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Space Adventures

This is one of Space Adventures' early concepts for a suborbital spaceship. Space Launch Corp., a newly acquired subsidiary, may have other ideas.

Virginia-based Space Adventures, the only travel company to send tourists to the international space station, announced this week that it is acquiring a spaceship-building company called Space Launch Corp. — and it looks as if the move represents a small step toward yet another giant leap into the commercial spaceflight business.

That's the impression you'd get from talking to Eric Anderson, Space Adventure's chief executive officer. In a conversation on Thursday, Anderson was characteristically mum about how exactly Space Launch will figure in his company's business strategy. "When the time is right, we'll announce what the new business plan for Space Launch is going to be," he told me.

But he noted with pride that the 7-year-old California-based company has already done $25 million worth of work for the U.S. military on projects such as the RASCAL orbital launch system. That low-cost system would have been somewhat similar to Orbital System's Pegasus rocket, with a reusable aircraft carrying an expendable rocket up to high altitude for air launch into orbit.

Space Launch fleshed out a design for the system, but the Pentagon decided not to go on to the next phase. Now Space Adventures will be benefiting from that know-how instead.

"They are a strategic asset," Anderson said, "in that we feel much of the technology that they developed is both useful and applicable to commercial human spaceflight projects."

Anderson declined to discuss the terms of the transaction, other than to say that Space Launch will be a wholly owned subsidiary of privately held Space Adventures, with Jacob Lopata staying on as chief executive officer. In a news release, Lopata said he was looking forward to joining Space Adventures "to develop the technologies and business structures required to open the space frontier to all."

Anderson also declined to say whether Space Launch would be developing a suborbital or orbital craft for Space Adventures' use, but he acknowledged that "we clearly have plans to develop space tourism capabilities."

Space Adventures is already working with other companies to have a suborbital spaceship built in Russia, known as the Explorer, and to have spaceports built in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Just last week, a Russian news report indicated that the Explorer might not get off the ground until 2009 — somewhat later than initially expected.

Anderson pooh-poohed that report. "Don't believe everything read in Russia," he told me. "I kind of chuckled when I saw that."

He also said the Explorer project and the Space Launch acquisition "have nothing to do with each other." Anderson noted that, because of U.S. export requirements, it might make sense to have access to foreign-built rocket ships as well as domestic ones.

But he emphasized that Space Adventures itself would stay focused on the business of travel arrangements rather than spaceship development. "There are groupings of companies that may have related ownership and even related names, but there is a wall between their businesses," he explained.

That stance may be important as the suborbital spaceflight market develops, because Space Adventures has forged deals with a variety of other spaceship builders to broker seats on future flights. Hypothetically, it might be awkward if Spaceship Company X came to see Space Adventures as a rival as well as a customer.

In other Space Adventures news:

• Anderson acknowledged that although the financing is in place for spaceport development in the United Arab Emirates, the Spaceport Singapore project is still not fully funded. However, he said, "the project is going very well, and I think it will be funded in a number of months."
• The company announced today that Japanese entrepreneur Daisuke Enomoto, a client who is due to fly to the international space station in September, successfully completed a round of Black Sea survival training.

They may have started out as a plot device for the villain in a James Bond movie, but today, lasers are a totally old-hat technology. They've made their way into humdrum light pointers, supermarket scanners and DVD players. Sasers, on the other hand, are just coming onto the high-tech scene. So what's a saser?

Sasers — that is, "sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" — are the acoustic analogs of lasers, according to today's Physics News Update from the American Institute of Physics. Just as lasers build up a potent burst of light energy through coherent amplification, sasers amplify ultrasound waves by reflecting the sound back and forth between acoustic mirriors.

In today's issue of Physical Review Letters, a British-Ukrainian team led by the University of Nottingham's Anthony Kent describes a new method for amplifying the ultrasound by using stacks of thin layers of semiconductors as the mirrors. Physics News Update says the researchers claim their saser is the first to reach the terahertz frequency range while using a modest electrical power input.

"Terahertz coherent sound is itself a relatively new field of research," the Update reports. "Essentially ultrasound with wavelengths measured in nanometers, THz acoustical devices might be used in modulating light waves in optoelectronic devices."

This schematic illustrates how a saser device might work, and in this archived report, Hokkaido University's Oliver Wright discusses how terahertz ultrasound could be used to probe nanoscale structures.

Although these devices are more likely to turn up in next-generation circuitry rather than the next James Bond spy sequel, the concept has a rich science-fiction legacy. "Sasers" were used as hand-held weapons or sonic amplifiers in David Brin's Uplift saga, and this report on fringe science traces the fictional antecedents of the saser back to the "weirding devices" in Frank Herbert's "Dune" novels.

Are there other science-fact or science-fiction angles to the saser story? Feel free to leave a comment or write me an e-mail note.

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Discovery Channel

A 17-inch-long wooden coffin covered in gold leaf is among the artifacts found in the KV-63 chamber in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Lots of little mysteries keep adding to the big mystery surrounding the ancient Egyptian chamber known as KV-63. Was the chamber — where seven coffins and 28 jars were tucked away more than 3,000 years ago — meant to be a royal tomb, a hiding place, a supply room for used mummification materials, or all of the above?

The latest little mystery has to do with a 17-inch-long (42-centimeter-long) coffin. The wooden mini-coffin, which is covered with pink-tinged gold, is about the right size for an infant. But it's empty, with no inscription on it. So what purpose was it meant to serve?

"It's probably not for an infant, but more likely it might be for a funerary figurine. Unfortunately there was nothing in it, so we can only make guesses as to what it might be," the leader of the KV-63 dig, Otto Schaden of the University of Memphis, told me via telephone from Egypt today.

The mini-coffin was found just last week, stuffed inside a somewhat bigger coffin along with a bunch of ancient pillows, and has become the focus of the publicity buildup for Sunday's Discovery Channel documentary about Schaden's work, titled "Egypt's New Tomb Revealed."

The TV show traces the saga of KV-63 up to virtually the present day, but the saga hasn't quite come to its climax. After months of work, Schaden and his team are just now getting to the most intriguing of the chamber's seven coffins: a full-size, sealed coffin at the very back of the room, plus another infant-sized coffin lying nearby.

"We're not sure what we'll find in the other one," Schaden said. "It could be possibly a child, but it could also be a funerary figure, or it could be empty."

That mini-coffin may be taken out of the chamber next week for further study. Schaden said the team plans to X-ray both the infant's coffin and the larger sealed coffin, to get a sense of the contents before taking on the delicate job of opening the lids. Also, 16 of the 28 jars found in the chamber have yet to be opened.

Schaden by no means expects to find treasures on a par with those discovered about 45 feet (15 meters) away in Tutankhamen's tomb. But he does hope to find connections to the age of Tutankhamun and his father, the heretic pharaoh Akhnaten. The style of the carvings and some of the inscriptions found at the KV-63 site already point to the 18th Dynasty, when Akhnaten and Tut ruled.

"We know where the final acts were performed in this tomb, or roughly when, but we'd like to know specifically," he said. "We'd like to know if we can nail it down to a specific reign and maybe even a date. We still have a lot of things to examine in which such information could be sitting there waiting for us."

The show suggests that the chamber might have served as a repository or even a dumping ground during the tumultuous times of the 18th Dynasty. The trouble began when monotheistic-minded Akhnaten removed references to old gods to make room for his deity, Aten.

"What you had was Akhnaten imposing a rather radically new idea on Egypt, and for a civilization that relied so heavily on past traditions, to suddenly have a pharaoh come by and say the god you've been worshipping for hundreds of years has to go — this must have really scared a lot of people," Schaden said.

After Akhnaten left the scene, Tutankhamun and his military advisers led Egypt back to the old gods and the old ways. "I'm sure that in the process, there were a lot of individuals who, at one time or another, on one side of the situation or the other, may have gotten into deep trouble," Schaden said.

Were the coffins and the jars in KV-63 stashed away by ancient notables who found themselves in deep trouble? Schaden sees this as a potential scenario, but he's not ready to commit himself yet.

"My theory is, don't guess," he told me. "Wait until you know, or are reasonably sure. ... We still have most of the questions unanswered."

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