SpaceShipTwo interior mockup unveiled

I'm at the Javits Center in New York City for Wired magazine's NextFest 2006, where the Virgin Group's chief Richard Branson (center), Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn (left), and V.P. of astronaut relations Steve Attenborough this morning unveiled an interior mockup of Virgin's planned tourist spaceship, SpaceShipTwo.

The Virgin crew stressed that the interior was a concept only, but that it was very close to the design being built by Scaled Composites in Mojave California. The outside of the ship will be kept secret until its expected unveiling by Scaled late next year. A model of SpaceShipOne hung above the mockup to give a sense of scale.

SpaceShipTwo's passenger cabin will enclose 1,000 cubic feet, which felt spacious when I stepped inside it (shoes off first, please, entreated Virgin employees).

There's Branson, sans shoes, along with Alan Watts, the very first Virgin Atlantic frequent flier with enough miles (two million of them) for a trip to space.

After dropping from a jet-powered mother ship and firing its single rocket motor to reach space, the six passengers on board will be able to unbuckle their restraints to float free in the cabin.

Virgin initially planned a tether system to reel passengers back into their seats in time for the spaceship's reentry after four or five minutes of weightlessness. It's a simpler design without tethers, said Whitehorn. Preflight training will help passengers return to their seats, and even if they don't make it in time they will still be able to lie down on the floor for an equally comfortable reentry, said Whitehorn.

A bulkhead separating the passenger cabin from the two pilots in the cockpit will keep flying passengers safely away from control panels.


Though not part of the mockup, four big round analog dials will show passengers their speed, in multiples of the speed of sound (Mach), their g loads, altitude, and probably mission elapsed time, though Whitehorn wasn't completely sure about that last one when I asked him.

A display will show exterior camera views of the spaceship throughout the flight, while windows all around the fuselage will give passengers the best possible views as the ship slowly rolls at the top of its suborbital arc.

New book title, release date

The sales and marketing folks at Smithsonian Books had a good point: the original title for my forthcoming book on commercial spaceflight was going to be a mouthful for anyone trying to order it.

I like the sound of "The Entreprenauts," but people reading it don't know how to pronounce it, and people hearing it don't know how to spell it. So we decided together on "Rocketeers."

Some people might think that name applies exclusively to the 1991 Disney movie called The Rocketeer, but that movie was actually based on a Dark Horse comic of the same name by Dave Stevens. And neither work has a monopoly on the name. Merriam-Webster says:

Main Entry: rock·e·teer
Pronunciation: "rä-k&-'tir
Function: noun
1 : one who fires, pilots, or rides in a rocket
2 : a scientist who specializes in rocketry

Sure seems like a good fit to me.

Not that I mind the comic book reference; I've been reading comics since I could read, and if you want to know just how much of a geek I really am, consider that I've privately assigned the space entrepreneurs I've been covering to DC and Marvel comic book heroes. (Actually its pretty easy to pair these guys up. What millionaire space entrepreneur and DC superhero both drive awesome cars and have taken winged creatures as their symbol? Which rocketeer and Marvel hero are both gruff loners with massive sideburns? Ahem. Anyway....)

The good people at Smithsonian Books also wanted a more descriptive subtitle, so here's the full title we came up with:

Rocketeers: How a visionary band of business leaders, engineers and pilots is boldly privatizing space

We have a release date too: July 31, 2007.

The cover is in the final stages of design and I should get a look at it any day now.

First blogger in space

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft lifted off early this morning carrying Anousheh Ansari, who helped to fund the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for the first commercial spaceship.

Not only is Ansari the first woman to pay her own way into space, she's also the first blogger. The blog is presided over by X PRIZE founder and chair Peter Diamandis. Diamandis will post emails and photos from Ansari during Ansari's eight-day visit to the International Space Station via a $250,000 data link paid for by the foundation. Diamandis's own commentary is a also a rare treat and not to be missed.

Ansari says space fans will get a chance to chat with her in person at this year's X PRIZE Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico late next month.

Flying my stuff

Check out the spiffy new banner above, from Bigelow Aerospace's "Fly Your Stuff" program. Bigelow's next space launch, currently scheduled for January 2007, will carry the cover of my book about commercial spaceflight. The book is due out next year from Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins. More news on that soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to fly an image or a small object to be photographed in space and displayed on Bigelow's website, now's the time to do it. Yesterday, Bigelow released the reservations that hadn't been claimed by then. Means a bunch more slots are available now. Get one for $295 until November 1 or until they're all gone, whichever comes first.

No, I didn't get my slot free, and Bigelow isn't paying me for the banner. Like it says, I'm just thrilled to be on board. And, well, hell, how could I resist doing the first book promo in space?

October PopSci out with two stories by me

You should be able to find the October issue of Popular Science on stands starting around now. I have a one-pager about Bigelow Aerospace's Fly Your Stuff program on page 48 and a three-pager about the Lunar Lander Challenge beginning on page 38. Sorry, no links available to the articles yet.

I mention the Bigelow piece first because I'm most proud of it. Robert Bigelow is running an honest-to-God space program, with actual hardware now in orbit, and for all the right reasons.

He wants to turn a profit, sure, by building orbiting space complexes for lease to anyone who can afford it. But he also wants to inspire as many people as he can to look up, as in beyond our current political and environmental problems, to consider, even for a moment, that we human beings are capable of fantastic things, if only we put our differences aside and work together.

In one little step along the way, he's opened the cargo manifest of his next orbiting test vehicle, currently slated for a January launch, to anyone with a spare $295. That price gets you a photograph or golf ball-sized object floating around on camera in the Genesis II, which is a 1/3-scale model of the habitable modules that Bigelow plans to launch by 2012. Your money back if you don't see yourself or your keepsake in space via Bigelow's website within 90 days of launch.

I think that's very cool, for two reasons. One, for a relatively small amount you can help support the emerging commercial space industry by buying a real service, and two, it'll give ordinary people a legitimate sense of ownership in a successful space venture.

Lockheed Martin gets Apollo 2.0

...and the crowd yawns. "I doubt that in the coming months and years I will be commenting much on Orion or the other shiny, precious projects in Mr. Griffin's Constellation," says Clark S. Lindsey, one of my favorite bloggers. I'm absolutely with him on that. Three point nine billion in NASA funny money through 2013, an additional $3.5 billion from 2009 to 2019, and hundreds of millions more for incidentals, according to the New York Times. And they won't stick to that budget, because as Warren E. Leary and Leslie Wayne point out in their Times article, "there is little incentive to stay within budget once a contract has been awarded."

All this for a manned lunar landing that will accomplish little more than was done by project Apollo almost 40 years ago. Orion, as NASA administrator Mike Griffin himself admits, is just "Apollo on steroids." It's still a throw-away capsule design to be built without consideration for cost or sustainability. NASA will throw these rockets at the moon, plant more flags, maybe pull up a few Chinese ones, and go back home. There's some lip service being paid to having Apollo 2.0 act as a stepping stone to Mars, but I don't think that idea is being taken very seriously by anyone. Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

No, this looks to me mainly like a giant corporate welfare project designed to keep Big Aerospace and certain congressional districts happy.

Orion will plod along racking up cost overrun after cost overrun, while the entrepreneurial space community will surge ahead. You want to see some real action in space, check out Space Adventures, with its planned commercial lunar flyby mission. Odds are it'll handily beat Apollo 2.0 back to the moon, and for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Funny, Leary and Wayne don't even mention NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, ostensibly designed to give the burgeoning entrepreneurial space community a leg up in supplying NASA with commercial orbital spaceflights. Is that because with a measly $500 million spread out over five years and two competing companies it's too insignificant for serious consideration?

My own sneaking suspicion is that now that NASA has carefully selected the best of the commercial orbital space programs it will transform that miserly carrot into a stick as soon as it looks like either SpaceX or Rocketplane Kistler is in danger of leaving Lockheed Martin in the dust.