New spaceship in the works?
Posted: Friday, June 02, 2006 8:18 PM by Alan Boyle
Space Adventures |
This is one of Space Adventures' early concepts for a suborbital spaceship. Space Launch Corp., a newly acquired subsidiary, may have other ideas.
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Virginia-based Space Adventures, the only travel company to send tourists to the international space station, announced this week that it is acquiring a spaceship-building company called Space Launch Corp. — and it looks as if the move represents a small step toward yet another giant leap into the commercial spaceflight business.
That's the impression you'd get from talking to Eric Anderson, Space Adventure's chief executive officer. In a conversation on Thursday, Anderson was characteristically mum about how exactly Space Launch will figure in his company's business strategy. "When the time is right, we'll announce what the new business plan for Space Launch is going to be," he told me.
But he noted with pride that the 7-year-old California-based company has already done $25 million worth of work for the U.S. military on projects such as the RASCAL orbital launch system. That low-cost system would have been somewhat similar to Orbital System's Pegasus rocket, with a reusable aircraft carrying an expendable rocket up to high altitude for air launch into orbit.
Space Launch fleshed out a design for the system, but the Pentagon decided not to go on to the next phase. Now Space Adventures will be benefiting from that know-how instead.
"They are a strategic asset," Anderson said, "in that we feel much of the technology that they developed is both useful and applicable to commercial human spaceflight projects."
Anderson declined to discuss the terms of the transaction, other than to say that Space Launch will be a wholly owned subsidiary of privately held Space Adventures, with Jacob Lopata staying on as chief executive officer. In a news release, Lopata said he was looking forward to joining Space Adventures "to develop the technologies and business structures required to open the space frontier to all."
Anderson also declined to say whether Space Launch would be developing a suborbital or orbital craft for Space Adventures' use, but he acknowledged that "we clearly have plans to develop space tourism capabilities."
Space Adventures is already working with other companies to have a suborbital spaceship built in Russia, known as the Explorer, and to have spaceports built in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Just last week, a Russian news report indicated that the Explorer might not get off the ground until 2009 — somewhat later than initially expected.
Anderson pooh-poohed that report. "Don't believe everything read in Russia," he told me. "I kind of chuckled when I saw that."
He also said the Explorer project and the Space Launch acquisition "have nothing to do with each other." Anderson noted that, because of U.S. export requirements, it might make sense to have access to foreign-built rocket ships as well as domestic ones.
But he emphasized that Space Adventures itself would stay focused on the business of travel arrangements rather than spaceship development. "There are groupings of companies that may have related ownership and even related names, but there is a wall between their businesses," he explained.
That stance may be important as the suborbital spaceflight market develops, because Space Adventures has forged deals with a variety of other spaceship builders to broker seats on future flights. Hypothetically, it might be awkward if Spaceship Company X came to see Space Adventures as a rival as well as a customer.
In other Space Adventures news:
- Anderson acknowledged that although the financing is in place for spaceport development in the United Arab Emirates, the Spaceport Singapore project is still not fully funded. However, he said, "the project is going very well, and I think it will be funded in a number of months."
- The company announced today that Japanese entrepreneur Daisuke Enomoto, a client who is due to fly to the international space station in September, successfully completed a round of Black Sea survival training.
