Res Communis

AUSTRALIA appears to have been beaten to the punch as a potential base for a space tourism industry by wealthy interests in other countries

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: The Australian

Virgin Galactic chairman Richard Branson was touting Australia as a site for a Galactic spaceport as recently as last year.

But Sir Richard said that several countries were now bidding for the spaceports as the project moves closer to reality — and Australia was not among them.

“Because spaceship programs are not cheap to develop, I think we’re going to prioritise one or two of the countries that are paying quite considerable sums of money for us to go there first,” he said.

Sir Richard said Australia could conceivably participate in the bidding, but Galactic had not asked authorities here whether they were interested.

However, he said the competition was stiff.

“We’ve got three Middle Eastern countries competing for one spaceport in the Middle East,” he said. “Right now I think they’ve got deeper pockets than some other countries.”

Virgin Galactic has already had two “secret” flights of the Burt Rutan-designed White Knight Two mothership and expects to fly it publicly soon.

White Knight Two is the world’s biggest all-composite aircraft, boasting the wingspan of a Boeing 757, and is powered by four Pratt & Whitney PW308A engines.

An eight-person spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo (SS2), will be carried under the centre of the mothership’s wing and be released at 50,000ft.

It will then fire its hybrid rocket and climb 100km above the Earth to the internationally recognised boundary of space.

Sir Richard said the test flights had gone well.

He noted the rockets on SS2 were also performing well in tests and said it was expected to fly, although initially not into space, before the end of the year.

This would be followed by extensive tests to prove that the the concept was safe as it moved towards regulatory approval. Galactic is likely to face significant regulatory hurdles, but Sir Richard is confident it will overcome them, noting the company will do more flights during testing than NASA had completed in its history.

“It will be well and truly tried and tested before we actually take passengers up there,” he said.

“Being a commercial spaceship company, we can’t afford to lose any passengers. NASA actually loses about 3 per cent of all the passengers they take to space. I don’t think our passengers would accept that attrition rate.”

The venture also seems to be going to plan on the commercial side, with an estimated

$US45million ($69.5million) worth of tickets sold.

Galactic hopes to fly 500 people in the first year at $US200,000 a head, a number on a par with those taken up in the first 45 years of space travel.

“The program’s all going well,” Sir Richard said. “It’s an expensive program to be doing in this recession but, anyway, we’re committed and we’re pushing on with it.”

The billionaire said he still believed the program had enormous potential and he hoped that one day the public would be able to holiday on a space station orbiting the moon.

“I think this is the start, hopefully, of an enormously exciting program. First we’ll do sub-orbital flights and then we want to move on to orbital flights.

“One day, I hope that our engineers will be able to put commercial planes into orbit and take off from Sydney and land in New York within an hour, an hour and a half.

“I think one day it will happen — hopefully in our lifetimes.”