Last February, Alan Boyle predicted a 100 year wait for Lunar surface tourism.

I think 100 years to Lunar surface tourism is pessimistic. SA is already offering Lunar orbit tourism. You only have to a little more than eight times the $100 million Lunar-orbit seat price to get Lunar tourism on the Apollo model. You’d rendezvous with a lander in Earth orbit, you’d take two cosmonauts instead of two passengers. The passenger and one of the cosmonauts would land on the Moon. Roughly four $200 million launches. That includes the cost of doing it robotically once, then the price will drop in half. There are about 691 billionaires. If 1% of them want to go, we could be doing Lunar tourism as soon as a few years after someone puts down their $100 million deposit to get it going.

With global income doubling every thirty years, a larger percent of the economy becoming private sector and with concentration of wealth increasing, we could see thousands of billionaires in 60 years. There are 70,000 with $30 million in 2005. There will be more than 70,000 with $120 million in 2065. With thousands of new centimillionaires every year, utilization might allow a cycler that only centimillionaires would use. E.g., $20 million in 60 years garnering a flight a month. That would be 0.02% of them per year, a rate sustainable indefinitely with no repeats. The numbers to orbit would have to be about $2 million, but the big step from $12-20 million to $2-4 million will occur in the next 10 years with Bigelow stations and America’s-Space-Prize caliber launchers and vehicles.

With an L-1 station refitting the return portion of the lander for reuse, cyclers, Lunar oxygen, etc., the mature industry price could drop roughly to three times the fuel cost which is only about 5 times the cost to orbit. So $100,000 trips to orbit means maybe million dollar trips to the surface of the Moon. I’d go at that price even if I have to sell my house, take up a major weightloss program and go through years of therapy to overcome spacesuit claustrophobia. I’ll be ready to go at that price no later than 15 years when I pay off my 15-year mortgage and my daughter is graduating college. I won’t be unusual–with tens of millions of million dollar mortgages with payments of $5000/month tax deductible at 6% mortgage rates, there will be tens of millions of millionaires in 15-30 years. People on both coasts are paying 50% of their income for houses. There’s an average of $120,000/year GDP (not counting those pesky local taxes and insurance). That’s only three times per capita GDP or the average GDP for a household of three. Median per-capita income is less than half of average GDP ($45,000) so we are not talking about 50% of the US population being able to afford this in 15 years, but that would not be impossible. In any event, there are still likely to be tens of millions of millionaires by then in the demographic for full-price orbital flight and SpaceShot for everyone else.

Like the Economist wrote last week, it will be hard to do conspicuous consumption of space travel any more.

The topic for this post is “Space,” but it could also be “Media Criticism.” New space blogger Eric Collins emails:

You may have noticed the post on HobbySpace about the so-called hyperspace drive. The linked-to article from the Scotsman is annoying on several different levels. I was really disappointed that this article was making it onto several highly visible blogs (including slashdot).

I was preparing a long blog rant about this incredibly speculative, bordering on crackpot, theory when I finally came across a link to the original article posted at New Scientist. This article is much more informative and manages to sufficiently address the speculative nature of the proposal. So, rather than blog about it myself, I decided that I would just try to make sure people were aware of the New Scientist article. And, since your blog is much more visible than mine, I figured you could probably get the word out much more effectively than I could.

Yes, I was going to post something about this, particularly after Glenn picked up on it, but I haven’t had time, so thanks to Eric.

The strangest thing (of several strange things) that jumped out at me about the Scotsman article to me was this paragraph:

…if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

Huh?

Even ignoring the mumbo jumbo about magnetic fields and different dimensions, this is the equivalent of saying “the solution to land-based transportation is to raise the speed limit from seventy MPH to 500 MPH,” ignoring the fact that no one has a car that can drive this fast. There is no description in here of how one goes faster than our “dimension’s” speed of light, even if the speed of light is faster. The problem isn’t speed limits, it’s propulsion. Hell, if we could approach the speed of light here, that would be a huge breakthrough. Once we figure out how to do that, then we can start worrying about how to increase the speed of light.

This is another example of how science and technology stories can get mangled by reporters who don’t have any idea what they’re writing about. And the New Scientist piece is, indeed, much more interesting (and describes what actually is a new form of propulsion, by converting electromagnetic forces to gravitational forces), to those who (unlike the Scotsman reporter) are numerate and literate in basic physics.

I haven’t had time to read the NPRM from the FAA on the new space passenger regulations, or formulate any inputs, but Jeff Foust has done a little research and come up with some amusing examples of people who have.

I will say that I think that it’s a little premature for the FAA to be worried about smuggling on commercial space transports, disarming the universe, or especially people on a spacewalk throwing things at the planet.

As for the concern about requiring that space transport pilots be licensed aviation pilots, I doubt if the FAA considers that to be a sufficient condition, but it’s certainly not unreasonable to make it a necessary one.

Meanwhile, over at Space Law Probe, Jesse Londin has more serious thoughts on it.

I know this will disappoint you.

Jon Goff has some follow-up comments to Grant Bonin’s HLLV critique.

[Update at 11:30 AM]

Sorry, that was Ken Murphy, not Jon Goff.

Over at the first issue of The Space Review for the new year, Grant Bonin writes the essay that I would write if I wasn’t swamped with proposals and other work, on the wisdom of building a heavy-lift launcher. He provides a good overview of the economic considerations, and the myths surrounding them.

As he points out, the cost of NASA’s proposed new Shuttle-derived vehicle will be very high, and since development isn’t planned to start for several years, there are many events that could occur between now and then to forestall it. It is a shame that NASA has essentially ended any further architectural analysis (unless they’re continuing such activity in house), because we ought to be thinking about more innovative ways of getting propellants and hardware into orbit, and storing them and assembling them. That is much more of a key to becoming a space-faring nation than building bigger (and more expensive) rockets.

is the midpoint between the high and low scenario numbers that FAA chose for the Proposed Rule for Human Spaceflight Requirements for Crew and Spaceflight Participants to calculate how much of a burden the regulation would be. 7500 flights over ten years with one paying customer paying $200,000 would be $1.5 billion. Rocketplane is building a 4-seater expected to enter testing in 2006. Masten has a 5-seater on their product roadmap for some time after 2008. XCOR Xerus is a two-seater. The Spaceship Company has an operator who says they have $10 million in deposits for flying in a 7-9 seater. 7500 times 4 passengers would be $6 billion over ten years or $600 million/year.

Likely there will be higher prices early and more flights at lower prices later as operations become more routine, more suborbital vehicles get built and competition takes hold. If flight rates grow linearly from zero, we would get 1425 flights in year ten and even if the price drops to Futron’s predicted 2015 price of $80,000 per passenger, we would substantially exceed the demand forecast by Futron if this prediction holds up. $500 million per year was a number they did not think would get hit until 2018.

If we double the Futron price estimates (they anticipated $100k prices at the start), we might double revenues, but that requires that all those launches have willing purchasers. (As I’ve said when Futron first released the study in 10/2004) since Futron doesn’t include demand from games, this may be reasonable.

Put another way, reconciling Futron’s passenger numbers with the FAA flight numbers, we get an average passengers per flight over ten years of only 2 passengers per flight.

The high estimate for suborbital flight rates by FAA was 10142 and the low 5081 with a 50% probability attached to each. These include test flights and non-passenger flights.

–Update 2006-01-04 04:56:00 CST–
And non-government orbital passenger flights.

I don’t normally watch Sixty Minutes, but apparently they’re going to have a segment tonight (starting in about twenty minutes, Eastern Time) on Burt Rutan and similar efforts.

[Update at 8:55 PM EST]

Clark Lindsey thinks it’s a repeat from last year. Having seen it tonight, that seems right to me (particularly considering that it’s a holiday, and they’re probably just doing redos). But this year or last year, it’s a good sign.

I should note that anyone who is familiar with the story won’t get anything new out of it, but it’s nice to see it being played to the Geritol set. I doubt if it will result in much, but if even one new investor is brought into the game because of it, it’s worthwhile.

I’d also compare and contrast it with the segment they did on Aubrey de Grey, in which they found it necessary to “balance” his prognostications about thousand-year lifetimes with cautionary words from Jay Olshansky. Apparently, Sixty Minutes found the Rutan story sufficiently uncontroversial that they didn’t have a need to “balance” it with quotes from some NASA official or John Pike. That’s a great sign for the acceptance of this new meme.

FAA-AST has (as expected for the past few months) issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on public space passenger travel. This is the next step in the process by which the useful enabling legislation passed by Congress a year ago gets translated into actual regulations. The public has sixty days to provide input to it, and as a potential spaceline operator, I’ll have to sit down and read the 123-page document when I get a chance and comment on it, to both them and my readers.

Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen in the next week or so. Jesse Londin, over at Space Law Probe, has similar immediate constraints, but I expect some useful commentary from that quarter over the next few weeks, and will link to it when it happens.

[Update at 11 AM Central]

Jeff Foust (who has some other interesting space policy items) points out an AP article on it. While I obviously have to read the NPRM itself, just glancing through the article and looking at the reporter’s summary of it, all the rules seem reasonable to me, and consonant with the intent of the legislation (though I remain concerned now, as I did then, that the time period before FAA can regulate safety more stringently remains too short). But in any event, the devil, as always, dwells in the details.

[Another update at noon Central]

Liz at Regolith has a summary of the proposed regs.

Professor Reynolds has some thoughts, with which I obviously agree:

Space enthusiasts, God knows, have seen plenty of disappointment in the past few decades, as the brief false dawn of Apollo led to years of failed promises and no visible momentum. But we’re now seeing signs of new technologies — and, just as important, new systems of organization — that make a takeoff into sustained growth much more likely for the space sector. Prizes to develop technology, space tourism to develop markets and help us move up the learning curve, and people with the money and vision to provide the seed capital for both: The essentials now look to be in place. It’s about time.

And other than the potential prizes, much of what NASA is doing seems increasingly irrelevant.