The competition heats up: The Russians are considering offering tourists the ability to buy a full six month tour on ISS when they resume tourist flights in 2018.
They don’t yet have any customers for such a flight, but in order to make some money, or “lowering the budgetary load” as they put it, they are considering offering it.
The competition heats up: Faced with the loss of income from NASA in 2017, when private commercial ferries take over the job of bringing Americans to ISS, Russian officials today revealed that they plan to resume launching tourists to the station in 2018.
The problem the Russians will have then is that they will have competition from the American companies, who will likely be able to compete in price with them, and will be easier to work with.
I’ll believe it when I see it: The executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which runs Spaceport America, said Tuesday that she hopes Virgin Galactic will resume test flights of a SpaceShipTwo suborbital ship sometime in 2015, with commercial flights beginning in 2016.
She claimed that work on the new ship is about 80% completed, with construction of another ship also underway.
Forgive me if I have my doubts. Virgin Galactic has spent more than a decade making these promises, with no results.
At a press conference Sarah Brightman yesterday revealed that she is working with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create a new song to sing when she visits the International Space Station later this year.
She also said that she will sing it from the station near the end of her visit. While the reason she gave for this schedule was because she needed time to adjust to weightlessness, I also see this as good marketing, allowing time for a pr build-up to get the largest audience possible.
Doug Messier has done some research and has found the numbers might be less than advertised.
The competition heats up: A press conference in Russia highlighted the first day of astronaut training for space tourist Sarah Brightman.
A ten minute video excerpt of the conference is below the fold. The most interesting part of the video, however, has nothing to do with Brightman. Instead, it was what was said by her back-up space tourist, Satoshi Takamatus. Since the age of six he had wanted to be an astronaut. At 22 however Japan’s space agency rejected him because he wore glasses or contacts. He then became an advertising executive who in 2001 arranged to shoot a commercial on ISS using Russian astronauts. While in Russia, he apparently met the right people and, using those contacts, has now come back at 53 as a paying customer. If Brightman has any issues that prevent her from flying, he will step up and replace her. If not, he is tentatively scheduled to fly himself in ’17 or ’18.
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Though she is now in Russia, Sarah Brightman has delayed the start of her astronaut training by one week due to the onset of a head cold.
Update: Russian officials now say it was a family illness, not a head cold, that forced this delay.
The competition heats up: Sarah Brightman is scheduled to arrive in Russia on Thursday to begin her training for her tourist flight to ISS later this year.
The competition heats up: In a newspaper interview, the CEO of Virgin Galactic has outlined the company’s flight plans for SpaceShipTwo in the coming months, leading hopefully to its first commercial flights.
“We expect to get to space altitude in a short number of flights, assuming the rocket performs as expected,” Whitesides told the Journal. “Scaled made it to space in four flights with SpaceShipOne. I believe it will be a little more than that for us, but not dramatically so.”
Once SpaceShipTwo successfully reaches space, Scaled Composites will turn over the rocket to Virgin Galactic for its commercial operations based in New Mexico. Virgin has already taken control of the mothership, which it flew to Spaceport America for some initial test operations in September. “Once we take control of SpaceShipTwo, we expect to do some more testing here in New Mexico, but that will primarily be efficiency testing rather than technology testing,” Whitesides said. “It will give pilots an opportunity to train at this airfield after Mojave to practice things like coming in on final approach.”
As much as I have expressed strong skepticism in recent months of Virgin Galactic’s promises, I truly hope this happens, and soon.
The competition heats up: They might fly as high, but the balloon company that is aiming to capture some of the space tourism market is a strong rival to Virgin Galactic and XCOR.
Spaceship Earth Grants (SEG) has launched a contest where it will give away one space flight ticket to fly on any available launch service for every 50,000 applications it receives.
The winner (or winners) will receive a trip aboard a spaceflight provider flight available at the time of the award announcement. In other words, should the likes of space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic or Space Adventures be capable of offering trips into space at the time, then the winning candidate would be booked aboard one of their flights. Subject, of course, to availability and the various restrictions one or all of these companies may impose, along with the rider that no promise is made to be able to fly on a particular carrier.
Be warned however, the application is not free. SEG will charge you from $15 to $90, the amount “dependent upon the relative wealth of the nation in which you live.”
The competition heats up: The start of Sarah Brightman’s astronaut training has been delayed from this fall to the beginning of 2015.
I suspect this delay has more to do with accommodating her schedule and the fact that she is very enthusiastic and well-prepared than any negative issues related to her or the mission. They have probably decided that she just needs less time to train.
Her actual flight to ISS is scheduled for the fall of 2015.
The competition heats up: More information was released today describing Great Britain’s suggested spaceport locations.
These spaceports are specifically aimed at the suborbital space tourism market, for American companies like Virgin Galactic or XCOR, or for the developing British company Skylon.
It is interesting that 6 of 8 are located in Scotland, which might very well not be part of the United Kingdom after a vote on separation this fall.
The competition heats up: WhiteKnightTwo took off on its first test flight since January today.
No word on what they are testing, though I suspect it is related to the cracks rumored to have been found on the ship’s wings.
The competition heats up: According to the head of the Russian Cosmonaut Training Center, British singer Sarah Brightman is scheduled to begin her training there in August or September of this year for her September 2015 tourist flight to ISS.
The competition heats up: Yahoo today published a 5 point comparison between a ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Worldview’s Voyager balloon.
The winner, Virgin Galactic, but by a nose. As the story notes, Worldview is the better buy. “You can use the money you save for a nice vacation on Earth — where you can make new friends by telling stores about that time you went to space.”
The competition heats up: Worldview has successfully completed the first unmanned test flight of its stratospheric passenger balloon.
The flight brought a remote-controlled, balloon-borne craft up to a height of 120,000 feet (36.5 kilometers) and back down to 50,000 feet (15 kilometers). Then the craft was cut loose from the balloon and guided to a soft landing using an innovative parafoil.
The test over Roswell, New Mexico, marked a world record for the highest parafoil flight, World View said.
World View’s Tycho prototype is just one-tenth the size of the pressurized capsule that the Arizona-based company plans to build for its Voyager tours. But Tycho’s maiden voyage put the system’s aerodynamics to a valuable initial test, said Taber MacCallum, who is World View’s co-founder and chief technology officer (as well as Poynter’s husband).
While these balloon tourist flights won’t go as high as the suborbital flights planned by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and others, they will last far far longer and cost a third the price. They have already sold out their first three flights.
More capitalism: Getting the Russian Soyuz capsule prepped to take two tourists around the Moon.
The key detail in this story is not so much that they are beginning to figure out the engineering upgrades necessary to fling a Soyuz capsule around the Moon but that Space Adventures has apparantly finally gotten two passengers who have put down deposits for the lunar flight. For years they have said they had one ticket holder, suspected to be James Cameron, but without a second passenger the flight could not go forward. It now appears that they have gotten a deposit from that second person.
Posted on the road in New Mexico.
The competition heats up: The race between Lady Gaga and Sarah Brightman to be first professional singer to perform in space.
Some additional details about Airbus’s spaceplane, its recent successful drop tests, and the company’s future plans.
The design has similar to XCOR’s Lynx. It would take off and land from a runway and do a suborbital flight without the need of a mother ship.
