Six hundred people have now signed up for a ride on the Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo rocketplane. Initial cost was $200,000, but Virgin Galactic, billing itself as the world’s first spaceline, has bumped the price to $250,000.

That represents at least $120 million in revenue. These folks are just paying deposits at this point, but it’s essentially money in the bank for Virgin if it can deliver the goods: a couple-hour ride out of the atmosphere and back for an otherworldly view of the Earth’s curves set against a black daytime sky and a few minutes of weightlessness.

It’ll be 9 years this year since SpaceShipOne proved that a privately built craft can rocket people into space. Some of those 600 Virgin customers have been awaiting their chance to fly since then, though not customer number 600, Marsha Waters, pictured here with Virgin owner Richard Branson. She made the decision to fly at the end of April, when SpaceShipTwo achieved its first powered flight.

Said Waters in a statement from Virgin released today:

“After watching Virgin Galactic’s supersonic test flight at the end of April, I thought “this is it” and made the decision to purchase my ticket to space while I still had the chance. It’s a big step and a major financial commitment for me, but I know it will be the most exciting, worthwhile adventure I will ever embark upon.”

 

That adventure will soon belong to all, even those who don’t go themselves, as increasing numbers of space flight participants return to Earth with changed perspectives and stories to tell. We’ll all get to look up with them.

He’s keeping details close to the vest, but, Jay Yarow at businessinsider.com has dug up a very plausible explanation for what Musk might have in mind.

Back in 1972 R. M. Salter at the RAND Corporation produced a paper describing what he called a Very High Speed Transit. This would be a hypersonic (Mach 5+) train running on magnetic levitation in a vacuum tunnel. Frictionless transportation could whisk passengers from New York to LA in 21 minutes. Reminds me of the Beach Pneumatic Transit built by Scientific American editor Alfred Ely Beach in New York City back in 1870.

Musk isn’t talking about that kind of speed, but he does say that he envisions the hyperloop making the trip from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes. That works out to an average speed of about the speed of sound (same as the Concorde airliner).

In a May 15 Twitter post, however, Musk dismissed the vacuum tunnel concept.

Will publish something on the Hyperloop in about four weeks. Will forgo patents on the idea and just open source it. Not a vac tunnel btw.

In a CNBC interview, Musk says he might give more details on the Hyperloop after a planned announcement from Telsa on June 20. He also says he doesn’t see building it himself, but that he hopes someone else will take it up (the Hyperloop discussion starts at 6 minutes, 55 seconds into the interview).

Anyone else care to speculate?

Mike Lazaridis at the GE Look Ahead Executing Innovation summit in Toronto, May 29, 2013. Photo: Michael Belfiore.

I was in Toronto last week for the GE Look Ahead Executing Innovation summit hosted by The Economist. This was a closed meeting of mostly Canadian business leaders sharing ideas across different industries, including healthcare, energy, and information technology.

I got a chance to meet Mike Lazaridis, one of the co-founders of Research in Motion, which makes the Blackberry. He has since left RIM, and just this year, in March, launched a new venture aimed at nothing less than putting Canada at the epicenter of a revolution in computing.

Quantum Valley Investments is part of a $700 million investment in quantum computer based in Waterloo, Ontario, 100 kilometers outside of Toronto that includes the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical physics—also founded by Lazaridis, and at which I have been a speaker—and the University of Waterloo, which is a world-class research institution and a top-three school for recruiting engineers for Google and others.

Lazaridis sees a coming quantum revolution, with computers using atoms as individual bits rather than transistors, and making calculations thousands of times faster than any so-called classical computer.

Another Canadian venture, Vancouver-based D-Wave has been making news lately with the first quantum computer to market, but it’s still in very early stages. Lazaridis is aiming for something much larger. “We’d like to get into…a whole new industrial revolution,” he said at the event.

One of the major benefits of space travel is the new perspective it brings, both to the people who experience it, and to those who experience it vicariously through them.

I believe that this perspective shift is just as  important as any scientific knowledge or new technologies we gain through space travel. We are feeling, living, spiritual beings who crave a sense of purpose and a deeper understanding of our place in the universe than mere data can provide.

The Apollo 8 astronauts who took the famous Earthrise photo started the modern environmental movement by providing the first view of our home in space, in the context of space. It was their Christmas gift to the world, and it’s what we remember best from that mission nearly 45 years later.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gave us another such perspective by recording a music video shortly before departing the International Space Station this month, expressing through music the feeling that seeing our home planet from the outside can evoke. The video conveys more than reams of data can. It conveys a feeling. It inspires.

We need people in space who can express themselves through the arts every bit as much as we need scientists, engineers, and pilots. And as more and more people are able to get to space by their own means, we will have them. Prepare to be inspired.

The fourth time’s a charm in this case. I’ve just received word that on Wednesday the fourth and final flight in the X-51A program achieved its objective of running a scramjet engine in flight for more five minutes.

This is the first time in history that any group, in this case the Air Force in a project with DARPA with Pratt & Whitney and Boeing as contractors, has managed to demonstrate sustained powered flight in an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle.

The vehicle was unmanned and dropped off from a B-52 carrier plane over the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. After first getting a boost to its supersonic operating speed by a rocket, the vehicle fired up its scramjet engine to hit Mach 5.1 and travel 230 nautical miles in a little over six minutes.

“I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight,” program manager for the project at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Charlie Brink, said in an Air Force press release that went out today.

Scramjets can travel faster than any other airbreathing engine because they lack the moving parts of conventional jets. The interior geomtry of the engine itself compresses incoming air sufficiently for combustion without reliance on fans and compressors.

Getting a scramjet to stay lit is a devilishly tricky problem that some have likened to keeping a match lit in a hurricane because of the force of the supersonic air that has to be running through the engine for it to work. Before the X-51A program, the longest duration run for a scramjet in flight was by the NASA X-43 back in 2004, for all of ten seconds.

Three other X-51A tests ended in failure. The one that flew on Wednesday was the last of these single-use experimental vehicles to be built, with no others in the pipeline.

The first practical application for scramjets will be as cruise missiles. But the technology, once matured enough, could be used for civilian transport as well. The advantage will be rocket speed without the bulk and weight of oxidizer tanks, potentially enabling round-the-world flights in under four hours from any major airport.

In other words, this technology, fully demonstrated for the first time on Wednesday, could bring about as big a shift in air transport as that wrought by the jet engine itself. It’s a big deal, and now after this week’s successful test, we should start seeing more development money, private as well as public, getting devoted to it.

Photo: Virgin Galactic

Yesterday in Mojave, the Scaled Composites-built suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipTwo lit its rocket engine for the first time and cracked the sound barrier. Pilot Mark Stucky and copilot Mike Alsbury were at the controls of the spaceship, and pilot Dave Mackay and copilot Clint Nichols flew the White Knight Two carrier jet that took the spaceship up to launch altitude.

It was the first time in more than 9 years that a manned suborbital spaceship has achieved powered flight. The last flight was by the SpaceShipOne prototype that convinced Richard Branson to sign the Scaled team on to get his Virgin Galactic company off the ground.

This flight seems like a long time in coming. But the developers of these new vehicles cannot afford a misstep. One crash would almost certainly spell the end of a given program, and call the whole enterprise into question besides. The engineers and test pilots working on these ships want to be as certain as they can be that nothing will go wrong in flight, and so they’ve been taking their own sweet time getting everything right.

Things should move faster now. SpaceShipTwo’s first run to space could come by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, a second-generation manned suborbital ship called Lynx is under construction in the XCOR hangar just down the flight line from Scaled’s hangar. The XCOR team is looking at first powered flight this year as well, with a ship that can blast off from the runway under its own power, without relying on a carrier aircraft.

And way down at the end of the runway at Mojave, a brand new hangar houses another Scaled project, the carrier plane being built for Stratolaunch. That mothership will be the world’s largest airplane, with a 385-foot wingspan and powered by 6 jet engines salvaged from a pair of Boeing 747s.

All the while, the unmanned vertical takeoff/vertical landing rockets of Masten Space Systems, just across Sabovich Street from Scaled, achieve ever greater heights and feats of autonomous control.

It’s an exciting time to be in Mojave. I’m envious of blogger Doug Messier of Parabolic Arc, who has a ringside seat to all the action from his office in the old control tower at Mojave Air and Space Port.

I’m in transit back from a day with XCOR Aerospace in Mojave yesterday.

To my mind, XCOR is the great underreported commercial spaceflight story of the decade. While companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic get the majority of the press attention, XCOR has been quietly building, piece by piece, a spaceship of its own.

I think the company will have to start fielding a lot more media requests later this year, however. That’s when they’ll start test flying the Lynx in preparation for revenue flights as early as next year.

Lynx is a two-seat rocketplane powered by four XCOR-built 5K18 engines. If Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, with its eight seats, is a space minivan, XCOR is the space Corvette. You can read more about this comparison in my story last year for Popular Mechanics.

While SpaceShipTwo will require swapping out the entire engine between flights, Lynx’s all-liquid propulsion will let ground crews refuel and go on short order like a regular old airplane.

XCOR’s Mike Massee got this shot of me with my camera. I’m pushing the button on a static fire test of one of the reaction control system engines that will allow Lynx to maneuver in space. The ship will have 12 of these babies on board, six to control the ship in pitch, yaw, and roll, with the other six serving as backup.

My first couple of shots of engineer Mark Peck (standing behind me in this photo) running engine tests came out blurry because I had a hard time supressing my startle response when the engine fired. The engine punches out only 50 pounds of thrust, but it’s loud, even with hearing protection. Sitting right next to it, I coud feel my pant legs flutter in the shockwave as well as the heat from the blast.

Even so, the engine is safe enough to run indoors, with other work going on in the shop all around. XCOR’s Doug Jones calls out the impending test fire, and the other people in the shop put on hearing protection and stand clear for the few seconds that the engine run requires with prep.

The blast shield around the engine is made of two layers of bullet-proof glass—just in case. It may never be needed, however. In XCOR’s 14-year history, during which it has had 4,000-plus engine firings, an XCOR engine has never had what is euphemistically termed in the rocket business a hard start.

Now, for the first time, America has two, not just one, launch vehicles in operation for reaching the International Space Station.

The Antares rocket, built and operated by Orbital Science Corporation, lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia on a test flight to orbit today. It carried a mass simulator to stand for the Cygnus spacecraft that will be added to a flight later this year. Everything went smoothly.

If all continues to go well, Cygnus will join the SpaceX dragon in supplying cargo to the station. SpaceX, which has already completed two cargo missions to Space Station on contract with NASA following successful test flights of its own, is working on adding crew capacity to the Dragon by 2015. Orbital has no plans to add crew capacity to Cygnus.

You can read more about the Antares and Cygnus in my story in January for Popular Mechanics.

Today’s successful mission is yet another affirmation that NASA’s policy of contracting out access to low Earth orbit while it concentrates on deep space missions is the right direction. Orbital, SpaceX, and up-and-comers like Sierra Nevada Corporation will be able to get the job done more affordably and with greater safety than the the retired Space Shuttles.

From NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver’s blog:

It was a thrill to be at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia today for the successful launch of the Antares rocket on its maiden voyage. Today’s test flight marks another important milestone in NASA’s plan for American companies to launch supplies to the International Space Station for fewer tax dollars, bringing this important work back to the United States where it belongs. I congratulate the Orbital and NASA teams that helped to make this achievement possible.

My mother has been an avid weather watcher since the ’80s, when my family moved from Southern California to Minneapolis, where tornadoes and thunderstorms and snowstorms made a big impression on us. But in this age of superstorms and devastating hurricanes, we all have reason to be weather obsessed. This isn’t the time to let go of our investment in weather satellites.

Fortunately, private industry is stepping in to fill the gap left by government-funded programs.

A Utah State spinoff called GeoMetWatch plans to launch so-called hyperspectral atmospheric sounders into geosynchronous orbit, picking up where a cancelled NASA program called GIFTS left off. GIFTS, for Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer, was to advance the art of weather forecasting from conventional low Earth orbit cameras that observe in the visible spectrum.

GeoMetWatch will take off from NASA’s initial $400 million investment in this technology with smaller sensors that will hitch rides on geosynchronous communications satellite launches. The instruments, positioned so that they can observe the same area continuously, will be able to collect data in multiple bands across the spectrum to measure water vapor, the concentration of various gases, wind velocities, and more over time and through varying levels of the atmosphere. The press rep who contacted me about this calls it 4D imaging, which seems apt since the sensors will build up a 3D picture of the atmosphere over time, the fourth dimension.

If all goes well, the first sensor will go up on an Asian communications satellite to cover the Asia Pacific region starting in 2016.

NASA has included an item for capturing an asteroid in this financial year’s budget request. Two companies have launched in the last year dedicated to mining asteroids. There’s no doubt in my mind that asteroids represent the next frontier for both human and robotic spaceflight.

Near Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are easier to reach than the moon. Depending on the size and where the are, they can be towed to a convenient location for exploration. And they are valuable, full of precious metals, the raw stuff of building infrastructure in space, and, most importantly, full of water. Water to drink, to breathe (after separating out the oxygen), and to power rockets (hydrogen and oxygen burning together constitute the best chemical fuel we know how to make).

“Chief asteroid miner” at Planetary Resources, Chris Lewicki, talks about NASA’s new plan to bag an asteroid in a recent blog post.

Planetary Resources is the best-funded of the two asteroid mining companies (the other is Deep Space Industries), and it is well along in constructing its first fleet of asteroid-hunting spacecraft. Yes. Fleet. These folks aren’t fooling around, and they have the backing and the expertise to get this job done.

NASA administrator Charlie Bolden will unveil the requested budget on Wednesday, April 10, at 3pm Eastern Time. You can listen in here:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

And get more details starting at 1pm here:

http://www.nasa.gov/budget