NEW YORK —
Two space tourism firms hoping to give fare-paying customers the rides of their
lives are set to take some major steps forward in coming months.
On July 28,
the suborbital tourism firm Virgin Galactic will unveil the first
WhiteKnightTwo mothership for its planned fleet of SpaceShipTwo
spaceliners designed by aerospace veteran Burt Rutan and his company Scaled
Composites. Meanwhile, the Virginia-based company Space Adventures is preparing
to launch its sixth paying customer on a $30 million trek to the International
Space Station on Oct.12, with two more orbital hopefuls already waiting in the
wings.
First up is
Virgin Galactic, a firm founded by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson
with the aim of launching up to six paying customers and two pilots on joy
rides to suborbital space for about $200,000 a seat.
At the core
of Virgin
Galactic's reusable spaceliner fleet is SpaceShipTwo, an air-launched suborbital
spacecraft derived from Rutan's $10 million Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne
design. Virgin Galactic has ordered five SpaceShipTwos and two of their immense
WhiteKnightTwo
motherships, the first of which has been christened "Eve" after Branson's
mother and will be unveiled at a Scaled hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port
in Mojave, Calif.
"We'll be
rolling this carrier out of the hangar for the first time on July 28, and
shortly afterward it will start its test program," Virgin Galactic
commercial director Stephen Attenborough said Wednesday during the 2008 Space
Business Forum held here by the non-profit Space Foundation. "It will be the
world's largest all carbon composite aircraft...it breaks all sorts of records."
With a
unique dual-boom design, Rutan's WhiteKnightTwo sports a wingspan of about 140
feet (42 meters) with each outboard cabin mounted about 25 feet (7.6 meters)
from its centrally moored SpaceShipTwo payload. About 254 people have paid a
total of about $36 million in down payments to assure their SpaceShipTwo seats
once the spacecraft begins operational flights. The suborbital vehicle itself
is slated to be unveiled early next year, Virgin Galactic officials have said.
The carrier
craft is also designed with the capability to haul unmanned rockets in place of
a crew-carrying vehicle, and could one day be used to launch low Earth orbiting
satellites or even cargo into space, Attenborough said. With its 18-inch
(46-cm) windows and roomy 7.5-foot (2.2-meter) wide cabin, SpaceShipTwo
could also be used for suborbital science experiments in addition to leisure
trips, he added.
"We built a
big spaceship," Attenborough said. "It's going to have plenty of room in there for the
scientists and the experiments they're going to do in there."
Aiming
for orbit
Later this
year, Space Adventures plans to launch American
millionaire Richard Garriott, the son of retired NASA astronaut Owen
Garriott, to the International Space Station under a $30 million agreement with
Russia's Federal Space Agency.
Garriott is
set to launch Oct. 12 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with the space
station's Expedition 18 commander Michael Fincke of NASA and flight engineer
Yuri Lonchakov of Russia's Federal Space Agency.
Garriott is
the sixth space tourist to hitch a ride to the station with Space Adventures,
which has been the only firm to offer multimillion-dollar treks to orbit since the
landmark flight of American entrepreneur Dennis Tito in 2001. Last week, Space
Adventures announced its intent to launch the
first all-private Soyuz flight to the space station in 2011 and welcomed
Google co-founder Sergey Brin to its ranks of hopeful private spaceflyers.
"We are a
company that is amazingly now 10 years old," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures
president and CEO, during the forum, adding that there are a host of
opportunities still ahead for his firm. "We're sort of at a crux and looking
ahead toward the next 10 years, so anything is possible."
In addition
to Garriott, Space Adventures has contracts for two more orbital tourists — the
seventh and eighth private spaceflyers — though their identities have
yet to be publicly revealed, Anderson told SPACE.com.
George
Nield, the associate administrator of the Office of Commerical Spaceflight at
the Federal Aviation Administration, said the strides by Virgin Galactic, Space
Adventures and others are just the beginning of a potential watershed for the
space tourism industry.
"Today,
spaceflight as we've known it for the last half century is at the doorway to
change," Nield said during the forum. "We're on the threshold of seeing what we
think will be a very significant market on suborbital flights for space tourism."
Ambitious
commercial endeavors, he added, are also taking on a larger role in the U.S.
spaceflight industry that was traditionally reserved for government agencies in
the past.
"This is
not your father's version of the U.S. space program," Nield said. "The future
of space belongs to private enterprise."
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