been quietly perfecting their spaceports and crafts. Among them is Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, who operates Blue Origin, a secretive company with operations in Kent and in Culberson County, Texas.

Around the U.S., 16 commercial spaceports -- sort of like airports for spaceships -- are finished or planned. They will operate outside the bounds of both the Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Space tourism could generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue by 2021, the FAA says. The largest share of that revenue will come from suborbital flights, such as the ones proposed by Virgin Galactic.

So far, Vienna, Va.-based Space Adventures Ltd. is the only company that has put private citizens in space. It works with the Russian Space Agency, NASA and the International Space Station partners

"We are the only company that takes people up right now and will be, probably, I'd say, for the next four years," Chief Executive Eric Anderson said.

The most recent tourist was Charles Simonyi, who formerly led Microsoft Corp.'s Word and Excel teams. He reportedly paid about $25 million for the trip.

Other space tourism companies aren't competition for Space Adventures, Anderson said.

"I kind of consider them potential providers and partners in the future," he said. "We're not building rockets. We are an experience provider."

The FAA governs space tourism by licensing commercial rockets and issuing experimental launch permits. But it cannot guarantee that the programs being offered are safe -- people who sign up are giving informed consent, which means they are aware of the dangers, said FAA spokesman Hank Price.

Billionaire Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Group, expects his company to be the next to put citizens in space. Up to five new tourists sign up per month, said Whitehorn, the Virgin Galactic president. Virgin already has sold nearly 200 seats, and holds $26 million in customer deposits. The first flight is planned for 2010.

News about Virgin's progress had been limited until an explosion at the Mojave Desert facility killed three technicians in July, which forced public scrutiny upon spacecraft construction.

'On the cutting edge'

Lepley, in Bothell, completed a training course at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where she learned how to sell space tours. She is marketing the trips to corporations and high-net-worth people, but no one has yet plunked down a deposit. Deposits start at $20,000.

But, she said, Seattle is full of adventuresome types and she expects a deposit in a few days. "They've done Italy, they've done the African safari, they've done Nepal," she said.

Her commission on each trip sold -- 3 percent -- is not as high as other travel sales, but her company gets name recognition, "and to be on the cutting edge and sell something for the adventurous soul," she said.

Huib van Leeuwen, 42, a Seattle engineer, is one such soul. He's already registered his interest online.

"It's something of a real fantasy, going into space," he said. His biggest concern is that the other people in the craft could ruin the experience.

He looked longingly at a model spacecraft at the Bothell party on Thursday. He hasn't yet made a deposit, he confessed, nor saved the money to go.

How long until it's his turn? "I'm talking to my wife about it."

WHICH TRIP IS THE BARGAIN?

SPACE ADVENTURES tourists pay about $25 million to spend two weeks at zero gravity, totaling 20,160 minutes.

Per-minute cost: $1,240

VIRGIN GALACTIC will charge $200,000 for its trip, which includes four minutes at zero gravity.

Per-minute cost: $50,000

INTO SPACE

Commercial human spaceflight milestones:

April 1, 2004: U.S. government issues the first launch license for a reusable launch vehicle to Scaled Composites. The company is building a spaceship for Virgin Galactic.

April 8, 2004: Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne completes the first private- sector human commercial rocket launch.

June 17, 2004: U.S. government issues the first license for an inland spaceport to Mojave, Calif.

June 21, 2004: U.S. government awards Mike Melvill the first commercial astronaut wings for his successful flight of SpaceShipOne.

Oct. 4, 2004: An international competition awards $10 million, called the XPrize, to Scaled Composites for its successful flights of SpaceShipOne. Pilot Brian Binnie receives the FAA's second set of commercial astronaut wings.

Dec. 31, 2006: FAA issues requirements for crew and passengers involved in private space travel.

April 6, 2007: FAA completes guidelines for obtaining experimental launch permits.

Source: Federal Aviation Administration

G.A.P Adventures takes travellers to the edge of space

2007-12-07T12:12:00.000-08:00

After years of providing travellers with the most exciting, innovative adventures in the world, G.A.P Adventures is now helping people experience our planet’s last frontier—space. With the launch of these three new Space Experiences, G.A.P Adventures can now cater to those travellers whose wanderlust extends beyond this world.

“Making new and thrilling travel experiences available to people has driven G.A.P Adventures to every corner of the globe,” said G.A.P Adventures CEO Bruce Poon Tip. “I am proud that we now also cater to travellers who not only look up into the night’s sky with open eyed curiosity, but want to experience it first-hand. For G.A.P Adventures it was never a question of if we could provide our travellers with the experience of undertaking space travel, but when.”

G.A.P Adventures new Space Experiences include:

Russia Space Adventure – The Edge of Earth: Would be astronauts no longer require a degree in astrophysics or a million dollar bank account to be able to view the earth’s curve from 60,000 ft with G.A.P Adventures new Russia Space Adventure. Travellers will be taken to the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere in a MIG-31 Jet Fighter to experience the edge of space itself.

When their feet finally touch the ground, travellers on this adventure will be able to explore remnants of the vast aviation history that placed the then Soviet Union on the world map. The Monino Air Museum, just outside of Moscow, houses some of the oldest aircrafts in the former Soviet Republic. This three-day trip concludes with a chance for travellers to immerse themselves in the many sights of fascinating Moscow, with the third day acting as a back-up flight day in case of poor weather conditions.

Zero Gravity Adventure: G.A.P Adventures has a tour that allows travellers to experience zero gravity first-hand. After exploring Moscow, tour members will be transported to the Chkailovsky Air Base, located just outside of Moscow. After one day of cosmonaut training, they will fly 34,000ft into the atmosphere to experience zero gravity. Once the proper altitude is reached of this remarkable flight, weightlessness takes control and the travellers will feel as though they were in space itself.

Cosmonaut for a Day: If you don’t want to fly to 60,000 ft but would still like to experience life as a cosmonaut, then G.A.P Adventures has the ideal tour. The five-day “cosmonaut training package” provides the opportunity to train like a real Russian cosmonaut, from eating space food to experiencing space simulators. Also included is an opportunity to explore the immense aviation history of Russia and the many tourist attractions of Moscow. This unique tour allows travellers to experience what is required for life in space, without having to leave earth.

G.A.P Adventures has committed itself to providing the public with unique and accessible travel experiences. The three new Space Experiences will take travellers closer to space than ever before. For more information visit Gapadventures.com.

Space cadets taken in by TV hoax

2007-12-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

Three contestants have spoken of their disbelief after being fooled into thinking they went into space for the UK reality show Space Cadets.

The three believed they had blasted off from a cosmonaut training camp in Russia, but were in fact in a fake spaceship in a warehouse in Suffolk.

They cheered up when told they had each won £25,000 ($44,300).

But one contestant, teaching assistant Keri Hasset from Birmingham, said she was "heartbroken" by the prank.

Fake ceremony

"When I thought we were coming back to Earth I was planning my speech. I was going to say it had been my childhood dream. Now I'm a little bit heartbroken," she said.

Ms Hasset, plasterer Paul French, 26 from Bristol, and footballer/recruitment consultant Billy Jackson, 25, from Kent, had suspicions they were being tricked when they had to hold a ceremony for a celebrity Russian dog called Mr Bimby on the spaceship.

"This is a spacecraft but it feels like a caravan," Paul told his fellow astronauts.

"And if we were going to space and they were weighing us for our health, they wouldn't use scales like you get at home, would they?"

On discovering the show was a fake, Billy told Channel 4: "My mum and dad are gonna love this.

"This is the biggest wind-up ever. This is wicked."

"Aw man," said Paul. "We're not astronauts. We're just asses."

The show, presented by Johnny Vaughan, built a full-scale replica of a Russian space training camp in a disused hangar near Ipswich.

The ten original contestants had been whittled down to three over the course of two weeks, with the winners believing they were becoming Britain's first space tourists.

Channel 4 invested millions in the hoax but viewing figures slipped during the series.
Source

Space program co-ops and Astronaut Farmer

2007-11-23T06:38:00.001-08:00

Spaceflight started out in the realm of the hobbyist. Then it entered the realm of the government. In 2004, SpaceShipOne proved by example that a person could have a space program. In 2007, Space Shot pointed the way for a person of Charles Farmer’s means to take a spaceflight with the launch of freespaceshot.com. Let’s review the space age from the personal perspective, then see where it’s headed.
Emergence to emergency

Science in the 19th century was not yet a scientific military industrial complex. Rocketry for human spaceflight started out as a club activity on the fringe. During the early years, the space hobbyist could do the following:
Further research and experimentation in rocketry
Join a rocketry club

Rockets had been used as weapons for hundreds of years, but in World War 2 rockets became fashionable. With the advent of nuclear weapons, rockets became important strategic weapons. Human spaceflight was not yet big business.

When Sputnik circled the Earth, the United States populace awoke to the feasibility of artificial satellites and the fear of foreign domination of space. This fear fueled the Space Race culminating in a series of Lunar flights.
During these heady years, individuals could apply to be astronauts and the engineers to build the rockets. But spaceflight was beyond even the wealthiest individuals. No one could buy V-2 missiles at the scrap yard the way they could a DC-3. Rocketry was a national obsession and the government marshaled all national resources to force the pace of rocket development.

During these years, the space hobbyist could do the following:
Build a small rocket
Join a space advocacy group
Read or write science fiction
Join the national effort to explore and conquer space

The space hobbyists were largely nationalized to become the new cadre of military and civilian government space programs.

Even after the national emergency ended with the end of the Space Race, there was still little new that the individual could do even as the national effort to explore and conquer space wound down.

This is how Charles Farmer in The Astronaut Farmer got involved. He was going to be an astronaut for the government.
The personal space program and the startup space program

With the Ansari X Prize, Peter Diamandis gave Paul Allen the impetus to go out and build his own personal space program. For tens of millions of dollars, a person could achieve what the government did with its X-15 program that cost hundreds of millions of dollars nearly fifty years ago or about $1.5 billion in current dollars. This opened up the possibility of having a space program to Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Others similarly situated, such as Bob Bigelow and Elon Musk, were making progress on their personal space programs.
With the award of hundreds of millions of dollars in government money to Musk’s SpaceX for his rocket and for Branson’s spaceport, the validation of the age of the personal space program is underway. It won’t be for lack of government support that these space programs fail, but it might be due to too much support; they may get co-opted and lose their personal flavor.

Even as rich people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to burn started hiring engineers by the score, the garage startup personal space program is gaining ground. XCOR Aerospace is making steady progress toward its first spacecraft.

These new opportunities became available to the space enthusiast:
Go to work for a company that expects to fly all of its employees into space
Earn sweat equity by working for a space startup
Invest in a company if you are a qualified investor (roughly $250,000/year family income or $1 million in assets)

This is where I joined. But even if there are two million families with $250,000/year income, that still leaves 98 percent of the United States without a way to invest without becoming an employee of a space firm.

Could an atypical farmer take a lifetime of effort and farm wages and spend them on an orbital rocket ride? It may be fiction today, but it is only a few years away from being fact. Forty years working full time earning about the average wage of $12.50 an hour earns $1 million. It is only a matter of time before private industry finds a way to provide an orbital flight for $1 million now that orbital flights for over $10 million on the Russian Soyuz are sold out. Kistler K-1 may be able to fly 4,500 kg to low Earth orbit, which is enough for a pair of two-person Gemini re-entry modules, for $17 million. That would be about $4.25 million per person in launch costs if a charter can be had for four people for $17 million. That might be half of the total costs because one still has to build the crew compartment; the launch vehicle is only part of the costs.

Call it next decade, December 31, 2019, when someone saving a lifetime’s earnings at the average wage will be enough to afford an orbital spaceflight. That amount of money will probably be up to $1.5 million by then, or $3 million if you are working two jobs like Charles Farmer did in the movie.
Cooperative space program

Now for the first time, anyone can be like Charles Farmer and invest a little time, and in return earn a small opportunity to get into orbit. You don’t need to dedicate your life or a big chunk of riches to directly seek space flight. Instead of spending millions of dollars of time to earn a spaceflight, spend a few minutes at a time and earn an opportunity to win a multi-million dollar spaceflight worth a few dollars.
FreeSpaceShot.com has a tournament to win an orbital spaceflight on the Kistler K-1 with billions of entries. Playing takes a couple of minutes and builds a few cents of advertising revenue toward a spaceflight. Less than one thousand people playing at night for forty years could together produce a winner of one seat at today’s $20 million Soyuz flight price tag (plus tax). We already have 2,000 players and rising and spaceflight prices are falling. I expect the players will not have to wait as long to see an orbital flight winner as the twenty years Barbara Morgan has been waiting for her government flight.

In a generation as spaceflight prices go down and income goes up, we might see an orbital flight raffled for a fund raiser the way that trips to Hawaii were raffled a generation ago: tens of thousand tickets at $100 each, with the bulk of the money going to the sponsoring organization.

Thus, we return to the club roots of space programs after a seventy-year long hiatus. This time, the prize is a trip to orbit or beyond. Strive to be an astronaut like Charles Farmer whenever you want.
by Sam Dinkin

Space program co-ops and Astronaut Farmer

2007-11-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

by Sam Dinkin
Monday, March 5, 2007

Spaceflight started out in the realm of the hobbyist. Then it entered the realm of the government. In 2004, SpaceShipOne proved by example that a person could have a space program. In 2007, Space Shot pointed the way for a person of Charles Farmer’s means to take a spaceflight with the launch of freespaceshot.com. Let’s review the space age from the personal perspective, then see where it’s headed.
Emergence to emergency

Science in the 19th century was not yet a scientific military industrial complex. Rocketry for human spaceflight started out as a club activity on the fringe. During the early years, the space hobbyist could do the following:
Further research and experimentation in rocketry
Join a rocketry club

Rockets had been used as weapons for hundreds of years, but in World War 2 rockets became fashionable. With the advent of nuclear weapons, rockets became important strategic weapons. Human spaceflight was not yet big business.

When Sputnik circled the Earth, the United States populace awoke to the feasibility of artificial satellites and the fear of foreign domination of space. This fear fueled the Space Race culminating in a series of Lunar flights.
During these heady years, individuals could apply to be astronauts and the engineers to build the rockets. But spaceflight was beyond even the wealthiest individuals. No one could buy V-2 missiles at the scrap yard the way they could a DC-3. Rocketry was a national obsession and the government marshaled all national resources to force the pace of rocket development.

During these years, the space hobbyist could do the following:
Build a small rocket
Join a space advocacy group
Read or write science fiction
Join the national effort to explore and conquer space

The space hobbyists were largely nationalized to become the new cadre of military and civilian government space programs.

Even after the national emergency ended with the end of the Space Race, there was still little new that the individual could do even as the national effort to explore and conquer space wound down.

This is how Charles Farmer in The Astronaut Farmer got involved. He was going to be an astronaut for the government.
The personal space program and the startup space program

With the Ansari X Prize, Peter Diamandis gave Paul Allen the impetus to go out and build his own personal space program. For tens of millions of dollars, a person could achieve what the government did with its X-15 program that cost hundreds of millions of dollars nearly fifty years ago or about $1.5 billion in current dollars. This opened up the possibility of having a space program to Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Others similarly situated, such as Bob Bigelow and Elon Musk, were making progress on their personal space programs.
With the award of hundreds of millions of dollars in government money to Musk’s SpaceX for his rocket and for Branson’s spaceport, the validation of the age of the personal space program is underway. It won’t be for lack of government support that these space programs fail, but it might be due to too much support; they may get co-opted and lose their personal flavor.

Even as rich people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to burn started hiring engineers by the score, the garage startup personal space program is gaining ground. XCOR Aerospace is making steady progress toward its first spacecraft.

These new opportunities became available to the space enthusiast:
Go to work for a company that expects to fly all of its employees into space
Earn sweat equity by working for a space startup
Invest in a company if you are a qualified investor (roughly $250,000/year family income or $1 million in assets)

This is where I joined. But even if there are two million families with $250,000/year income, that still leaves 98 percent of the United States without a way to invest without becoming an employee of a space firm.

Could an atypical farmer take a lifetime of effort and farm wages and spend them on an orbital rocket ride? It may be fiction today, but it is only a few years away from being fact. Forty years working full time earning about the average wage of $12.50 an hour earns $1 million. It is only a matter of time before private industry finds a way to provide an orbital flight for $1 million now that orbital flights for over $10 million on the Russian Soyuz are sold out. Kistler K-1 may be able to fly 4,500 kg to low Earth orbit, which is enough for a pair of two-person Gemini re-entry modules, for $17 million. That would be about $4.25 million per person in launch costs if a charter can be had for four people for $17 million. That might be half of the total costs because one still has to build the crew compartment; the launch vehicle is only part of the costs.

Call it next decade, December 31, 2019, when someone saving a lifetime’s earnings at the average wage will be enough to afford an orbital spaceflight. That amount of money will probably be up to $1.5 million by then, or $3 million if you are working two jobs like Charles Farmer did in the movie.
Cooperative space program

Now for the first time, anyone can be like Charles Farmer and invest a little time, and in return earn a small opportunity to get into orbit. You don’t need to dedicate your life or a big chunk of riches to directly seek space flight. Instead of spending millions of dollars of time to earn a spaceflight, spend a few minutes at a time and earn an opportunity to win a multi-million dollar spaceflight worth a few dollars.
FreeSpaceShot.com has a tournament to win an orbital spaceflight on the Kistler K-1 with billions of entries. Playing takes a couple of minutes and builds a few cents of advertising revenue toward a spaceflight. Less than one thousand people playing at night for forty years could together produce a winner of one seat at today’s $20 million Soyuz flight price tag (plus tax). We already have 2,000 players and rising and spaceflight prices are falling. I expect the players will not have to wait as long to see an orbital flight winner as the twenty years Barbara Morgan has been waiting for her government flight.

In a generation as spaceflight prices go down and income goes up, we might see an orbital flight raffled for a fund raiser the way that trips to Hawaii were raffled a generation ago: tens of thousand tickets at $100 each, with the bulk of the money going to the sponsoring organization.

Thus, we return to the club roots of space programs after a seventy-year long hiatus. This time, the prize is a trip to orbit or beyond. Strive to be an astronaut like Charles Farmer whenever you want.

Space tourist talks about great trip

2007-11-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

Students told how Anousheh Ansari fulfilled her dream

By WHITNEY ALLEN
Times Staff Writer whitneydallen@hotmail.com

As a girl, Anousheh Ansari had always dreamed of going to space, but females growing up in Iran don't usually get encouragement for such dreams.

So, she moved to the United States when she was 16, earned advanced degrees in engineering and started an Internet company, Telecom Technologies, that she and her husband sold for $750 million. Last year, she spent $20 million of her self-made fortune to buy a ride to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

"I always wanted to be an astronaut, but everyone always told me that it would never happen," said Ansari, who spoke to Bob Jones High School students Thursday during a schoolwide assembly.
Students sat on the edge of their seats while she explained the intense training she endured to prepare for her trip to space.

"I had to learn Russian," said Ansari, 41. "I trained in Moscow during one of the coldest winters in history.

"It took two days to reach the space station and I spent the first six hours of the trip with my knees pulled up to my chest."

Even before her trip to space, Ansari was a major proponent of space innovation. Her family's name is attached to the Ansari X-Prize, a $10 million prize awarded in 2004 to entrepreneur Burt Rutan for his SpaceShipOne, the first commercial space vehicle to crack the atmosphere.

Tim Pickens, president of Orion Propulsion in Huntsville, worked on the team that built SpaceShipOne. Pickens and his wife, Melanie, a chemistry teacher at Bob Jones, were among those responsible for bringing Ansari to Madison to speak to the students.

After she spoke, the students asked Ansari questions about her trip to space. One of her favorite experiences, she said, was eating M&Ms while floating weightless.

One student asked, "Do you believe in aliens and extraterrestrial beings?"

Ansari quickly answered, "I sure do. The universe is so huge, it is hard to believe that we are the only beings in the entire universe.

Watch this space!

2007-11-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

Dutch radio station offers space flight as prize

by Thijs Westerbeek

Dutch commercial radio station Q-music is trying to further raise its profile, and its market share, with a remarkable promotional activity. Listeners can submit their names, and every hour three names are mentioned on the air. The first person to call back after hearing his or her name stands a chance of winning a very special prize.

The prize consists of a so-called 'suborbital' flight, where a small, space shuttle type of aircraft will be launched on the back of a bigger plane. Although the Space Shuttle Explorer will go higher than 100 kilometres for only a few minutes, it will indeed be a real space flight. According to the renowned Dutch aerospace journalist Govert Schilling, it will be an experience the winner will never forget for the rest of his or her life.

"You will reach an altitude of over 100 kilometres, which is far beyond the atmosphere. You will see the blackness of the universe and you will see the Earth as a beautiful blue planet from the outside. However, it will only be for a short time, and a few minutes later you will be landing on the runway, like a plane."

Harmful exhaust fumes
It will be an exciting trip, but it will have a harmful effect on the atmosphere, says Peter van Vliet. He's the president of iNS, a foundation that promotes sustainability; he is also the editor-in-chief of a Dutch-language news site on sustainability. He says the higher aerial strata in the atmosphere are especially vulnerable.
"Those higher aerial strata are extremely thin. The exhaust fumes emitted at that level cause much more damage than the same amount of exhaust fumes would do on lower aerial strata."

Van Vliet holds the view that space tourism is unacceptable at a time when there is so much attention on air pollution and climate change. He says it will be even more unacceptable if such commercial space flights happen more frequently in the future.
"It's a classic case of something you just can't do anymore, in this day and age. Just look at the fuel that is burned up, and the emissions an adventure like that will produce, and compare it with those five minutes of fun for six passengers. What's more, if you think of your direct contribution to the decay of the higher aerial strata, I have serious doubts about the whole thing."
Drawing board
It remains to be seen if the lucky Q-music listener really will embark on a journey into space. In fact, the spaceship only exists on the drawing board at the moment, and the launch sites in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore still have to be built as well.

The website of 'Space Adventures', the American company that is supposed to carry our the space flights, is keeping silent about when all of these plans are going to be realised. It will take years before they're able to stage a space flight, if at all. The winner of the contest will be announced on Saturday 22 September at a special event in the aviation and space travel museum Aviodome in Lelystad, the Netherlands.

OPINION: Space 'Adventurers' Paving The Way For the Rest of Us

2007-11-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

Ready for blast off! Cue the music ... For days now, I've been hearing the poignant song, "Imagine" by John Lennon in my head every time I hear, read, or even think about Anousheh Ansari's flight to the International Space Station. While reading her blog today, I learned that the hauntingly beautiful song is actually one of her favorites. That's not really a surprise however; most of us space-lovers know the relevance of that song to our cause.

As the author of the book, "Women Astronauts," I really wanted to write something to commemorate the flight of the first female space tourist, but I can't! She's nowhere in sight because her flight hasn't been booked yet. Ansari, who is set to blast off into space in less than twelve hours from this writing, is not what I would call a tourist. The self-described "space ambassador" is better described as a "space adventurer!"

Think of it this way, your typical tourist doesn't spend six months away from family and friends in intensive training and study in a foreign country. Adventurers, on the other hand, do spend months training to climb Mount Everest, or dive to the bottom of the ocean, or to fly into space. That takes extreme dedication to accomplish your own personal dream. "Tourists" on the other hand, plunk down a credit card, buy some appropriate duds, and go on a trip.

Ansari joins the other space adventurers. These are independently paying space travel customers; Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, and Greg Olson, who've paid their own way into space. Ansari is the first female space adventurer to pay her own way. So what? It doesn't really matter what gender she is, her passion is what drives her. Besides, her flight really isn't that different from British space adventurer Helen Sharman. The Russians also flew Sharman into space back in 1991, but her flight was (partly) funded by a corporate contest.

What makes Ansari's flight special? It's not because she's the first woman to pay her own way into space. It's because of her efforts and dedication to making space accessible to everyone. Personally, I'm impressed with her because she has had the dream of spaceflight since she was a kid, saw an opportunity, and worked to make it happen. Like me, and maybe you too, she was born with an extreme passion for space exploration and desire to travel into space. Unlike most of us, she's actually making her dream happen. And with her support for space tourism causes, like the X-Prize, she's helping to make that dream happen for you, me, and others too.

I admit that I'm a bit jealous because she gets to see the Earth and stars from space and experience weightlessness. But, I'm also happy for her. And I think she's bringing hope to all of us that dream of flying into space and seeing our beautiful planet Earth as one.

So, while these guys and gals are not what I would call "space tourists," they are space adventurers. They are pioneers blazing the way into space for all of us. And someday, when the first real space tourists actually fly into space, that will mean that anyone who's got the money will be able to experience space at any time. Imagine being able to just book your flight and go into space for a ten-day vacation!

When will we have real space tourism; the kind where you can put your money down and just go? When will we have easy and safe access to space? When will the openings for space adventurers allow dozens or hundreds of people per year to experience space? We must work together with private industry to make it happen. We need to demand our space. We must make our politicians understand that they must work to remove roadblocks to private industry's access to space. And we must get as many people interested in space exploration as possible. That part is straightforward however; all we need to do is share with them our vision of the future.

Space tourism can help to make Earth a better place in the same way that international travel does. Travel expands our view of the world. It makes us realize how much we have in common with people who live differently than we do. It makes us see what we have in common. Many astronauts and cosmonauts come back with profoundly different views of the world after seeing it from space, the way it really is - without borders.

The true power of space "adventurism" or "tourism" is that it can bring home that perspective of the Earth as one, no separation because of borders, politics, ethnicity, religion, or anything else. Again from the immortal words of John Lennon, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will be as one." And music out...

Laura S. Woodmansee (www.woodmansee.com) is a science journalist and JPL Solar System Ambassador. She is the author of three space books; Women Astronauts, Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier, and most recently, Sex in Space. She can be contacted via her web site at www.woodmansee.com.
By Laura S. Woodmansee

Sales Strong for First Seats Aboard Virgin Galactic's Spaceliner

2007-11-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

GOLDEN, Colo. -- After witnessing the initial surge of public interest in suborbital space tourism that followed the successful flight of the X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne three years ago, officials at Virgin Galactic thought the pace of paid reservations might slow down in 2007 — particularly since SpaceShipTwo is not slated to launch before late 2009 at the earliest.

They needn't have worried.

"In the last quarter, we have doubled the number of bookings taken on the same time last year," said Carolyn Wincer, head of Astronaut Sales for Virgin Galactic. Wincer told SPACE.com the company had thought that interest might drop for a while until the new spaceship was rolled out.

"However, this is not the case at all," she said. "As word gets around that you can make a reservation now, people are keen to secure a place. Even better, uptake is in line with our 'best case scenario' from our original business plan ... meaning that the price point and estimates of interest that we projected ourselves, and based on market research, are so far proving to be correct."

So in the big picture, Wincer says the strong public interest is "good news for all space enthusiasts and for the industry as a whole!"

Initially, Virgin Galactic space flights will operate from the Mojave Spaceport in Mojave, California – home of Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the company that built SpaceShipOne and where SpaceShipTwo is now coming together.

The Spaceship Company, a joint venture announced in July 2005 between Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, has contracted Scaled Composites to design and build SpaceShipTwo and the carrier mothership WhiteKnight Two.

SpaceShipTwo is being designed to accommodate six passengers. It is scheduled to be unveiled before the end of 2007 and will be named Virgin SpaceShip (VSS) Enterprise.

Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five of the new spaceships and two motherships. The spaceline operator has established a set payment of $200,000 per seat, with a minimum refundable deposit of $20,000 to make a reservation.

Wincer said 200 customers from 30 different countries have already made deposits to confirm their reservations.

Space Sales Force

Fresh statistics from Wincer show some interesting trends.

The country that is home to the largest number of ticket buyers is the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and Ireland. In terms of the proportion of Virgin Galactic customers per capita, the top three countries are New Zealand, Ireland and Denmark.

Of the customers who have signed up so far, 15 percent are female, Wincer's statistics show. Ten percent of total customers booked through a travel agent, but 30 percent of the bookings have been received via Virgin Galactic "Accredited Space Agents" — an initiative launched in January of this year, she said. Accredited Space Agents are registered travel agents who have been specially selected and fully trained on all aspects of the Virgin Galactic offering.

As for Accredited Space Agents (ASAs) around the world, the numbers are as follows:
Australia has nine travel agencies and about 30 travel consultants.
New Zealand has one national chain with 10 consultants.
Japan has one agency with five consultants.
The United States has 47 consultants from about 45 agencies, all of these are members of Virtuoso, a leading leisure travel network.
Canada has six consultants from four agencies (who will be trained next week in Vancouver and are all Virtuoso members).
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has one agency with about 12 consultants.
Then add one agency and two to three consultants from each of the following who are all being trained this week at the International Space University: Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, the United Kingdom, Russia, Israel, and the Czech Republic.

"I mention the number of consultants as they are the ones who actually become 'ASAs' after they undergo our one day training program covering technology, customer experience, g-forces, medical issues, sales, marketing and public relations," Wincer said. "By doing a quick tally, by the time we finish the training in Vancouver, we should have around 100 ASA consultants worldwide from around 82 agencies in 17 countries."

Takeoff to touchdown

What you get for your $200,000 includes three days of pre-flight preparation, bonding and training onsite at the spaceport.

The big day arrives with departure of the White Knight Two that cradles SpaceShipTwo, hauling the vehicle and passengers to 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) in altitude for release.

Space travelers will then be rocketed to around 360,000 feet (109,728 meters) in altitude, some 68 miles (109 kilometers) high, with "fee-floating" passengers experiencing 4 to 5 minutes of microgravity. Faces pressed against large windows, customers get an on-high view of more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) in any direction. As for the length of time for SpaceShipTwo to glide to a terra firma touchdown, that takes some 30 minutes. The suborbital journey ends with SpaceShipTwo gliding to a runway landing.

All-in-all, the suborbital sojourn — from takeoff to touchdown — takes approximately 2.5 hours.

In the United States, those who travel above an altitude of 50 miles (80 kilometers) are designated as astronauts.

The Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), the world air sports federation based in Lausanne, Switzerland, defines spaceflight as over 62 miles (100 kilometers). Virgin Galactic passengers will receive Virgin Galactic astronaut wings and may receive Federal Aviation Administration astronaut wings as well.

Spaceport America

While initial spaceline operations will take place at the Mojave Spaceport, Virgin Galactic is to establish its headquarters and operate space flights from Spaceport America, now under construction in New Mexico and billed as the world's first "purpose built" commercial spaceport.

Momentum is picking up in readying Spaceport America for operations – but first the paperwork.

The New Mexico Spaceport Authority anticipates official filing of its license application later this year to the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We expect to receive the Record of Decision on the Environmental Impact Statement and the approval of the license application in early 2008, and we plan to break ground shortly after that," said Rick Homans, Executive Director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority.

"Bottom line...we remain on schedule to be operational by late 2009 or early 2010," Homans told SPACE.com.

Video here

Q&A: Astronaut's Son Takes New Route to Space

2007-11-02T13:32:00.001-07:00

Oct. 16, 2007 — Who could blame Richard Garriott? He grew up in Houston, surrounded by astronauts, including his dad Owen. He wasn't particularly turned on by math and science, but he did have a sharp eye for engineering — computer games that is.

By the time he was in high school, he was earning more than his astronaut dad. He tried college, but as the game business grew, his grades flagged until finally he dropped out.

Garriott, 46, is ready now to make a daring play in a game that's been building for 10 years. Unlike the quests in his medieval/fantasy series Ultima, the new gig is for real. Garriott is going to space like dear ole' dad, but he's doing it the new-fashioned way: by making out a check for $30 million.
arriott spoke with Discovery News about why he wants to leave the planet, what it was like growing up as an astronaut's son, and who is the real inspiration behind his adventures.

Irene Klotz, Discovery News: What is it about flying in space that appeals to you?

Richard Garriott: I think everyone has the fantasy or the desire to travel in space. I grew up in an environment where not only was my dad actually going to space, both of my next-door neighbors were astronauts, the guy behind me over the fence was an astronaut — basically the whole neighborhood was either astronauts or engineers in support of NASA...I kind of assumed that someday we would all be going to space.
Read here

Moon 2.0 - Your Chance to Ride Along

2007-10-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed in the videos and posters you can find on the the Google Lunar X PRIZE website, we are referring to this competition and the missions spurred by the prize as Moon 2.0. This is also a theme that's been used, to a limited sense, in talking about the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. While I was in India, I had a few people come up to me and ask me about this particular phrase,

Partly, of course, the Moon 2.0 theme references the fact that we hope the Google Lunar X PRIZE will kick off a second era of extensive lunar exploration, similar to the era of Lunar Orbiters, Rangers, Surveyors, Lunas, Lunokhods Zond, and Apollo missions. That rationale for the Moon 2.0 theme is apparent, but there's another reason that perhaps isn't as obvious--or maybe just doesn't translate as easily across generational or language gaps.

These days, a lot of the talk about the Internet--at least among my peers here in the USA--is about Web 2.0. This isn't a new internet protocol or a separate network (like Internet2). Instead, Web 2.0 represents a new way of thinking about the internet. If Web 1.0 was about portals and "push" technology--content produced by a central body and served up for the public--Web 2.0 is about public participation, sharing, and, increasingly often, user generated content. If Web 1.0 was a unprecedented and useful window to an enormous library, Web 2.0 is a new sort of town hall, where all users can participate.

We believe that the second era of lunar exploration will have an incredibly important aspect of public participation, and in a way fundamentally different than the first such era. Moon 1.0, to be sure--especially the Apollo mission--captured the public imagination to an extent rarely seen in any endeavor, regardless of the industry. But the members of the public were, for the most part, passive observers in the program, watching the events unfold from home.

This time around, it will be much more common for ordinary citizens from all around the world to actually play a role in the competition. Not only can any person from any country take part by forming or joining a team, but they will also be able to virtually 'ride along' with the lunar probes in new kind of way. I expect that each of our Google Lunar X PRIZE teams will find a new and unique way to do this, but the X PRIZE Foundation has already launched one: the Lunar Legacy program.

As part of the requirements for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, each team will be required to carry a small amount of payload provided by the X PRIZE Foundation to the surface of the Moon. Part of that payload space (and, more importantly, mass) will be used to carry a memory device that carries photos and messages provided by members of the viewing public through this program. Much as Apollo Astronaut Charlie Duke left a photograph of his family on the lunar surface as a symbol or inspiration and a lasting legacy of mankind's first voyages to the Moon, this program will allow anyone to send, for example, a photo of a loved one, to express their support or any other message. At the announcement of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, we took literally hundreds of photos of students, families, and enthusiasts to be included in part of this program. Then, we opened it up to allow anyone to participate.

Every once in a while, we'll spotlight a particularly interesting entry in the Lunar Legacy gallery. Today, I'd like to point you to a particularly poignant one. It would be hard for me to express it any more eloquently than the poster did herself, so if I may quote:

Robert P. (Bob) Verdier was a Boeing test conductor during the Apollo years. On July 16, 1969, he wrote and posted letters to each of his children. When they arrived a few days later in the mail, he said we could open them right away or put them in a safe place for future reading. I gave mine back to him to keep for me. After he died, my mom had boxes of his work life she wanted us to have. In amongst the old Saturn V firing manuals, badges and flightline passes, was his unopened letter to me.

.

Her father ends the letter by imploring the next generation to "use it wisely"--to treasure the ability to reach out to our celestial neighbors. With Moon 2.0, finally--finally--my generation, not yet born during Moon 1.0, gets a chance to do just that.

Update: Funnily, just as I posted this, comedian Stephen Colbert is interviewing Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell on his television show, The Colbert Report. At the beginning of a pretty entertaining (and very complementary, for Colbert) interview, Colbert said, talking about his childhood fascination with the Apollo program and the people who made that possible: "my childhood was better than my children's childhood, because I had these heroes to look up to." I'm hopeful that Moon 2.0 can change that!

Space Adventures Announces 1st Second Generation Astronaut

2007-10-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

Space Adventures, Ltd., the world’s leading space experiences company, announced today that famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun preparations for a “commercially active” mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight, currently planned for October 2008, will be the first in a series of missions that will accommodate commercial activity aboard the ISS. Involvement from the private sector can include scientific and environmental research and educational outreach programming.

“It has always been Space Adventures’ goal to open the space frontier. Now, with Richard’s flight, we have designed a series of missions devoted to increase commercial involvement in manned space missions,” said Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures. “It is a very rare occasion when so many commercial opportunities are available in one space mission. We encourage interested parties to contact us.”

Space Adventures made history in 2001 by organizing the mission of the first private space explorer. Now, the company continues to bring innovation to manned space flight by enabling corporate and non-profit entities to participate in commercial endeavors on the planet’s only orbiting outpost.

“I am dedicating my spaceflight to science,” said Mr. Garriott. “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He continued, “We need to be adventurous in mind and stimulate our intellects to answer today’s most daunting scientific questions and to invent tomorrow’s technological marvels.”

The first commercial research partner involved in Mr. Garriott’s mission is ExtremoZyme, Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Owen Garriott. The company plans to conduct protein crystallization experiments in space with proteins that have important cellular functions and are usually associated with common human diseases. Having access to these superior crystals will enable researchers to learn more about the molecular details of these proteins which is essential for protein engineering and structure-guided drug design.

“Because of my career, it was almost natural for Richard to be interested in space and exploration. I am so pleased that he is able to embrace this himself and that he is dedicating his flight to research. I am very proud of him,” said Owen Garriott, Mr. Garriott’s father and former NASA astronaut (Skylab II/SL-3, STS-9/Spacelab-1).

Interested parties, including commercial and non-profit entities and space enthusiasts, can get involved in Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight via his web site (www.richardinspace.com). Mr. Garriott will be updating the site continuously via photos, blog entries and individuals can submit questions and suggestions for his mission activities. “I want to involve as many people as possible in my mission,” said Mr. Garriott.

About Richard Garriott:

Richard Garriott is best known as a key figure in the computer gaming field. He was one of the earliest and most successful game developers. Mr. Garriott developed the Ultima series which remains the longest running computer game franchise, and with his brother, Robert, he founded Origin Systems, one of the most respected PC game developers and publishers. Richard also created Ultima Online, which ushered in the new massively multi-player online (MMO) genre, the fastest growing segment in computer gaming today. More recently, he co-founded the North American arm of NCsoft, the world’s largest online game developer and publisher. In October, his latest game, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, will ship in North America and in the European Union. For more information, please visit www.rgtr.com.

About Space Adventures:

Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world’s first private space explorers: Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

Space Adventures Announces 1st Second Generation Astronaut

2007-10-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

First private spaceflight open to commercial involvement in mission activities.
September 28 2007

Space Adventures, Ltd., the world’s leading space experiences company, announced today that famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun preparations for a “commercially active” mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight, currently planned for October 2008, will be the first in a series of missions that will accommodate commercial activity aboard the ISS. Involvement from the private sector can include scientific and environmental research and educational outreach programming.

“It has always been Space Adventures’ goal to open the space frontier. Now, with Richard’s flight, we have designed a series of missions devoted to increase commercial involvement in manned space missions,” said Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures. “It is a very rare occasion when so many commercial opportunities are available in one space mission. We encourage interested parties to contact us.”

Space Adventures made history in 2001 by organizing the mission of the first private space explorer. Now, the company continues to bring innovation to manned space flight by enabling corporate and non-profit entities to participate in commercial endeavors on the planet’s only orbiting outpost.

“I am dedicating my spaceflight to science,” said Mr. Garriott. “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He continued, “We need to be adventurous in mind and stimulate our intellects to answer today’s most daunting scientific questions and to invent tomorrow’s technological marvels.”

The first commercial research partner involved in Mr. Garriott’s mission is ExtremoZyme, Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Owen Garriott. The company plans to conduct protein crystallization experiments in space with proteins that have important cellular functions and are usually associated with common human diseases. Having access to these superior crystals will enable researchers to learn more about the molecular details of these proteins which is essential for protein engineering and structure-guided drug design.

“Because of my career, it was almost natural for Richard to be interested in space and exploration. I am so pleased that he is able to embrace this himself and that he is dedicating his flight to research. I am very proud of him,” said Owen Garriott, Mr. Garriott’s father and former NASA astronaut (Skylab II/SL-3, STS-9/Spacelab-1).

Interested parties, including commercial and non-profit entities and space enthusiasts, can get involved in Mr. Garriott’s spaceflight via his web site (www.richardinspace.com). Mr. Garriott will be updating the site continuously via photos, blog entries and individuals can submit questions and suggestions for his mission activities. “I want to involve as many people as possible in my mission,” said Mr. Garriott.

About Richard Garriott:

Richard Garriott is best known as a key figure in the computer gaming field. He was one of the earliest and most successful game developers. Mr. Garriott developed the Ultima series which remains the longest running computer game franchise, and with his brother, Robert, he founded Origin Systems, one of the most respected PC game developers and publishers. Richard also created Ultima Online, which ushered in the new massively multi-player online (MMO) genre, the fastest growing segment in computer gaming today. More recently, he co-founded the North American arm of NCsoft, the world’s largest online game developer and publisher. In October, his latest game, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, will ship in North America and in the European Union. For more information, please visit www.rgtr.com.

About Space Adventures:

Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world’s first private space explorers: Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.

First female space tourist blasts into space (Roundup)

2007-10-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Moscow - The world's first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari launched from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket Monday, heading to the International Space Station (ISS) with the orbiter's new crew.

Ansari, 40, an Iranian-American telecommunications entrepreneur, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria blasted off punctually at 10:08 a.m. (0408 GMT) from the Baikonur space centre, Russian mission control said.

Meanwhile, there was concern about the appearance of smoke or vapours on the ISS, apparently emanating from a faulty oxygen generator.

Authorities told the three-man crew to don protective suits with goggles, but said the situation was under control.

'The situation on the ISS is normal, there is not danger, and certainly no fears for the safety of the crew, Roskosmos space agency spokesman Igor Panarin told the Interfax news agency.

The incoming Soyuz is due to dock with the space station early Wednesday. Commander Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria will serve on the ISS for six months while Ansari should return to earth on September 28 with the station's departing crew.

The businesswoman went through the lift-off eyes wide, as footage from NASA, the US space agency, showed. Worried that she was becoming overexcited, Russian controllers told her professional companions to calm her as they embarked on the two-day journey to the station.

'If she carries on turning her head so frantically it may affect how she feels and spoil her first days in orbit, and we want her to receive maximum enjoyment from the flight,' flight director Vladimir Solovyov said.

As the Soyuz rose for nine minutes into its designated orbit Ansari's mascot for the trip, a small toy badger, swung on a string from the capsule ceiling above her. The amateur space traveller gave a smile of wonderment as it then began to float in the conditions of weightlessness.

Ansari, who left Iran at age 16 and is now a US citizen living in Dallas, was preceded in space by three other so-called space tourists, all men.

Paying some 20 million US dollars for the trip, she says she hopes her life and space voyage will inspire young people worldwide, 'especially women and girls.'

During her eight-day stay, she will conduct scientific experiments for the European Space Agency ESA into the effects of anaemia and backache in zero gravity.

The ISS is currently crewed by three people. While German Thomas Reiter will stay on board until later in the year, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and American Jeffrey Williams will be busy with cleaning chores during their last hours in orbit, officials said.

The new crew, which is the station's 14th, will have an especially intensive programme.

Four space walks are planned for their stay, during one of which Tyurin will drive a golf ball as part of an advertisement for a Canadian company. The stunt was to have been filmed by the current crew but was postponed amid safety worries.

Three unmanned progress supply ships and at least one US space shuttle are also due to dock at the ISS in the coming months.

To make way for the approaching Soyuz capsule carrying Ansari, the shuttle Atlantis undocked from the station Sunday after completing three spacewalks to install a truss and two solar arrays on the orbital outpost. It is scheduled to land in Florida Wednesday.

The Soyuz will now orbit the planet 22 times as it move into the same flight path as the ISS, which flies around 400 kilometres above the earth. The capsule is due to dock at 0525 GMT Wednesday.

The journey is the culmination of a lifetime of interest in space for Ansari. After selling her Internet company Telecom Technologies in 2001 for 750 million dollars, she was in a position to lend serious clout to efforts to develop private space flight.

She and her family provided sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, and a ten-million-dollar award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned craft into space twice in two weeks. This feat was accomplished by designer Burt Rutan in 2004.
http://monstersandcritics.com

Leads to Space Settlement

2007-10-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Space tourism is a reality. Four tourists have traveled to the International Space Station (ISS) at their own expense and at least four companies are developing sub-orbital tourist vehicles (Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures, Rocketplane Kistler, and Blue Origin). Not only does space tourism extend the freedom to travel into space for those with the means, it promises a profitable market to develop the launch vehicles necessary to expand life throughout the solar system. Space tourism may solve the single most difficult problem holding up space settlement: safe and inexpensive transportation from the surface of the Earth to Low Earth Orbit.

Present launch capabilities, while sufficient for communications, remote sensing, some space science and limited manned operations, are grossly inadequate for large scale space settlement. By space settlement we mean very large numbers of people living in giant orbital spacecraft, on the Moon, on Mars and/or within large asteroids. Space settlement could provides humanity with hundreds of times more living area, thousands of time more physical resources, and millions of times more energy than is presently at our disposal. Such a vast expansion of the resources available to human civilization would eliminate the need, although perhaps not the practice, of resource-driven war. Such warfare kills and maims large numbers of people and destroys their work. Substantially better launch capacity is a necessary precursor to space settlement, but progress over the last 50 years has been disappointing. Space tourism may change that.

Over the last 50 years a wide variety of launchers have been developed, up to and including the U.S. Space Shuttle, the most capable space vehicle to date. However, in spite of decades of development, Earth-to-Orbit transportation costs thousands of dollars per kilogram and suffers a catastrophic failure rate of a one or two percent. Worse, these figures have not improved with time. For example, the Saturn V was developed in the 1960’s to put men on the Moon. This vehicle cost less, measured in man-hours per ton to LEO (Low Earth Orbit), than today’s major launch vehicles. Furthermore, the Saturn never suffered a catastrophic failure, although there were many close calls. By contrast, current shuttle costs run between $500-1,000 million per flight to deliver, at most, a few tens of tons of payload to the International Space Station, and the shuttle has suffered two catastrophic failures in just over a hundred flights.

Aircraft developed much more rapidly in their first 50 years. This may be because hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of flights occurred in that period, but we have only launched a few thousand payloads into space. Substantial launch vehicle improvement may require tens of thousands of launches per year, not the current 50-70. Unfortunately, current markets for space launch: communications, Earth-observing, science, national prestige, etc. cannot support hundreds of launches per year, let alone tens of thousands. However, a new space market has recently been created: Space Adventures, Ltd. and the Russian space program have flown four tourists to the ISS, reputedly for about $20 million apiece. Although the ISS was originally intended to serve a host of space applications, it has not yet done so for a variety of reasons. Space tourism
may be the legacy of the ISS, and it could be a very good one indeed.

The only market for humans-in-space potentially capable of sustaining thousands of flights per year is tourism, if the cost is in the $100,000 range or less. If the price is in the $10,000 range, millions of flights can be supported. Published market research suggests that the space tourism market may become very large if the price is right. In 1994, Patrick Colins, et all found that the Japanese market could provide about one million customers per year for space flight at about $10,000 per passenger. In 1996, Sven Abitzsch found that approximately 20% of the U.S., Canadian and German populations and nearly 40% of the Japanese population would be will to pay over $10,000 (actually, six months salary) for a trip into space. This represents nearly a hundred million people. In 1999, Oily Barrett found that 12% of United Kingdom residents, representing 3.5 million people, said they were willing to pay over $10,000 for a trip to space. In 2001, Crouch surveyed the literature and found that the global space tourism market is a strong function of price, with an annual demand of five million per year at $10,000 per flight and 170 at $500,00 per flight, representing annual markets of $5 billion and $85 million respectively. Table 1 shows Crouch’s demand vs. price per ticket. If these projections are optimistic by no more than a factor of ten, and the price per ticket can be brought down sufficiently, there is good reason to believe space tourism can support tens of thousands of launches per year or more, a rate comparable to the early decades of aviation.

price/ticket (1994 $) passengers/year
$1,000 20 million
$10,000 5 million
$100,000 400 thousand
$250,000 1,000
$500,000 170

All human-capable orbital vehicles to date have been developed as national projects by the U.S., Russia/USSR, and China. For sub-orbital vehicles the picture is quite different. Spurred by the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, a change in the way launch development was rewarded, Scaled Composites, LLC built and flew SpaceShipOne into space twice in as many weeks in 2004. Interestingly, these were the only U.S. manned space flights that year as the Shuttle was grounded after a fatal accident in 2003. While Scaled Composites reportedly spent considerably more than the purse to win, other commercial deals involving advertising and technology sales netted a small profit. As a direct result, Scaled is now developing SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic is building a space port in New Mexico and intends to fly tourists into space for two hundred thousand dollars per trip within a few years. Furthermore, Virgin has serious competitors.

Space tourism may lead to large numbers of people traveling to space in the next few decades. Burt Rutan, the technical genius behind SpaceShipOne, made a prediction in a 2004 talk in San Jose, CA:
Within 5 years 3,000 tourists will have been to space.
Within 15 years sub-orbital tourism will be affordable, and 50,000 people will have flown.
Within 15 years the first, expensive orbital tourist flights will have happened.
Within 25 years orbital tourism will be affordable.

Space settlement has tremendous potential benefits for mankind but requires a much more robust and inexpensive launch capacity than is available today. Traditional approaches to improving launch have failed to deliver a sufficiently capable system over the last few decades and shows little promise of doing so. To address this issue, we propose orienting launch development towards the tourist market, which, at the right price, is large enough to support tens of thousands of flights per year. Just as computers once cost millions of dollars and were only available to the few, space tourism today is the province of the wealthy. However, as the cost of computers plunged, they have become part of everyday life for the world’s middle-class. Space tourism promises to do something similar for personal space flight. Just as one day millions of years ago life, for whatever reason, crawled out of the oceans and onto dry land, space tourism may well begin the spread of life throughout our solar system.
sorce
http://www.nss.org

Space tourist tells tales of rockets, diapers

2007-09-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO--Knowing the feeling of weightlessness...enjoying NASA-issued shrimp cocktail...being called "space cowboy" by Russian cosmonauts. Cost: $20 million.

The experience of flying to the International Space Station: Priceless.

That may be the easiest way to sum up Greg Olsen's 10-day tour into orbit with the Russian Space Agency, as the third private citizen ever to make the trip. Olsen spoke about his October 2005 travels at the annual Society of Information Design luncheon, held here Wednesday.

"It was absolutely worth it," Olsen said to a roomful of scientists, after describing some of the sillier highlights, like flying through the shuttle or snacking on a floating Slim Jim.

On a more technical note, Olsen trained for five months, or 900 hours, in Moscow before rocketing roughly 200 miles into outer space, orbiting the Earth for two days, and then finally docking at the ISS for eight more days. In all, Olsen, who was 60 when the voyage launched, orbited the Earth 150 times before heading back to Russia. That's possible because the ISS travels at about 17,000 miles per hour, completing an orbit around the Earth every 90 minutes.

"The only way for someone like me to go up there is through the Russian Soyuz rocket," he said, adding: "It's quite an experience."

If private industry has its way, Olsen will soon be joined by many other people out to expand the idea of what it means to travel abroad. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are building businesses around private space travel, and NASA itself is hosting contests to encourage companies and academics to build next-generation technology for commercial space flight.

A New Jersey resident, Olsen got the idea for his trip one morning in 2003 while reading the paper at a local Starbucks. Space Adventures--a U.S.-based space-travel agency contracted with Russia--had sent the first two private citizens to ISS, according to a news article that day. Olsen, who was recently flush with cash from the sale of his optical technology company Epitaxx to a telecom operator, decided it was a good time to pursue a long-held dream.

But his plans were temporarily thwarted in 2004, when Russian doctors found a black spot on his lung during routine X-rays before training was to start. After working with doctors for nine months, he was re-admitted to the program.

"People often ask me what I learned and I tell them, 'Don't give up,'" said Olsen, who now lectures at schools around the country, encouraging kids to study math and science. "I failed trigonometry in high school and eventually went on to get my Ph.D."

Olsen described his five-month training in Moscow as a cross between college and military boot camp, but for Russian cosmonauts. Training included a two-mile run every morning, Russian language classes and exams, fire-fighting drills and zero-gravity training, in which he practiced free-falling for 30 seconds at a time.

Olsen traveled with two astronauts, a Russian and an American, but he still had to speak the language, which was the hardest part of the training, he said. At liftoff the three men had waited two and half hours in cramped conditions, and then flew another four-and-a-half hours before having the ability to move around. "We all wore Huggies diapers, and we all had to use them, too."

In the Soyuz, the crew made 34 orbits before docking at the ISS, where there were two other astronauts manning the station. The ISS is fairly close to Earth at 226 miles in outer space, and it measures about 200 feet long. Olsen likened his experience in the station to a long and weightless camping trip. No showers, no sinks, no running water. The crew uses wet wipes to clean up and an onboard vacuum to urinate. The crew straps into sleeping bags to sleep upright.

When Olsen landed, he needed help to stand and walk because of effects to the vestibular system in zero gravity and the shaky re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. It took him three or four days to regain normalcy.

It also took him some time to regain his normal height. He was 1 inch taller for a day, thanks to weightless effects that cause the vertebrae to relax and stretch.

Rivals race for UAE launch space

2007-09-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures eye Ras Al-Khaimah as potential base for suborbital tourism flights

Rival space tourism ventures Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures could go head-to-head over plans to launch suborbital flights from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Virgin chairman Sir Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will talk with authorities from the northernmost emirate Ras Al-Khaimah, where Space Adventures already has spaceport development plans in place.
“We are going to have discussions over the next week with the people who have approached us. It is a perfect region from which to operate flights and if discussions go well, it’s quite likely the UAE will see space needle Virgin Galactic flights from here in the not-too-distant future,” said Branson, in Dubai last week for the launch of Virgin Atlantic’s service from London Heathrow.
Space Adventures in February announced plans to develop a commercial spaceport in Ras Al-Khaimah to add to other potential spaceport locations in Asia and North America.
The venture says the Ras Al-Khaimah spaceport development project will cost at least $265 million with shared investments by Space Adventures and the government of Ras Al-Khaimah and unspecified other funding. The UAE Department of Civilian Aviation has cleared suborbital spaceflights.
First flights for Virgin Galactic’s suborbital service will be from Mojave airport in California before moving to its preferred centre of operations in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic’s network of potential future spaceports includes the north of Scotland or Sweden, Ras Al-Khaimah and Australia.
Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn says the space shuttle design for SpaceShipTwo (SS2) is frozen with construction of the commercial prototype expected to start this year. “We have taken, for commercial reasons, the deliberate decision of not unveiling the design until early next year,” says Whitehorn.
Virgin Galactic has increased the size of the SS2’s carrier vehicle, White Knight 2, to the size of a Boeing 757, while SS2 itself will be the size of a large-cabin Gulfstream IV business jet, designed to allow space tourists to experience weightlessness earth from space and spectacular views.
Whitehorn says that so far $13.1 million has been paid in deposits by 157 prospective customers.

Billionaire flips over his home in space

2007-09-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

Billionaire space traveler Charles Simonyi, right, floats upside down Monday during a news conference in the Zvezda service module after his arrival at the international space station with Russian office space cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Fyodor Yurchikhin (front row). In the background are members of the station's current crew, Michael Lopez-Alegria and (obscured from view) Mikhail Tyurin and Sunita Williams.
KOROLYOV, Russia - Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. billionaire bringing a gourmet meal arrived at the international space station Tuesday — to a warm welcome from current crewmen and the earthbound applause of Martha Stewart.

The lifestyle guru was among Russian and American officials and visitors monitoring the docking at Russian Mission Control, on Moscow's outskirts, as onboard TV cameras showed the Soyuz nearing the station and then jerking to a stop. Stewart is a friend of Charles Simonyi, the American who shelled out $20-25 million to be the world's fifth paying private space jam.

The Soyuz capsule docked automatically with the ISS and Simonyi and two Russian cosmonauts floated into the space station about 90 minutes later.

The Uncomfortable Reality of Sex in Space

2007-09-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

I picture NASA shifting uncomfortably in its chair, running its fingers under its collar and wondering if it's the only one feeling warm now that sex is in the air.

Or beyond the air, as the case may be.

You see, the space agency is almost 50 years old, and while it likes to think it's a leader in exploring new frontiers, it has yet to shake off the fetters of its childhood when it comes to sex, romance and relationships.

Yet it is starting to talk more publicly about the special considerations associated with long space flights, such as how to deal with illness and even death when you can't just turn around and come home. And sex is on the list for future discussions.

In the past, NASA has not been comfortable talking about sexuality, says science journalist Laura Woodmansee, who encountered resistance while researching her book Sex in Space.

"It's almost as if (retired astronauts) agreed not to talk about sex when they left (NASA)," she says. "And the current ones worry about their jobs and how it would make them look."

Yet as humans begin to spend more time in space and to travel further from Earth, space agencies will need to factor sex into their equations.

"We will have to address crew compatibility, sexuality issues, whether there is a necessity for sexual activity," says David Steitz, NASA senior public affairs officer.

He had the grace to laugh when I interrupted with a "Hell, yeah!"

But I was serious, too. We cannot expect astronauts to spend three years in a spacecraft and not have sex -- of some kind. Probably with each other, and likely in more than one combination.

Sex in space presents a number of challenges beyond tangible matters like zero gravity or awkward enclosures. In fact, the physics should be the least of NASA's concerns.

It's the touchy-feely bit that the agency will need to consider seriously. Blindly applying Earth-bound standards that astronauts cannot follow under space-voyage conditions will only lead to guilt and shame.

What happens if one person in the spaceship makes a romantic overture, only to be rebuffed? What happens if an astronaut in a relationship back home falls in love with another member of the mission? What to do -- send a breakup text message from Mars?

How do you handle love, sex, romance, heartbreak, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you're 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you'll make it back?

You cope with it the way you do everything else in space. You rely on your intelligence, your commitment to the common good and your training.

If NASA invites me to take part in discussions about sexual standards in space -- it could happen -- I will suggest sending all candidates into the adult internet for a year.

They don't have to have cybersex or fall in love, but they should participate in different types of adult communities until they become comfortable with the wide range of human sexual relationships. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would gladly volunteer to show astronauts the ropes.

Online, astronauts (and their partners, if they have any) can learn how to deal with sexual situations similar to those they will face in space, with one important difference: an escape hatch.

They can observe and experiment with sex without possession, partnership without monogamy, sexual pleasure without expectation of roses or breakfast.

They can discover group love, bond with a special someone, or both. They can try letting go of jealousy and fear, figure out how to protect themselves from other people's drama, and develop healthy ways to cope with desire, love and rejection.

Some astronauts might discover they are comfortable with polyamory or bisexuality while others might reaffirm their commitment to monogamy. The important thing is that they practice living and working respectfully with others regardless of who is sleeping with whom.

We need to acknowledge that humans will bring our sexuality with us into space and that includes all the complexities of relationships as well as the relatively simple matter of bodies. NASA cannot avoid confronting those complexities, especially now that the public knows even astronauts sometimes confuse obsession with love.

"How long can humans go without sex?" is not the right question.

I don't care if you have a same-sex crew of great-grandparents who have never had a flicker of sexual desire in their entire lives. Lock a group of humans into a ship, sail them through space and time, and it won't take long for that deep, ancient need for touch and intimacy to surface.

For now, Steitz says, NASA is still trying to work out how to keep crewmembers physically healthy on an interplanetary journey.

"Obviously mental health is as important as the physical. The difference is, it's easier to develop physical standards for human bodies than for psychological or behavioral well-being," he says. "I can tell you how much bone mass you have, what your muscle strength is, how much oxygen you're breathing. But it's much harder to try to figure out 'are you happy?'"

Once they develop standards for maintaining physical health, he says, they can start designing a spacecraft. Only then do the less technical matters come to the fore.

Like where to stow the chocolate.
Regina Lynn

Do you want to travel to space? 1st stop: Sarasota

2007-09-11T12:20:00.001-07:00

By SARA KENNEDY
SARASOTA --A local travel agency is marketing an unusual product: trips to space.

Ryan Hilton, co-owner of Admiral Travel Gallery of Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch, is among 47 exclusive agents worldwide selling Virgin Galactic's commercial flights into space.

The trips aren't for everyone. For one thing, they cost $200,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness. For another, the spacecraft for the flights is still being tested and flights aren't expected to start until 2009.

"It's not your average experience, price and contract," acknowledged Hilton Wednesday from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was about to take a group of tourists on a 10-day trip into the bush. "Because it's so new, that is probably the most exciting element. It's open to anyone."

Diana Cloud, 52, of Sarasota, has signed on for seat number 161 on the six-passenger spaceship to be launched from the Mojave Desert. The spaceship, which sits atop a jet carrier aircraft, flies to 50,000 feet before it leaves the mother ship and continues on to the edge of the atmosphere at 360,000 feet, or nearly 70 miles.

Virgin Galactic, owned by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, is offering the space travel.

Cloud, who will receive two days of training before the flight, is expected to be on the 30th trip from Earth. "It's very exciting. She's a pioneer," Hilton said.

He thought of Cloud for the trip because her previous jaunts had revealed a decidedly adventurous streak. She has flown in a supersonic jet in South Africa and experienced zero gravity in a 727 cargo jet.

"Once I realized it was a great product match for her, we presented it, gave her the details," said Hilton.

The aptly named Cloud, who runs a consulting company and is also a licensed pilot, said she was immediately fascinated about the idea of space travel because "I want to see Earth with my own eyes.

"It's everything about spiritual," she said. "If you've read interviews with the astronauts, they say they'll never be the same and I do believe that. I've been blessed to be successful in life, I have extreme gratitude for that. It's an opportunity of a lifetime."

The spacecraft, flown with two pilots, will fly nearly 2,500 mph to just beyond the Earth's atmosphere in a daylong trip. The company has not yet set a date for its first flight, according to the company Web site, www.virgin-galactic.com.

"It is these spaceships that will allow affordable suborbital space tourism for the first time in the history of the universe," the Web site said.

Hundreds of other passengers from every continent have signed up, as well, according to Hilton, but Cloud is the only one who has paid a deposit through his agency.

Hilton had to compete for the privilege of selling such trips by submitting a business plan. In January, he attended three days of training at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

So, after hearing all the details, was Hilton tempted to sign up himself?

"I would do it in a heartbeat, maybe, one day," he laughed.

From the Iron Curtain to the Final Frontier

2007-09-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

Charles Simonyi, 58, Microsoft billionaire and CEO of Intentional Software
(Fortune Magazine) -- Charles Simonyi, the software programmer credited with developing Word and Excel, has a billion Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) dollars to his name, squires Martha Stewart on his arm, and last month became the fifth so-called space tourist, spending 13 days at the International Space Station.

It has been quite a ride since he was born in postwar, newly Stalinist Hungary in 1948 and escaped a life of bread lines and communist deprivation by moving to the U.S. to attend the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. For Simonyi his latest jaunt wasn't just an ego trip, because he sees himself as a champion for private-sector space exploration.

A few days after his capsule touched down in a field in central Kazakhstan, he spoke with Fortune's Tim Arango.

What did you miss the most while you were in space?

I missed a cold beer. The first thing I got when I got back was an apple. I started to eat it with such enthusiasm, but they took it away. They really just want you to be measured and slow when you return.

Do you foresee a day when space tourism is not just the province of billionaires - when it will be as affordable as plane travel?

Yes - the only question is when. I think the emphasis is going to move from government efforts to private efforts. Many of these ideas will pay off and reduce the cost of lifting humans to space. I'm talking to [Nikolai] Sevastianov, the head of [rocket designer] Energia, and he's very intent to reduce the cost to one-third of what it is today.

The trip is said to have cost $25 million. How much of that money went toward research and how much went to Space Adventures, the company that planned the trip?

I'm not going to confirm that number, and I certainly have no idea how the money is apportioned. The way I look at it is as a contribution to space. God knows, the space business, especially in Russia, can use help. The flight itself was a bonus. It was never assured that the flight would take place. I was training for more than six months, and at any point during that time there could have been a problem that prevented me from flying.

You left Microsoft in 2002 to found Intentional Software Corp. Is there work for your firm to do within the space industry?

There is work for our company in every industry where there are complex organizations and complex procedures. Hospitals come to mind. Many structures of government. And that includes space stations, which actually are not as complex as they seem.

What's more complex: preparing for travel in space or organizing a dinner party at Martha Stewart's Turkey Hill estate?

Preparing to go to space is more complicated, but not by much.
CNN.com

Space tourist Simonyi's station souvenirs

2007-09-07T09:40:00.001-07:00

April 9, 2007 — Charles Simonyi has his passport with him, ready for his arrival aboard the International Space Station (ISS) today.

"Just to get it stamped, not that I think you should have to have a passport to go to space," Simonyi, a former Microsoft software developer, told collectSPACE before his launch this past Saturday.

The government-issued document is among Simonyi's small stash of souvenirs and personal items that he has packed for his 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost.

As the fifth space tourist, Simonyi will spend his time conducting experiments for international space agencies including the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Hungarian Space Office. In his free time, the American billionaire plans to blog about his experience on his website, communicate with students on the ground and take many photographs.

"I am bringing up a lot of camera equipment and a lot of blank tapes and cassettes," said Simonyi, who has also brought an MP3 player with over 1,600 tracks loaded "all legally" with classical and rock music.

He also plans to establish the station's first reading room.

"I am taking some books. I say I am starting a library — there are books up there, but anyway I'm the first one to say it should be a library, so I am taking up a couple of books." The books he is bringing are Faust by Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.

Delivering enrichment of a different type, Simonyi also carries a six-course meal chosen by close friend Martha Stewart and prepared by French chef Alain Ducasse. It includes roasted quail, duck breast confit and shredded chicken parmentier.

History and heritage

As a high school student in Budapest, Hungary, Simonyi first learned to program computers on the Soviet Ural II. Moving to the U.S. to attend the University of California at Berkeley and then earning a doctorate at Stanford, he began working in 1972 at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he created Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editor.

From there, Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981, leading the teams that developed Word and Excel. Today, he is the president and CEO of Intentional Software Corporation, a company he founded in 2002 to focus on improving ways in which organizations write software.

In a nod to his nation of birth, Simonyi has with him three contest-winning drawings created by Hungarian children. Held by the Hungarian Red Cross, the contest called for children in over 50 schools across the country to submit drawings that depict the organization helping people on and off the planet. Simonyi will use the ISS's ink stamp to mark the drawings as having been on-board, and will return the pictures to the artists during a ceremony to be held after his flight.

Simonyi said in a statement that he was "honored to support the Hungarian Red Cross and to involve children from Hungary and around the world in the wonder of space travel." Using amateur radio, Simonyi also plans to speak directly with high school students from aboard the station in three events across the United States.

Symbolizing his history with computer software, which ultimately led him to being able to afford the $25 million trip to space, Simonyi has brought a Ural II paper tape. "To remind me where it all started," Simonyi said of the memento.

Simonyi's heritage and history are also represented by the design of his personal mission insignia. The diamond shaped patch combines an outer rectangle of Hungarian, Russian and American flags, and an inner circle that has depictions of the station and Soyuz spacecraft inside a constellation of stars.

"It became evident that we needed to have a patch, so I was trying to think of what would be the good motives that you would want to show on the patch and of course, what might be the motto for the flight... it became 'From Ideas to Reality'," Simonyi described to collectSPACE.

"'Reality' of course, was being there, the space station, Soyuz and so on. We needed an illustration for an 'idea'. In a number of different ways, the simplest idea is the theorem of Pythagoras. How to represent the theorem of Pythagoras?" Simonyi asked rhetorically of the relation between three sides of a triangle in geometry.

"We had a couple of brainstorms and it went through a couple of different iterations. It was first a cutout of the shape of the theorem of Pythagoras... [with] the reality behind it. That didn't work graphically."

"Somehow the idea of a constellation that looks like the theorem [was suggested], which is a fascinating idea by itself because there is no such thing. Imagine if there would be, that would be quite remarkable! But no, we imagined a theorem in the form of a constellation, it was an interesting thought and it worked graphically very well, so that's it. And then of course, the background of flags is pretty important, too," explained Simonyi.

In addition to the patches sewn on his space- and flight- suits, Simonyi took with him a small supply of emblems as well as U.S. and Hungarian flags he wrote in his blog "will make excellent gifts some day to museums at home in Seattle and in Hungary."

More to add to his collection

Even before applying to fly in space, Simonyi collected space artifacts as a hobby.

"I have a few pieces of clothing from early Russian [cosmonauts]. I have Komarov's sweatpants, or at least sweatpants that are said to have belonged to Komarov, things like that, but mostly written materials," Simonyi revealed in his interview with collectSPACE.

"I have a few checklists. For example, I have several of the checklists that [Apollo 11 moonwalker] Buzz Aldrin has been selling. I love documentation, checklists or manuals; all the Apollo manuals, the Gemini manuals, all the manuals."

Simonyi isn't the only collector coming on-board the ISS when Soyuz TMA-10 docks just after 2:00 p.m. CDT this afternoon. One of his two traveling crew mates, Fyodor Yurchikhin collects stamps, that is when he has the time.

"I collect stamps," Yurchikhin proudly told collectSPACE before his launch. "I cannot tell you that I collect now the stamps because I should have enough free time, I do not have enough free time. Now, my collection waits for me."

He may not have stamps aboard, but Yurchikhin, who is set to take over command of the station, has something just as, if not more, meaningful along with him: a stuffed toy dog.

"My small dog is with me because this dog lives with me I think more than 30 years from my high school because my favorite teacher give me this toy. It's like talisman for me. Everywhere in my travels this dog is with me."

Indeed, this isn't the first time the toy dog has traveled to space. It accompanied Yurchikhin on his first mission in 2002 with the crew of STS-112 on space shuttle Atlantis.

Like his fellow cosmonaut, Soyuz TMA-10 commander Oleg Kotov also brought a toy, a small black cat named "Dimlar," after his two children Dima and Lara. The doll could be seen hanging in the Soyuz cabin during launch.

Yurchikhin and Kotov will remain on the ISS, replacing Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, who will return to Earth with Simonyi on April 20.

Spaceport America: First Looks at a New Space Terminal

2007-09-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

GOLDEN, Colorado -- Architectural and engineering teams have begun shaping the look and feel of New Mexico's Spaceport America, taking the wraps off new images today that showcase the curb appeal of the sprawling main terminal and hangar at the futuristic facility.

Last month, a team of U.S. and British architects and designers had been recommended for award to design the primary terminal and hangar facility at Spaceport America - structures that symbolize the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport.

Selected from an international field of eleven firms, the winning design is the work of URS Corporation - a large design and engineering enterprise - teamed with Foster + Partners of the United Kingdom, a group with extensive experience in crafting airport buildings.

When the 100,000 square-foot (9,290 square-meter) facility is completed -- the centerpiece of the world's first, purpose-built, commercial spaceport -- the structures will serve as the primary operating base for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceliner, and also as the headquarters for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority.

The terminal and hangar facility will also provide room for aircraft and spacecraft, and Virgin Galactic's operations facilities, including pre-flight and post-flight facilities, administrative offices, and lounges. The spacious maintenance hangar can hold two White Knight Two carrier aircraft and five SpaceShipTwo spaceliners - vessels now under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California.

Destination experience

The terminal and hangar facility are projected to cost about $31 million, and will provide a "Destination Experience" for visitors to Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic intends to sign a 20-year lease for approximately 84,000 square feet (7,803 square meters) in the building.

"The URS/Foster team presented us with a concept that blends sensitivity to the environment, cutting-edge technology and a stunning image and shape when viewed from high above," noted Kelly O'Donnell, chair of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority in a press statement last month.

The design chosen is a low-lying, striking bit of construction that uses natural earth as a berm, and relies on passive energy for heating and cooling, with photovoltaic panels for electricity and water recycling capabilities. A rolling concrete shell acts as a roof with massive windows opening to a view of the runway and spacecraft.

According to a press statement released today, the low-lying, organic shape resembles a rise in the landscape, and will use local materials and regional construction techniques.

"A careful balance between accessibility and privacy is achieved, as visitors and astronauts enter the building through a deep channel cut in the landscape," the statement noted. "The walls will form an exhibition area leading to a galleried level above the hangar that houses the spacecraft and on through to the terminal building. Natural light enters via skylights, with a glazed façade reserved for the terminal building, establishing a platform for spectacular views onto the runway."

Construction on the 100,000 square-foot hangar and terminal facility is scheduled to begin in 2008.

Environmentally efficient landmark

Renderings of the main terminal and hangar facility were to be unveiled today during a press conference held at the Pan American Center on the New Mexico State University campus in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Announcements regarding the winning team and design selected were held up due to the tragic Mojave, California Air and Space Port accident on July 26, in which a test stand explosion killed three Scaled employees during a routine test.

Company founder of Foster + Partners, Lord Norman Foster, said in an earlier press comment that the world's first space terminal would be a technically complex building. The facility not only will provide a dramatic experience for the astronauts and visitors, "but will set an ecologically sound model for future spaceport facilities," he added.

Jens Deichmann, vice president of URS Corporation, accented their group's involvement: "Our team of New Mexico, regional, and international talent is excited to help the State of New Mexico and Virgin Galactic advance their goals of commercial space travel and scientific and engineering education."

The New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) is currently finalizing contract negotiations with URS and Foster + Partners. The team will then begin working with the NMSA and Virgin Galactic to finalize the design of the facility, and the NMSA expects to put the construction of the facility out for bids in the first half of 2008.

Construction of Spaceport America would begin in 2008, given a Federal Aviation Administration issuing of a site operator's license to the NMSA. Completion is expected in late 2009 or early 2010.

Year of the spaceship

Founded by Branson, a British entrepreneur and adventurer, Virgin Galactic was created to undertake the challenge of making private space travel available to everyone.

"The deal between New Mexico and URS working with Sir Norman Foster will produce a spectacular, but very environmentally efficient landmark for the new era of space travel," explained Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic.

"The design for Spaceport America is not only breathtaking but also practical which is also what I believe SpaceShipTwo and its launch aircraft WhiteKnight Two will be regarded as when their respective designs are unveiled next January," Whitehorn told SPACE.com.

Whitehorn added that, with the commencement of construction at Spaceport America and the completion of construction of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo, he and his Virgin Galactic team are now confident that 2008 will be "The Year of the Spaceship."
www.space.com

Space tourism tickets to skyrocket

2007-08-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

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.

A library for Mars

2007-08-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

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.

OSBOURNE'S SPACE DREAM

2007-08-17T06:04:00.001-07:00

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."

Three, two, one - Commence bragging!

2007-07-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

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.
continue...

Will Tourists Beat the Government Back to the Moon?

2007-07-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

Russian space tourism update

2007-06-28T08:18:00.001-07:00

An RIA Novosti article today reports that “more than 10 people” are interested in buying seats on Soyuz flights, following in the footsteps of the five orbital space tourists to date. “We are holding preliminary consultations with them, and there are no Russians among them,” said Roskosmos spokesman Igor Panarin. He also confirmed past reports that the cost of s Soyuz flight was going up from $20 million to $21.8 million, although many news reports of Charles Simonyi’s ISS flight pegged the cost as high as $25 million.
Russian space tourism update

For $250,000, you too can slip the surly bonds of Earth to say, `I do'

2007-06-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Weddings atop mountains and waterfalls. Weddings while skydiving and bungee jumping. Weddings inside mines and caves.

Yawn.

It's high time for people to expand their horizons and look beyond this world for marriage inspiration.

Cindy Cashman has. The professional speaker and self-help pocket book author from Lakeway, Tex., hopes to be the first person to get married in outer space.

Surely that's the final frontier for getting hitched.

It could happen as early as 2009. Cashman, 48, has an agreement with a Oklahoma-based company called Rocketplane, which is trying to pioneer spaceflight for the general public, to be one of the first regular folks shot into space.

For her, though, the trip will be extra special. "To go someplace where very few people have gone, and see the curvature of the Earth, and be weightless, and to look into the eyes of the man I love and say, `I do,'" she says in an interview, "this ties it all together: the excitement, the adventure, the opportunity of a lifetime!"

Rocketplane XP, the airplane-like spacecraft in which she and her fiancé will exchange vows, will use its jet engines, then its rocket engine to propel its passengers almost vertically beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a parabolic trajectory.

At its 100 km apogee, they'll be in outer space, free from the shackles of gravity, gazing at Earth's bright contours below.

Actually, there won't be time for that. They'll have just three to five minutes before they fall back into Earth's grip. Quick, the vows! "Do you take this man...I do! Do you take this woman...I do!"

Cashman and her 55-year-old beau, Mitch Walling, a pilot for regional airline American Eagle, also won't be able to stand for the ceremony. For safety reasons they'll have to stay belted to their seats. But he'll probably be able to kiss the bride.

A space wedding was bound to happen. Wherever humans have brought themselves, they have also brought their most celebrated institution. The whole idea of the "extreme wedding" was born out of the idea that the more arduous the journey, the more special the bond.

So far, couples aren't clamouring to have their weddings in space. This may be partly because of the cost. Even though Rocketplane and its competitors, such as billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, are set to expand space travel beyond the rarefied astronaut, it won't be available to the masses: Each ticket will cost about $250,000 U.S.

That hasn't stopped Virgin Galactic from collecting $25 million in deposits so far. One woman has even mortgaged her house to be able to go.

Virgin has had a number of inquiries from couples who want to fly to space together. One couple, George Whitesides – head of the U.S. National Space Society and, as of last week, an advisor to the company – and his wife Loretta, say they want to have their "honeymoon" in space.

Cashman says the idea came to her as a random thought that just popped into her head while she was meditating.

It wouldn't be out of character for her. She has already tried flying upside down with an aerobatic pilot.

The problem was that, at the time, she didn't have a fiancé. Not even a boyfriend.

Fortunately, she was enrolled in a dating service and was meeting singles in cyberspace. After going through 32 guys, she met Walling.

Not long after, he popped the question – at high speed on a motorbike. She was over the moon, and told him she'd like to head that way to get hitched.

"People think we're crazy," Cashman says, "but others just expected this from me."

All systems are go, it seems. There's one problem, however. If they wed in space, where on Earth would they officially be married?

One aviation lawyer told an Austin newspaper that there is "no body of law or jurisdiction that exists in space to confer recognition on a marriage ceremony."

Toronto family lawyer Steven Bookman disagrees. He compares it to couples who marry in, say, Las Vegas, or on a beach in the Caribbean or, in the case of landed immigrants, back in their native countries. If they're legally married in those places, they're considered married here.

"It shouldn't be any different" in space, he argues.

The challenge is, where would the marriage be registered? "It would seem to be the (jurisdiction of the) person that owns the actual craft you're getting married on," Bookman says.

Cashman still hasn't decided who will perform the ceremony. There's still one empty seat in the four-person vessel should she find someone. But that may not be necessary, Bookman says.

"The captain of a ship has the authority to marry people outside of the jurisdiction of the country where the craft is registered," he says.

"I'm sure he would have to authority to marry them and it would be recognized everywhere."

http://www.thestar.com

U.S.A. Billionaire Heads to Space Station

2007-06-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

A Russian rocket carrying the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word roared into the night skies over Kazakhstan Saturday, sending Charles Simonyi and two cosmonauts soaring into orbit on a two-day journey to the international space station.
Climbing on a column of smoke and fire into the clouds over the bleak steppes, the Soyuz TMA-10 capsule lifted off at 11:31 p.m. local time, casting an orange glow over the Baikonur cosmodrome and dozens of officials and well-wishers watching from about a mile away.
The capsule turned northeast and moved downrange before entering orbit about 10 minutes later. It was scheduled to rendezvous with the station Monday.

Among those bidding farewell was Simonyi's friend Martha Stewart, who watched the launch from a location separate from other spectators.

After seeing Simonyi off for final preparations, Stewart spent the final hours before the launch aboard another mode of transportation common to this part of Kazakhstan's steppes - a camel.

"The ride was excellent," she said.

Inside the capsule, Simonyi and cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov grinned for the onboard camera, gave the thumbs-up sign and batted at a toy black cat hanging from rope - a token of good luck chosen by Kotov and named after his two children.

Simonyi, a 58-year-old native of Hungary, paid $25 million for the 13-day trip, the fifth such paying "space tourist," or "space flight participant," as officials prefer to call them.

"I think for Charles it is a dream come true," said Victoria Scott, a friend who watched the liftoff as others drank champagne toasts and chanted "Charles! Charles!"

In a posting on the blog he intends to maintain while in orbit, Simonyi said he spent his final day getting a haircut and a therapeutic massage and watched a traditional showing of a classic Soviet-era war film.

There was no mention of Stewart on the blog, but Simonyi did make reference to one of the lesser-known, last-minute traditions for cosmonauts heading into space - urinating on the tire of the bus transporting them to the launch-pad.

Three days after arriving at the station and greeting its current occupants - Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and American astronauts Miguel Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams - Simonyi will treat the crews to a gourmet meal, chosen by Stewart, in honor of Cosmonauts' Day, the Russian day commemorating Yuri Gagarin's historic 1961 flight into space.

The menu includes quail roasted in Madiran wine, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken parmentier, apple fondant pieces, rice pudding with candied fruit, and semolina cake with dried apricots.

Simonyi had said he would bring with him the paper computer tapes that he used decades ago when he first learned programming on a bulky Soviet machine called Ural-2. He emigrated to the United States in 1968 and eventually worked at Microsoft Corp., helping to develop Word and Microsoft Excel before founding his own software company.

While at the space station, Simonyi will be conducting a number of experiments, including measuring radiation levels and studying biological organisms inside the lab.

He is to return to Earth on April 20 along with Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria.

---

Associated Press Writer Jim Heintz contributed to this report from Mission Control in Korolyov, Russia.

Mars rover finds "puddles" on the planet's surface

2007-06-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

The report identifies specific spots that appear to have contained liquid water two years ago, when Opportunity was exploring a crater called Endurance. It is a highly controversial claim, as many scientists believe that liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars today because of the planet’s thin atmosphere.

A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

If confirmed, the existence of such ponds would significantly boost the odds that living organisms could survive on or near the surface of Mars, says physicist Ron Levin, the report's lead author, who works in advanced image processing at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin in Arizona.

Along with fellow Lockheed engineer Daniel Lyddy, Levin used images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website. The resulting stereoscopic reconstructions, made from paired images from the Opportunity rover's twin cameras, show bluish features that look perfectly flat. The surfaces are so smooth that the computer could not find any surface details within those areas to match up between the two images.

The imaging shows that the areas occupy the lowest parts of the terrain. They also appear transparent: some features, which Levin says may be submerged rocks or pebbles, can be seen below the plane of the smooth surface.

Speedy evaporation?

Levin and other reasearchers, including JPL's Michael Hecht, have published calculations showing the possibility of "micro-environments" where water could linger, but the idea remains controversial.

“The temperatures get plenty warm enough, but the Mars atmosphere is essentially a vacuum," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, developer of the Mars rovers' mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometers. That means any water or ice exposed on the surface evaporates or sublimes away almost instantly, he says.

But, he adds, "it is theoretically possible to get liquid water within soil, or under other very special conditions". The question is just how special those conditions need to be, and whether they ever really are found on Mars today.

If there were absolutely no wind, says Christensen, you might build up a stagnant layer of vapour above a liquid surface, preventing it from evaporating too fast. “The problem is, there are winds on Mars… In the real world, I think it's virtually impossible," he told New Scientist.
Simple test

Levin disagrees. He says his analysis shows that there can be wind-free environments at certain times of day in certain protected locations. He thinks that could apply to these small depressions inside the sheltered bowl of Endurance crater, at midday in the Martian summer.

He adds that highly briny water, as is probably found on Mars, could be stable even at much lower temperatures.

Although the rover is now miles away from this site, Levin proposes a simple test that would prove the presence of liquid if similar features are found: use the rover's drill on the surface of the flat area. If it is ice, or any solid material, the drill will leave unmistakable markings, but if it is liquid there should be no trace of the drill's activity.

Levin’s father Gilbert was principal investigator of an experiment on the Viking Mars lander, which found evidence for life on the planet, although negative results from a separate test for organic materials led most scientists to doubt the evidence for biology.

Journal reference: R. L. Levin and Daniel Lyddy, Investigation of possible liquid water ponds on the Martian surface (2007 IEEE Aerospace Applications Conference Proceedings, paper #1376, to be published in IEEE Xplore)

Smooth surface

The smoothness and transparency of the features could suggest either water or very clear ice, Levin says.

"The surface is incredibly smooth, and the edges are in a plane and all at the same altitude," he says. "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the surface, there would be rubble or sand or something."

His report was presented at a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and will be published later this year in the institute's proceedings.

No signs of liquid water have been observed directly from cameras on the surface before. Reports last year pointed to the existence of gullies on crater walls where water appears to have flowed in the last few years, as shown in images taken from orbit, but those are short-lived flows, which are thought to have frozen over almost immediately.

Space Tourist Charles Simonyi to Chronicle ISS Flight in Book

2007-06-09T05:05:00.000-07:00

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - Charles Simonyi, who recently returned to Earth after a 13-day space odyssey, said Monday he was planning to write a book about his travel into orbit.

Hungarian-born Simonyi, 58, told a news conference in Budapest that he planned to compile the writings he had done in space and posted on his Web site into a book.

"I think there will most definitely be a book," he said, without specifying when it might be published. He said he still needed to review his notes.

"Although the Web site is almost a book it has not been edited as such," Simonyi said in his native Hungarian, though with a slight American accent. "It has lots of entries, which have all been written by me, but I need some more blog (space) because while I was up there I took notes which now have to be processed."

Simonyi - a software engineer who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel - paid US$25 million to accompany two cosmonauts aboard a Russian rocket that launched April 7 for the International Space Station.

Simonyi was the fifth such paying "space tourist" to ride Russian rockets to the international space station, after Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen and Anousheh Ansari.

Briton Helen Sharman in 1991 took a trip to the Soviet station Mir that she won through a contest, and a Japanese journalist traveled to Mir in 1990 with a ticket that reportedly cost US$12 million.

Simonyi is the second Hungarian astronaut ever to enter space. Hungarian cosmonaut Bertalan Farkas, who was also at the news conference, spent almost eight days in orbit in 1980.

Simonyi left Hungary as a teenager in 1966, first living in Denmark before moving to the U.S. state of California in 1968. He obtained U.S. citizenship in the 1980s.

"Although I am known as Charles Simonyi, I was born here in Hungary as Simonyi Karoly," he said. "I have never forgotten about Hungary, where I came from; the memories of my mother country are kept deep in my heart."

Editor's note: You can visit Charles Simonyi's Web site at www.charlesinspace.com.

Experience microgravity on a commercial parabolic flight.

2007-06-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

In April of 2001, Dennis Tito became the first traveler to pay for a trip to space with money out of his own pocket. He decided to do it and then just did it. That's what tourism is all about. His flight, and the subsequent one by Mark Shuttleworth, forever removed the giggle factor from discussions of space tourism.

In October of 2004, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE and thereby started a new race to develop the first vehicle that will provide suborbital space rides to paying customers. Suborbital generally refers to an up-and-down ( i.e. mostly vertical) flight that reaches an altitude of around 100km or more but does not go into orbit around the earth.

Market Studies by NASA and many other organizations have shown that there are sizable markets for space tourism, both suborbital and orbital, and that the markets will grow rapidly as the cost of sending a person into space drops from current levels.

Adventure tourism, such as trips to Antarctica or Mount Everest, has long been a profitable business. This can involve packages with prices as high as $100k range and even higher.
Though you commonly hear talk of "space joyrides for the rich", the development of space tourism will follow the normal course of development seen for most all consumer technologies and services.

Tourism itself began as something only done by the very rich.

Passenger flights on airlines were initially very expensive. VCRs, DVDs, PCs, etc. all started out as very expensive "toys". Eventually competition and economies of scale (i.e. mass production) take over and prices drop to the level the middle class can handle.

Before orbital rides are widely available, suborbital flights will be the most common way to ride into space. Going to 100km or so, one can see the horizon out to 1000km or so and clearly see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

In October of 2004, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE and thereby started a new race to develop the first vehicle that will provide suborbital space rides to paying customers. Suborbital generally refers to an up-and-down ( i.e. mostly vertical) flight that reaches an altitude of around 100km or more but does not go into orbit around the earth.

Market Studies by NASA and many other organizations have shown that there are sizable markets for space tourism, both suborbital and orbital, and that the markets will grow rapidly as the cost of sending a person into space drops from current levels.

Adventure tourism, such as trips to Antarctica or Mount Everest, has long been a profitable business. This can involve packages with prices as high as $100k range and even higher.
Though you commonly hear talk of "space joyrides for the rich", the development of space tourism will follow the normal course of development seen for most all consumer technologies and services.

Tourism itself began as something only done by the very rich.

Passenger flights on airlines were initially very expensive. VCRs, DVDs, PCs, etc. all started out as very expensive "toys". Eventually competition and economies of scale (i.e. mass production) take over and prices drop to the level the middle class can handle.

Before orbital rides are widely available, suborbital flights will be the most common way to ride into space. Going to 100km or so, one can see the horizon out to 1000km or so and clearly see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

The billionaire Richard Branson in September 2004 announced a contract with Burt Rutan that gave him funding to design and build a 5-8 passenger vehicle - unofficially referred to here as SpaceShipTwo. SS2 will safely and routinely fly above 100km for a cost of about $200k per seat.

Within a month of this announcement, Virgin Galactic already had 7000 people expressing strong interest in buying tickets to ride on the vehicle when it becomes available. The current goal is to begin flights in 2007.

The company Space Adventures also has had over 100 people place deposits, or pay the full $98k price, on a suborbital craft as soon as one become available. In the meantime, this company and others offer rides on MIG-25's that go to 25km in altitude.

You can also train for spaceflight by experiencing microgravity in Russian plane flying parabolic trajectories. The company ZERO-G in October 2004 began offering such rides in the US for $3000 per person. The first 20 flights were already sold out before they began regular service.

If you can't pay for an orbital trip, perhaps you can win a ride. There are now several contests in which the winner will go into space.

There have been announcements of several "Survivor" type reality format TV programs in which a group of contestants will struggle through several weeks of cosmonaut training and the winner going to the International Space Station. However, so far none of these programs have reached the production stage.
For the time when orbital flights become lower in price, there are companies designing space hotels where you can enjoy microgravity sports and great views of earth. The company Bigelow Aerospace will begin launching prototypes in 2005 of its inflatable space habitat and will launch a full scaled version that can be manned by 2010.

See this slide presentation by Sam Coniglio at the Space Tourism Society for a nice overview of the possibilities for future space tourism.

If you would like to travel in space in spirit only, then send a token of yourself, e.g. your name or DNA sample, on a space probe.

See also the section on Astronomy Tourism that involves trips to see eclipses, Aurora and other astronomical phenomena.

Space Tourism Personal Spaceflight for you ...

2007-06-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Experience microgravity on a commercial parabolic flight.

In April of 2001, Dennis Tito became the first traveler to pay for a trip to space with money out of his own pocket. He decided to do it and then just did it. That's what tourism is all about. His flight, and the subsequent one by Mark Shuttleworth, forever removed the giggle factor from discussions of space tourism.

In October of 2004, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE and thereby started a new race to develop the first vehicle that will provide suborbital space rides to paying customers. Suborbital generally refers to an up-and-down ( i.e. mostly vertical) flight that reaches an altitude of around 100km or more but does not go into orbit around the earth.

Market Studies by NASA and many other organizations have shown that there are sizable markets for space tourism, both suborbital and orbital, and that the markets will grow rapidly as the cost of sending a person into space drops from current levels.

Adventure tourism, such as trips to Antarctica or Mount Everest, has long been a profitable business. This can involve packages with prices as high as $100k range and even higher.
Though you commonly hear talk of "space joyrides for the rich", the development of space tourism will follow the normal course of development seen for most all consumer technologies and services.

Tourism itself began as something only done by the very rich.

Passenger flights on airlines were initially very expensive. VCRs, DVDs, PCs, etc. all started out as very expensive "toys". Eventually competition and economies of scale (i.e. mass production) take over and prices drop to the level the middle class can handle.

Before orbital rides are widely available, suborbital flights will be the most common way to ride into space. Going to 100km or so, one can see the horizon out to 1000km or so and clearly see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

The billionaire Richard Branson in September 2004 announced a contract with Burt Rutan that gave him funding to design and build a 5-8 passenger vehicle - unofficially referred to here as SpaceShipTwo. SS2 will safely and routinely fly above 100km for a cost of about $200k per seat.

Within a month of this announcement, Virgin Galactic already had 7000 people expressing strong interest in buying tickets to ride on the vehicle when it becomes available. The current goal is to begin flights in 2007.

The company Space Adventures also has had over 100 people place deposits, or pay the full $98k price, on a suborbital craft as soon as one become available. In the meantime, this company and others offer rides on MIG-25's that go to 25km in altitude.

You can also train for spaceflight by experiencing microgravity in Russian plane flying parabolic trajectories. The company ZERO-G in October 2004 began offering such rides in the US for $3000 per person. The first 20 flights were already sold out before they began regular service.

If you can't pay for an orbital trip, perhaps you can win a ride. There are now several contests in which the winner will go into space.

There have been announcements of several "Survivor" type reality format TV programs in which a group of contestants will struggle through several weeks of cosmonaut training and the winner going to the International Space Station. However, so far none of these programs have reached the production stage.

A commercial space habitat prototype built
by Bigelow Aerospace.

For the time when orbital flights become lower in price, there are companies designing space hotels where you can enjoy microgravity sports and great views of earth. The company Bigelow Aerospace will begin launching prototypes in 2005 of its inflatable space habitat and will launch a full scaled version that can be manned by 2010.

See this slide presentation by Sam Coniglio at the Space Tourism Society for a nice overview of the possibilities for future space tourism.

If you would like to travel in space in spirit only, then send a token of yourself, e.g. your name or DNA sample, on a space probe.

See also the section on Astronomy Tourism that involves trips to see eclipses, Aurora and other astronomical phenomena.

Woman Space Tourist Fulfills Dream

2007-06-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Anousheh Ansari at the Russian Space Center in Star City, outside Moscow, Aug. 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Misha Japaridze)

"Looking at my background, (everyone) can see sometimes the impossible can be possible, and dreams can come true."

When the world's first female space tourist met the media on Wednesday in Moscow along with her fellow crewmates, she got a lot more questions than the real astronauts.

Iranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari is scheduled to blast off for the international space station in mid-September, along with America astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.
The launch is currently scheduled for Sept. 14, but it may be changed to accommodate a flight by the American space shuttle Atlantis. The launch of Atlantis, which was supposed to have happened last weekend, has been delayed due to storms in Florida.

Whenever she gets under way, Ansari will be fulfilling a lifelong dream.

"Every since I can remember, it's been in my heart and in my soul. I've always been interested and fascinated by space," she said. "Ever since I was a child, I always used to gaze at the stars and wonder what's out there in the universe, and wonder if there are others like me, pondering the same questions somewhere else out there."

Ansari, who was born in Iran and emigrated to the United States as a teenager, will be acknowledging her roots by wearing both American and Iranian flags on her flight suit.

She's paid more than $20 million for her 10-day trip — money she made in the telecommunications business. Ansari may be the first woman to pay for a trip to space, but she's hoping to be a role model to young people of both genders.

"Looking at my background," she says, everyone "can see sometimes the impossible can be possible, and dreams can come true."

Ansari's dream will be coming true a little sooner than she expected. A Japanese businessman was scheduled to fly on September's mission, but he was bumped from the mission last week after failing a medical test. How did Ansari feel when she got the call saying she could fly instead?

"I had to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming, and I'm not sleeping, and it's really happening," she said. "Obviously, it was a big surprise."

Ansari, an electrical engineer by training, is now trying to pioneer space tourism for the masses.

Her family helped sponsor the so-called "X Prize," which was an award for first privately-funded, reusable spacecraft. That prize was won by Burt Rutan's creation SpaceShipOne in 2004. Ansari is now working on development of a new spaceship that would be used solely to fly civilians into orbit.

"I wanted to also use this [trip] to inspire and promote interest in space exploration and other sciences and technology for our youth, because I believe that's very necessary for the future of our race," she said.

The Russian Space Agency, Roskosmos, has always been strongly in favor of space tourism, but NASA, its U.S. counterpart, has had its doubts. Now, with the fourth paying passenger on her way, NASA seems to understand that space tourism is here to stay.

"I think it's important for agencies like Roskosmos and NASA to do what government agencies did for commercial aviation, which is to help promote — to plant the seeds for the industry to take off on its own," explained Lopez-Alegria, Ansari's crewmate. "I think Anousheh's flight, as well as the X Prize that she was involved in, are both good examples of how to do that."

This trip is just the start for Ansari. She's part of a team working to develop a private spacecraft to ferry civilians into orbit — but that's still many years away.

"Given the opportunities, entrepreneurs can come up with very clever, cost-effective ways to achieve space flights, with existing technologies," she explained.

For now, she'll be traveling the only way she can ... on a Russian rocket, with NASA's support ... helping many people to eventually go where she now boldly goes herself.

By Beth Knobel
(CBS) This story was writen by CBS News Moscow bureau chief Beth Knobel