With space tourism heavily in the news last week (remember the funding travails of poor Rocketplane Kistler?), the International Herald Tribune offers a good overview of the ambitions of spacegoing companies, calling the drive a "new space race."
Much of the article will be familiar territory for folks who have followed commercial space news, but a few pieces are worth noting.
Consulting firm Futron tries to put a dollar figure on future space tourism. As anybody knows who watched market estimates soar, and then sour during the dot-com boom and bust, projections for untested markets with high risk factors shouldn't be taken as gospel. But they're useful to watch, particularly as different researchers begin to think about the issue. From the article:
The article also offers a look, rare in the U.S. press, into what's happening in Europe. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is of course well known, but the plans of European aerospace giant EADS Astrium for a four-seat space plane, or Barcelona-based "space resort operator"
Galactic Suite may be less well known to Americans.
All this is good news – many of these projects will inevitably fail, so the more countries, and more entrepreneurs involved in this race, the more good ideas will be available to the spacegoing community.
For those who prefer a video overview, The Futures Channel online also recently posted a mini-documentary about the development of spaceports, and the promise of commercial spaceflight. It's worth watching for the scenes of barren New Mexico scrubland, which may someday be a thriving launchpad for orbital travel.
With thousands signing up as early space tourists, a new race is on [IHT]
(Image credit: Rocketplane Kistler)
