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Hey, Who Wants to Go to Space in a Giant Hot Air Balloon?

As part of our ongoing effort to track space tourism competition—because how else is the price ever going to drop enough so we can afford it—please turn your attention to the bloon.

Designed by Spanish entrepreneur Jose Lopez-Urdiales, the bloon is a sub-orbital device (kind of) that takes people to space (in a manner of speaking) and is scheduled to start flying in 2013 (theoretically). We're hedging on this description because the bloon isn't so much a spaceship like we've all become used to, as much as it is a really big hot air balloon.

The project webpage is reasonably slick, though the branding is kind of gratingly New Agey. There's lots of hand waving about going to "a place where borders do not really exist" and "where creation becomes real," with a promise to "help awaken consciousness of the unique, fragile beauty of our planet" so that you can become "one with your home planet." If we didn't know better we'd think it was kind of a parody, but other parts of the site seem reasonably straightforward.

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NASA Hires Virgin Galactic to Cover All That Space Flying Stuff

The United States doesn't really have a space travel program any more, inasmuch as our leaders found better and more inspirational programs to fund than ones that have astronauts literally reaching for the stars (e.g. empty rural airports in the home states of powerful Senators).

The problem is that NASA still has engineers and scientists who need to run experiments in low-gravity and no-gravity conditions, and they'd kind of like to keep doing some of those. So agency officials looked around, scratched their collective heads, and checked if there was still anyone still doing that space flight thing.

And that's the short version of how Virgin Galactic became NASA's official sub-contracter. The press release is here, and if you click through make sure you at least read the bolded quote in the middle of the release. It's the longest string of words that mean the least that you'll ever encounter.

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Seattle's Space Needle Wants to Send You to...Umm...Space

We've spent the last few years tracking how private space tourism is becoming a capital-T Thing—and of course now that the space shuttle program is dead, private space flight is for better or worse the only game in town.

You might also remember a post from last year about commercial space travel company Space Adventures, which inked a deal with Boeing for vehicles that could be shot into low-earth orbit. We speculated at the time that the world was still many years from regular launches, both because it takes time to build spaceships and because we still don't really have the infrastructure to launch them.

All of that aside, we're certainly getting closer. There are now contests springing up promising to send lucky winners into space, with the latest coming from the team behind the Seattle Space Needle. The iconic tourist attraction was built for the 1962 World's Fair and, as its 50th anniversary celebration approaches, organizers want to recapture some of that futuristic magic.

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Space Tourism Six Years From Now to Be Kind of Affordable

Obviously "affordable" is a relative concept when it comes to space tourism. But we've been telling you for a while to keep your fingers crossed for competition between Virgin Galactic and potential rivals, if only because that way we can all dream about one day maybe flying in a sub-orbital. Prices aren't going to drop in the next few years for a bunch of reasons, from the fact that Virgin Galactic is the only company building a spaceport—which kind of puts a damper on competition—to the simple high costs of flying people into space.

Even at this early stage, though, serious people are beginning to envision how space tourism might become more available to more people. Virgin Galactic's former President Will Whitehorn just gave a far-reaching talk on the topic, and he predicted that ticket prices would drop from their current price of $200,000 to below $100,000.

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Let's Talk Space Tourism. What's Virgin Galactic Been Up To Lately?

Six months after its first solo flight—coverage and background here and here—the Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise passed another milestone last Friday. The sub-orbital spaceship set a new 14:30 minute record after being dropped by its mothership, gliding over the Mohave Desert while test pilots confirmed that everything was working. This was the spaceship's fifth release, and things continue to progress nicely.

Eventually tests will start to incorporate the craft's space-age hybrid rocket motor, which thus far has only been tested on the ground. Those trials are going to begin over the next few months, with 2012 still the target for when commercial space tourism becomes a reality. By then the New Mexico Spaceport America, being built for both vertical and horizontal takeoffs, will also be ready.

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Foursquare Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before With An Extraterrestrial Check In

We’re pretty sure this is the coolest Foursquare badge and check in that you can get – on Friday, NASA astronaut Douglas H Wheelock used it to check in to space. Who knew cellphones worked up there?

He checked in at the International Space Station and, according to Foursquare, became the first human to “use a location-based service from space.” Now there’s something to tell the grandkids.

While he was up there, he also unlocked the new NASA Explorer badge, which will surely become the ultimate Foursquare badge to get. And the good news is that you don’t have to be up in the air to get it – soon, you’ll be able to unlock it when you check in at NASA properties on terra firma. Awesome! That's $200,000 saved right there.

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Richard Branson On Hand To Open Spaceport America's First Runway

A spaceship that can fly on its own needs a runway for takeoffs and landings, and so Virgin Galactic now has one of those too. The company's head honcho Richard Branson was joined last Friday by Governor Bill Richardson to formally inaugurate the much-anticipated runway of the much-anticipated spaceport in the New Mexico desert. That would be the much-anticipated commercial spaceport, built specifically to shuttle space tourists back and forth.

We're not quite there yet, because the VSS Enterprise - having completed that drop flight two weeks ago - still needs to undergo further work. Rocket testing has to be done, and nobody's actually flown the thing into space yet. But with updates now coming every month and half a month, it's not hard to squint into the future and see a time when space tourism actually becomes a capital-t Thing. The official estimate is 9 months to 18 months, give or take a few.

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Space, Ahoy! Virgin Galactic Spaceship Completes First Solo Flight

That's one more landmark in space tourism down, now that Virgin Galactic has successfully completed a free flight and landing of its commercial spaceship VSS Enterprise. The vehicle is the first of five that the company plans to build and up until now it has been hoisted into the air and brought back down by its mothership Eve. Not any more. It was released at 45,000 feet above the Mohave Desert and glided its way down for 11 minutes before making a perfect landing. You can see Virgin's Flickr gallery of the flight here.

The sky is no longer the limit" said Richard Branson, not bothering to add that you'll need to pay $200,000 to get a seat on the aircraft. We covered the industry dynamics behind sub-orbitals like the Enterprise when the ship was unveiled last year, and there are also broader forces pushing ticket costs down. Still, the 100km flights are going to be out of reach for most people for most of the foreseeable future. Plus the first 370 seats have already been reserved to the tune of $50 million total, so there's even a waiting list.

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United Nations Appoints Ambassador to Aliens, Wants to Play in Space Too

The United Nations wants to take the lead in making contact with ET, and so they're already appointing the people who'll do it. Right now it's a Malaysian astrophysicist named Mazlan Othman, but in the future who knows whom they'll choose. Not that it really matters. There are a lot of ins and outs of international geopolitics, but on an issue as huge as interstellar contact the UN is going to be mostly irrelevant. Contact isn't going to be done by committee, and honestly that's probably a good thing. We don't really want this guy helping to decide who explains the last 200 years of human history to a hyper-intelligent spacefaring race.

This isn't strictly travel-related, although, given how quickly space tourism is heating up, the UN's appointment of a "space ambassador" might end up being more than a punchline. In the meantime we're going to spend a while treating it as a punchline on account of how it's kind of a punchline. And stupid.

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Boeing Signs Up to Explore Space Tourism as Early as 2015

Another day, another small reason to be optimistic that space tourism will (someday) become as affordable as any other once-in-a-lifetime vacation. We've written about commercial space travel company Space Adventures a bunch, from their extreme summer vacations to their just-over-six-figures per trip sub orbiters. Now they've passed another major milestone, inking a deal with Boeing to put passengers on board "Crew Space Transportation"—100 vehicles to be made by Boeing, with the intention of sending them very speedily into a low Earth orbit.

Prices for the rides haven't been published yet, and Space Adventures has a little bit of time before that becomes an issue. Boeing hasn't even started manufacturing the crafts yet, and no flights are expected until some time around 2015. We're not exactly holding our breath on the price tag either. It's not like these are going to be LCC-level prices, which is closer to our usual wheelhouse.

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Space Tourism Gets Cheaper and Cheaper

Two of the major space tourism companies have hit milestones in recent recent weeks, but only one can claim that they're kind of sort of approaching prices that would allow them to credibly market themselves to consumers. Space flight isn't going to be affordable—whatever that will end up meaning—in the next decade. But it's still worth noting how the barest hints of competition are already pushing down prices, and how Space Adventures—about whom we've written before - is undercutting Virgin Galactic in the blossoming sub-orbital travel market by literally a hundred thousand dollars.

Space Adventures just unveiled their proposed consumer space travel package. They'll put tourists on a vertically launched vehicle, currently under development by Armadillo Aerospace, and fire them 62 miles above the ground. Once there, the engine would be shut down and passengers would float weightless for about five minutes, availing themselves of a 360-degree view of Earth. The anticipated price tag? A mere $102,000.

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Will NASA's Loss Be Space Tourism's Gain?

As part of the President's pivot to fiscal responsibility, the White House unveiled a new budget last week that scraps NASA's moon program and shifts $6 billion into promoting private space flight. Instead of using NASA's space shuttles to move our astronauts back and forth, the government would contract private firms to do the flying. The goal is to kill two birds with one budgetary allocation: the US would get to maintain its presence in space even while it injected badly-needed funds into the country's growing space tourism industry.

If the plan works out, the space industry in 2020 will look a lot like the airline industry a hundred years earlier. Until the 1920's, American planes were operated by the newly minted US Air Force. Then a bunch of small regional airlines began to develop, relying in no small part on guaranteed government air mail funding. In 1930 they merged into the corporation that became American Airlines, and the basis for modern civilian aviation was born.

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