How the Space Tourism Business Could See Orbital Boom (SPACE.com)

Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer,
Space.com Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer,
space.com – Mon Apr 25, 5:30 pm ET

Orbital space tourism is a niche industry at the moment, but business could really boom if costs come down by a couple of orders of magnitude, a new study asserts.

To date, only seven people -- beginning with multimillionaire businessman Dennis Tito in April 2001-- have paid to launch into Earth orbit, and they've reportedly plunked down between $20 million and $35 million for the experience.

Those are not the numbers of a thriving industry. But things could change dramatically if prices drop significantly -- down to about $500,000 per seat or so. That reduced rate could lure in hundreds of thousands of customers for orbital tourist trips, potentially generating revenues in excess of $100 billion per year, according to the study.

"This is the first time in the theoretical realm that we are at a closed business case," said study lead author Ajay Kothari, president and CEO of the aerospace engineering firm Astrox Corporation. "So that, to me, is very exciting."

Kothari and his colleagues have also mapped out a rough plan for dropping the cost to $500,000 per seat or less -- and it involves developing fully reusable, two-stage-to-orbit spaceships.[Vote Now! The Best Spaceships of All Time]

Shallow customer pool

The current going rate for a two-week tourist trip to space -- including a stay at the International Space Station -- is more than $30 million. The Virginia-based company Space Adventures sells seats for such flights aboard Russian Soyuz vehicles, and right now they're the only game in town.

That's not terribly surprising, because the pool of potential customers willing and able to pay $30 million for a space jaunt isn't very deep. Kothari and his team wanted to figure out how that pool might deepen if the price came down. [Video: Fly to Space with Rocketship Tours]

They started out by looking at a landmark 2002 space tourism study put out by the technology consulting firm Futron, with help from the polling company Zogby. This report used interviews with 450 American millionaires to make an assessment of the market for space tourism, both in the orbital and suborbital realms.

Though the Futron/Zogby report is nearly a decade old, it remains the most in-depth look at space tourism's potential customer base, Kothari said.

The report found, among other things, that 30 percent of the polled millionaires would be willing to spend $1 million for a two-week orbital trip, though only 7 percent would go if the price was set at $20 million per seat.

More potential customers

Kothari and his team used the Futron-Zogby results -- as well as data from studies of the numbers and purchasing habits of wealthy people -- as a starting point. Then they performed their own in-depth analysis of the potential global tourist market for orbital spaceflight.

The researchers took into account a variety of factors, including eagerness to go to space and physical fitness. For example, the average age of American millionaires is 57 -- so a substantial proportion of willing customers is likely to be too old or infirm to safely withstand the rigors of spaceflight.

The team then computed a conservative case, which assumed that passengers would be willing to spend just 1.5 percent of their net worth on an orbital voyage. And they calculated a more optimistic scenario, which assumed a 5 percent net worth threshold.

After crunching the numbers, Kothari and his team determined that the worldwide customer base at $5 million per seat is only about 600 people at the 1.5 percent threshold, and about 1,500 folks in the 5 percent scenario. So even if prices drop by a factor of four, that's not good enough to "close the business case" for orbital tourism.

If the price comes down to $1 million, the pool is about 9,000 people at the 1.5 percent threshold and 23,000 at 5 percent. That's better -- but still not good enough to support a thriving industry, Kothari said.

But that changes if tickets go for $500,000. At that price, the global customer base is 14,000 in the conservative case, but nearly 225,000 in the optimistic scenario. With hundreds of thousands of people willing to fly, revenues could top $100 billion per year within a few decades, according to the study.

"A closed business case is definitely possible," Kothari said. He presented the results in San Francisco earlier this month, at the 17th International Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies conference, which was organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

A new vehicle

It's a steep drop from over $30 million per seat to $500,000, but Kothari and his team have some ideas about how spaceflight companies could get there.

The key is having the right spaceship.

After analyzing a variety of designs, the researchers determined that a fully reusable, two-stage-to-orbit vehicle is the best bet. Kothari presented one such design at the conference. [Top 10 Private Spaceships Headed for Reality]

The concept vehicle would have a payload capacity of 20,000 pounds (9,091 kilograms) and could carry 40 passengers. It would launch vertically, with a rocket booster doing the heavy lifting for the first part of the journey. At an altitude around 75,000 feet (22,860 meters), the booster would separate and glide back home to the launch pad.

At that point, advanced engines on the upper stage -- the actual spaceship -- would kick in. These engines would be dual-function, employing ramjet/scramjet technology -- which uses vehicle speed to compress outside air before combusting it -- until about 100,000 feet (30,480 m) and Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound).

Then the engines would switch over to a rocket function, which would carry the craft the rest of the way into orbit.

After completing its space mission, the vehicle would land on a runway, like an airplane or NASA's space shuttle would. While development costs for such a new spacecraft would be high, the vehicle's owners would recoup their money over time by flying it often, according to the study.

This fully reusable architecture could eventually lead to launch prices as low as $340 per pound (compared to current figures of $5,000 to $10,000 per pound), Kothari said. And that could well translate to ticket prices lower than $500,000.

Getting there

This spaceship is just a concept vehicle for now, and more work needs to be done before it can become a reality. For one thing, scramjet technology needs to be further developed and tested, according to Kothari.

"The scramjet is the cake, and everything else is the icing," Kothari told SPACE.com. "If you don't have the scramjet, you cannot get there."

Still, such a spaceship is eminently possible, and it could be operational within a few decades — provided it receives enough funding, Kothari added.

"This needs to be developed," he said. "It really should become a program."

Works in progress

Of course, many other orbital vehicles are further along in development than the spaceship Kothari envisions. Multiple companies are devising their own crewed craft, with considerable funding help from NASA.

Just last week, for example, the space agency doled out nearly $270 million to four companies — Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) — for this very purpose. NASA wants private industry to start carrying cargo and crew to space as soon as possible, in the wake of the space shuttle program's retirement later this year.

So orbital space tourists may not be limited to the Soyuz for much longer.

"There are going to be other vehicles coming down the line," said Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures. "And I think pretty much all of those vehicles have private spaceflight as part of their business plan, if you like. It's part of what closes the business case."

Space Adventures, for its part, has signed a contract with Boeing to fly people to orbital space on its CST-100 vehicle. And those trips could start relatively soon.

"We hope, come 2015, we'll be able to start flying some paying passengers" on the CST-100, Shelley told SPACE.com.

This new race to orbital space could help drive costs down substantially, through competition and the development of new, more efficient techologies. But only time will tell if prices drop -- and if so, how much and how fast.

Still, all signs point toward the dawn of a new era in human spaceflight, experts say. NASA's effort to encourage private companies to develop their capabilities could open the heavens to more and more folks who don't have $30 million lying around.

"This really is what I would call an inflection point for human spaceflight," said Bretton Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "This change in human spaceflight will not only regain leadership [for the United States], it will take us light-years ahead of everybody else."

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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No Sex in Space, Yet, Official Says (SPACE.com)

While humans have been a spacefaring species for more than 50 years, it's quite possible we have yet to perform that most basic of acts — sex — beyond terra firma. Yet.

Rumors have long swirled that astronauts may have hooked up in orbit, perhaps even as part of secret sex-in-space experiments run by the Russian or American governments. But those stories are likely the product of overactive — and overheated — imaginations, experts say.

A Russian space official, for example, has categorically denied any such weightless shenanigans by his countrymen, the news agency AFP reported Friday (April 22).

"There is no official or unofficial evidence that there were instances of sexual intercourse or the carrying out of sexual experiments in space," Valery Bogomolov, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Biomedical Problems, told the news agency Interfax, AFP reported. "At least, in the history of Russian or Soviet space exploration, this most certainly was not the case." [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]

What about NASA astronauts?

Bogomolov also addressed the rumors of American hanky-panky, though with considerably less authority.

"As for American space exploration, well, I just don't have the information to categorically deny that," Bogomolov told Interfax, according to AFP. "There are just anecdotal rumors, which are not worth trusting."

But those in the know say NASA astronauts have likely been as chaste as their Russian counterparts while zipping around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,164 kph). While NASA apparently doesn't explicitly forbid sex in orbit, its astronaut code of conduct calls for "relationships of trust" and "professional standards" to be maintained at all times.

"I'm not aware of an official NASA policy on this," said former astronaut Leroy Chiao, a veteran of four space missions between 1994 and 2005. "It was not discussed when I was there, it was simply understood. Nobody brought it up — it simply wasn't a consideration."

Despite the advent of mixed-gender crews in 1983, NASA astronauts seem to have behaved themselves in orbit, according to Chiao.

"As for any couple having had sex in space, I seriously doubt it," Chiao told SPACE.com in an email interview.

Chiao, who spent more than 229 days in space, explained some of his reasoning in a blog post for the tech website Gizmodo back in 2009.

"Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it," Chiao wrote. "Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens."

Other astronauts have backed Chiao's viewpoint, saying that NASA's spaceflyers have thus far been too focused on their missions to risk any romantic entanglements in orbit.

That's not to say that such entanglements don't unfold back on Earth, however, as the messy love triangle involving then-astronauts William Oefelein and Lisa Nowak demonstrates. Nowak was arrested in 2007 for allegedly attacking a woman she viewed as a rival for Oefelein's affections. She ultimately received probation.

It will happen

Sex in space will happen eventually, if it hasn't already. It's one thing for a space shuttle crew to contain themselves for a few weeks, or astronauts aboard the station to remain chaste for five or six months. But manned missions to Mars would last years, so abstinence for that long would be a tall order for most people.

And sex would likely be a natural part of life at a lunar or Mars base, especially if the aim is to one day establish a self-sustaining colony.

The rise of private spaceflight should open the door even more to sex in space. Space tourists would not be bound by NASA's code of conduct, or as restricted by the demands of a complicated mission.

And some people will probably even fly to space just to join the "220-mile-high club." Virgin Galactic, which hopes to start flying tourists to suborbital space as early as next year, has already turned down a $1 million offer from an unidentified party to aid in the production of a sex-in-space movie.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Tragic romance eclipses 2nd-to-last shuttle flight (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Looking back on the horror of that Saturday in January, this seems miraculous today: that Mark Kelly would indeed command the next-to-last space shuttle flight and that his wounded wife, Gabrielle Giffords, would be here in Florida watching.

Yet that is what is expected to happen Friday.

The Kelly-Giffords ordeal has been a national drama since Jan. 8, when the congresswoman was shot in the head at a meet-and-greet in her hometown of Tucson, Ariz.

The couple's love story — her struggle to survive a serious brain injury and her remarkable progress, and his devotion to both his wife and NASA — has overshadowed Endeavour's final voyage and the looming end of the shuttle program.

It's all about Mark and Gabby.

"They're America's sweethearts," said Susan Still Kilrain, a former space shuttle pilot.

On a day fit for princes and princesses — Britain's Prince William will wed Kate Middleton that morning — Endeavour's scheduled 3:47 p.m. blastoff is the big draw for tourists and residents on Florida's Space Coast.

The Obama family will be here, as will a congressional contingent and an estimated 40,000 other NASA guests. Plus, hundreds of thousands are expected to jam surrounding beaches and roadways, all eager to catch one of the last two space shuttle launches.

In an interview with CBS' Katie Couric, excerpts of which were released Sunday, Kelly said Giffords' doctors have cleared her to travel to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to watch.

No one, it seems, can resist the real-life drama surrounding the 47-year-old astronaut and the 40-year-old congresswoman, married just three years when a bullet changed everything. The shooting rampage outside a supermarket left six dead and 13 injured, including Giffords.

Kelly rushed by private jet from Houston to Tucson with his two teenage daughters and his mother, as soon as he learned of the assassination attempt.

His shuttle co-pilot, Gregory Johnson, was also moving at rocket speed. He opened his Houston home to the rest of the shuttle crew and their families that bleak Saturday night, as he struggled to come up with a game plan amid the shock waves.

"We wanted to deal with the emotions of all the kids. My daughter was completely beside herself," recalled Johnson.

The six astronauts, all men, have 15 children among them, from 3 to 17 years old.

Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori's plane had just landed in Houston when he got the urgent one-word message. "Call." Just the day before, Italy's president had given him a flag to fly into space.

The news hit Vittori hard, just as it did everyone else on the crew and at NASA.

"Crews get close after 18 months," Johnson explained in an interview with The Associated Press, "and all my kids had met Gabby on numerous occasions and we had socialized together as a crew. So just getting past that emotional trauma was important. And then we were faced with OK, what do we do next? How are we going to move on?"

Kelly figured he'd be at his wife's ICU bedside for "maybe two, four, six months." That's what her trauma surgeon and neurosurgeon warned him, in the hours after the shooting.

"I'm pretty sure I'm done," he told his boss, chief astronaut Peggy Whitson.

For several weeks, Johnson and his crewmates didn't know whether Kelly would fly the April mission or whether the flight might be delayed. A backup commander stepped in to keep up the training momentum.

But as the days went by, Giffords made steady progress. Her previous good health, great care "and maybe a little bit of luck" contributed to her swift improvement, Kelly said. "Or maybe people really thinking about her and praying for her." The astronaut's aunt is a Catholic nun. As it turns out, Pope Benedict XVI will make the first papal call to space during Endeavour's mission.

After a monthlong leave, Kelly returned to work in February at Johnson Space Center, bringing his wife with him to Houston for rehab. It's what she would have wanted, he assured journalists.

As he resumed training, his wife's full days of rehab were paying off. She began walking and talking more, completing short sentences. She also began to take stock of what had happened to her; Kelly told her she'd been shot.

Kelly settled into a routine: early mornings with Giffords, taking her a newspaper and a cup of her favorite nonfat latte with cinnamon on top, then straight to Johnson for a long day of training, then back to the rehab center to say goodnight to his wife.

Before the tragedy, the two split their time among Texas, Arizona and Washington, hooking up on as many weekends as possible. The shooting brought them together practically every day, until Friday. As is the custom one week before liftoff, Kelly and his crew went into quarantine.

Almost certainly, Giffords will be kept out of public sight at the launch, as she has been ever since the shooting occurred. Her husband will face the cameras when he arrives Tuesday with his crew at Kennedy Space Center, and again on launch day.

Dr. Anna Fisher, a NASA manager for future spacecraft, said it's natural the world is focused more on the Kelly-Giffords saga than Endeavour's grand finale, though she thinks all the previous 133 shuttle flights should have gotten more attention.

"Whenever everything goes well, nobody pays attention," she added. "It's only when you have your Challengers, your Columbias or, like now, Mark's wife Gabby being shot," said Fisher, one of NASA's first female astronauts.

Indeed, journalists have descended in droves on NASA news conferences — those with or about Kelly — in a way not seen since shuttle flight resumed in 2005 following the Columbia disaster.

It will be the 25th and final flight of Endeavour, NASA's youngest shuttle that was built to replace the Challenger and first soared in 1992, six years after the launch accident.

And it will be the second-to-last shuttle mission, as NASA winds down the 30-year shuttle program with one last fling by Atlantis in early summer.

Even the Nobel laureate whose $2 billion science experiment will be delivered to the International Space Station by the Endeavour crew doesn't seem to mind that his project is being overlooked.

"I have great admiration for Commander Kelly," said physicist Samuel Ting. "It takes great courage for him to do this. Really, it takes total dedication to do this."

Perhaps the only two people on the planet who bristle at all the attention are Kelly and his identical twin Scott, also an astronaut and a Navy captain. They repeatedly have tried — but failed — to steer attention back to their space missions.

Scott abruptly walked away from a series of interviews after he returned from the space station in mid-March; he kept being asked about his brother and sister-in-law. Two days later, Mark canceled all private interviews that already had been set up with reporters at Johnson. He took part in the traditional crew news conference and talked about his wife, but kept it short.

Seldom does a single individual take over an entire space mission like this.

John Glenn was the exception when he returned to orbit in 1998 aboard Discovery at age 77. It's still called the John Glenn flight, even by NASA. Never mind there were six others on board and science experiments galore.

That's the only time a sitting president has ever attended a shuttle launch — at least until Friday. President Bill Clinton was on hand to see the original Mercury astronaut, the retiring senator, soar.

Now it's Kelly's turn. The Mark Kelly flight.

The five men who will ride into space with Kelly have circled around him, like a band of brothers.

"We also went through it," said astronaut Gregory Chamitoff. "We know Gabby and Mark really well. It's hard for us to see them go through this."

Astronauts point out that all space shuttle missions have distractions: divorce, child concerns and other family issues, health matters, accidents. On the last flight, for example, a crew member was injured in a bicycle crash just weeks before liftoff and had to be replaced.

Top-level managers insist the latest distraction will not affect the launch or the two-week flight, a particularly complicated mission featuring four spacewalks.

"I've talked to Mark extensively on it, and he is completely focused on the mission and ready to go," said shuttle program manager John Shannon.

Endeavour astronaut Mike Fincke said Kelly has set a good example for the crew, all veteran space fliers. Kelly will be making his fourth shuttle flight.

"He's able to compartmentalize and he's also able to count on us as his crewmates, while he's dealing with the things that he needs to deal with," Fincke said. "Mark doesn't need to worry. The mission's going to get done."

And, of course, Giffords herself is an inspiration.

"She's on a path to recovery," said crewmate Andrew Feustel, "and that is, I think, allowing us all to just carry on and get done what we need to get done."

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

Messages: http://tinyurl.com/NASAmessages

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Giffords cleared to view shuttle launch: husband (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Astronaut Mark Kelly says his wife, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, has been cleared to attend his space shuttle launch after recovering steadily from a brain injury sustained in a shooting.

The Democratic lawmaker was shot once through the head during a January 8 shooting rampage that killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, at an outdoor meeting she was hosting in Tuscon, Arizona.

Giffords was transferred to TIRR Memorial Hermann rehabilitation hospital in Houston, Texas, in late January.

"I've met with her doctors, her neurosurgeon and her doctors. And... they've given us permission to take her down to the launch," NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, the congresswoman's husband, told "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric."

"I'm excited about that."

CBS released excerpts of the interview on Sunday and will broadcast it on Monday.

Asked about his wife's reaction to the news, Kelly responded: "she said 'awesome' and pumped her fist."

Giffords is recovering from a bullet that tore through her brain's left hemisphere, which controls speech and movement for the right side of the body.

"Her personality's a hundred percent there. You know, it's difficult for her to walk. The communication skills are difficult, at this point," said Kelly, adding that his wife was "100 percent" herself.

Kelly is the commander of the space shuttle Endeavour's final mission, scheduled to launch Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"I can't say I notice improvement every day, but I can every few days," he told The Arizona Republic in an article published Sunday.

Giffords has said she wants to attend the launch, and Dong Kim, the Memorial Hermann neurosurgeon who oversees Giffords's care, indicated her wish will be granted.

"We're very comfortable with her traveling," he told the newspaper.

Kim said Giffords "is maybe in the top one percent of patients in terms of how far she's come, and how quickly she's gotten there. I think the question, then, becomes, how far is she going to go?"

Surgery is scheduled in May to repair a section of her skull with a cranial implant. Surgeons in Tucson tried to preserve the portion they removed but it is now infected.

The congresswoman is rehabilitating her right arm and leg through therapy that includes pushing a grocery cart, playing indoor golf and bowling, according to the Republic.

She can stand on her own and walk a bit, but use of her right leg is still improving. She is learning to write with her left hand.

"Her left side is perfect," said chief of staff Pia Carusone. "She can do whatever you can do."

Giffords is aware that she was shot but hasn't been told that the shooting victims included her friends and colleagues.

"The challenge is she knows what she wants to say, and she knows everything that's going on around her," Carusone said, but can't always express it. "It's frustrating for her. She'll sigh out of exasperation."

Alleged gunman Jared Loughner has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

The congresswoman's parents, Gloria and Spencer, have rarely left their daughter since she was shot, according to the newspaper.

Friends and staff have covered the walls of her room with poster-sized photos of joyous events such as her wedding and hiking in the Grand Canyon. She remembers the events, which doctors say is a good sign.

"I want to work," she tells her visiting staffers, who bring her articles and office memos about their work.

Yet is if far from clear at this point if or when Giffords might be able to consider work options.

"It is unfair to set expectations on her in any way," Carusone added in the Republic report. "Would a triumphant return be amazing? Yes. But first of all, her close friends and family will take anything."

Her husband visits in the morning, bringing coffee and the newspaper, before going to work at NASA. He returns at night. The newspaper said Kelly sometimes naps with his wife in her twin-size hospital bed.

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Giffords cleared to attend shuttle launch: husband (Reuters)

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Astronaut Mark Kelly says doctors have cleared his wife, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, now recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, as healthy enough to attend his space shuttle launch on Friday.

Word that Giffords had been given a medical approval to make the trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the blastoff, which President Barack Obama also plans to attend, came in CBS Evening News interview slated to be broadcast on Monday.

The network released excerpts from Katie Couric's interview with Kelly on Sunday.

"Yes, I've met with her doctors, her neurosurgeon and her doctors. And ... they've given us permission to take her down to the launch," Kelly said.

Asked Giffords' reaction to hearing that she's been given the green light to attend the launch, Kelly said, "I think she said, 'awesome,' and she pumped her fist."

James Campbell, a spokesman for the Houston hospital where she is undergoing rehabilitation, told Reuters in an e-mail on Sunday the hospital plans to issue a statement about her plans to travel on Monday.

The event would mark the first extended outing the Arizona Democrat has made from a hospital environment since she was gunned down as she met with a group of constituents outside a Tucson, Arizona supermarket on January 8.

Six people were killed and 13 others were wounded, Giffords among them, when a gunman opened fire on the congresswoman and bystanders. Jared Loughner, 22, a college dropout with a history of erratic behavior, is charged with the shooting.

Kelly, the commander of NASA's next-to-last scheduled shuttle mission, took a leave of absence after Giffords was wounded but returned to work in February after she was transferred to the Houston rehabilitation center.

The Endeavour mission led by Kelly will be delivering equipment to the International Space Station. NASA plans to fly one last mission with sister ship Atlantis in June before ending the 30-year-old shuttle program.

Kelly told Couric that the injury to the left side of his wife's brain has made it difficult for her to regain her ability to walk to and to speak but left the right hemisphere, which controls personality and cognitive functions, intact.

"Her personality's a hundred percent there," he told Couric.

The Arizona Republic reported on Sunday that Giffords still struggles to piece together lengthy sentences but can articulate brief phrases such as "love you" and "I miss Tucson."

The newspaper said she is working to improve the use of her right arm and leg through therapy that involves pushing a grocery cart, bowling and indoor golf.

She can walk a bit on her own and is working on improving her gait, Dr. Gerard Francisco, the chief medical officer at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR), Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, told the newspaper.

The Arizona Republic based its reporting on interviews with Giffords' doctors, husband, congressional staff, and a nurse.

"Her left side is perfect," Pia Carusone, her chief of staff, is quoted as saying. "She can do whatever you can do."

Kelly said his wife learned that people had died and others were wounded when he was reading her a New York Times story about the shooting one day in March and, noticing he had skipped a paragraph, she grabbed the newspaper from his hand.

Giffords cried and said, "So many people, so many people," according to the Arizona Republic.

But Kelly said he still has not told his wife that the dead included a Gabe Zimmerman from her staff, a federal judge who was a friend, and a 9-year-old girl.

(Writing and reporting by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Peter Bohan)

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Houston doctors say Giffords can attend launch (AP)

By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI, Associated Press Ramit Plushnick-masti, Associated Press – Mon Apr 25, 7:38 pm ET

HOUSTON – Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is set to reach an important milestone this week when she ventures from her Houston rehabilitation hospital for the first time to watch her astronaut husband rocket into space history.

Giffords and her doctors set the Cape Canaveral, Fla., trip as a goal early on in her rehabilitation. It was the hope of her husband, Mark Kelly, too as he trained to lead NASA's next-to-last space shuttle flight.

On Monday, doctors at TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital confirmed the congresswoman will fly to Florida to watch Kelly command the space shuttle Endeavour when it makes its final flight to the International Space Station.

The doctors said Giffords is "medically able" to travel and that they view the trip as part of her rehabilitation from a Jan. 8 gunshot wound to the head. The congresswoman was wounded in a mass shooting that killed six people in Tucson, Ariz.

It seems an extraordinary accomplishment now, that she would be able to attend the liftoff and that Kelly would feel comfortable leaving her side to fly into space. The launch is set Friday afternoon, and President Barack Obama and his wife and two daughters will be there too. However, it's unclear whether they'll sit with Giffords.

Kelly reported his wife said "awesome" and fist-pumped when doctors told her she could attend the launch, according to a transcript of an interview with CBS's Katie Couric that will be broadcast Monday on the Evening News.

For brain injured patients like Giffords, goals and outings are key to rehab. Setting goals helps patients work toward something tangible, doctors say, while trips and outings can be used to reintroduce them to the community and see how they interact in different situations.

"We routinely allow patients outside visits as part of their rehabilitation," said Dr. Gerard Francisco, lead physician of the brain injury rehabilitation team and chief medical officer at TIRR. Francisco also is chairman of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Medical School.

Attending the launch is an "opportune time" for Giffords to continue her therapy progression, he added in a statement.

It's unclear whether doctors from the Texas hospital will travel with Giffords to Florida. The last time the congresswoman flew was when she was transported on a private jet to Houston from the hospital in Tucson, Ariz., that treated her immediately after the shooting.

This time, however, her flight is not an ambulance transport and the trip will be considered another part of the intensive rehabilitation she has been undergoing since arriving in Houston in late January.

Giffords spokesman C.J. Karamargin said the congresswoman's Florida trip is "great news."

"Attending the launch is something the congresswoman has been working toward and something that's important for her, her family and her staff," Karamargin said. "It's another significant milestone in her recovery."

ABC and CBS News initially reported on Sunday that doctors had given Giffords the green light to attend the launch.

The launch is scheduled for Friday at 3:47 p.m. Eastern. Kelly and his crew have been in quarantine — to prevent them from getting sick before or during the mission — since Friday and will be arriving in Cape Canaveral on Tuesday.

Kelly told Couric days ago when the interview was taped that he and his wife were a team in a Scrabble game — and won. It was the most recent glimpse into Giffords' progress, which has been tightly guarded by her family and the hospital.

Kelly said Giffords is writing with her left hand because her right side is still impaired, and she requires assistance to walk.

She still speaks slowly and it takes her time to formulate thoughts and words, but he said improvement can be seen every few days or each week.

"When I get back . in a few weeks . she's going to be noticeably different than when I left. I mean I know that's the case. So it's exciting to see the improvement, day to day and week to week. It's really exciting," Kelly told Couric.

Shortly after the launch, Giffords will return to Houston, though the hospital said details about her travel arrangements will not be released.

While she is in Florida, "provisions have been made with NASA" regarding her care, the hospital said. It remains unclear whether there will be updates on her arrival in Florida or her return to Houston.

Families view launches at Kennedy Space Center from a restricted area, and there are no plans for Giffords to make a public appearance.

NASA for the past few weeks has had launch management officials scouting locations and working with Giffords' staff on "whatever particular needs she would require," Kennedy Space Center spokesman Allard Beutel said. He referred to the congresswoman's staff for details on her requirements and schedule.

But, he said, this is different from NASA's normal accommodations for astronauts' families, which usually watch lift-offs from the launch control center's roof — an area accessible only by stairs, Beutel said.

"I don't think we've ever had this kind of situation where this level of injury occurred so close to a launch," Beutel said Monday.

Giffords went to Kelly's last launch in 2008, when he commanded the space shuttle Discovery. The two married in 2007.

Giffords was shot while at a meet-and-greet with constituents in the parking lot of a Tucson, Ariz., shopping center. A gunman killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Giffords.

Jared Lee Loughner, 22, has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the attack and is in custody.

Giffords has not been seen publicly since the shooting and has spent the past three months relearning how to speak, walk and take care of herself. She has been singing — as part of musical therapy — asking for her favorite foods and visiting with family, friends and her rabbi.

Kelly returned to training for the shuttle launch in February after taking time off to be at his wife's hospital bedside.

___

Associated Press writer Amanda Lee Myers contributed to this report from Phoenix and AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed from Washington.

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Russia Makes Demands About 'Safety' of Docking with the ISS (ContributorNetwork)

A potential monkey wrench has been thrown into plans to use commercial space craft to bring astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. Russia is raising objections, it says, due to concerns about safety.

"'We will not issue docking permission unless the necessary level of reliability and safety [of the spacecraft] is proven. So far we have no proof that those spacecraft duly comply with the accepted norms of spaceflight safety,' said Alexei Krasov, who heads the manned spaceflight department of Roscosmos."

A test of the SpaceX Dragon that involves docking with the ISS is scheduled, tentatively for December. Twelve cargo resupply flights are planned by the Dragon through 2015, with crewed flights envisioned to follow starting in 2016.

Of course, Russia objections have little to do with safety but rather with its all but complete monopoly on access to the ISS once the space shuttle program concludes later this summer. Russia can and is essentially charging what it wants to take astronauts to the ISS on its Soyuz space craft and cargo on its automatic Progress craft. U.S. government subsidized commercial space craft such as the SpaceX Dragon threaten that monopoly.

The statement by Krasov follows standard Russian diplomatic procedure that has been practiced since the height of the Cold War. That technique is to make unreasonable, maximum demands and see how far they can be pushed. Krasov does not say what it would take for Russia to be "satisfied" that commercial space craft such as the Dragon are "safe." But one suspects that it involves concessions that have little to do with space craft safety.

The demand brings to raise a question: How is it that Russia has gotten the impression that it has veto power over how the United States brings people and supplies to a space station largely built by American money and effort? If this was part of the original agreement struck during the Clinton administration, then very probing questions will have to be asked, likely as part of a congressional investigation.

On the other hand, if the Obama administration has somehow allowed Russia to think it can ride roughshod over the United States, even more searching questions need to be asked. Sadly the record of President Barack Obama where it comes to standing up to the Russians has been a very bleak one indeed. That may be why Krasov has decided to make a fuss years after the commercial space program was started by President George W. Bush and over a year since President Obama decided to double down on the concept.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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Virgin Galactic's Tourist Spaceship Makes Longest Test Flight Yet (SPACE.com)

A privately built spaceship built by the space tourism company Virgin Galactic soared through its longest flight yet today (April 22) during a drop test over California's Mojave Desert.

The suborbital Virgin Galactic spacecraft, called SpaceShipTwo, maneuvered through the skies over the Mojave Air and Space Port during the milestone test. The Mojave-based aerospace company Scaled Composites is overseeing construction and flight testing of SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane for Virgin Galactic.

According to Scaled's SpaceShipTwo flight test log, today’s piloted glide marks the fifth release of the space plane at high altitude from the WhiteKnightTwo mothership. [Photos: SpaceShipTwo Makes First Glide Flight]

"Looks like another good day for the Scaled team as we move through the test program," said George Whitesides, president and CEO of Virgin Galactic.

Whitesides told SPACE.com that the flight was the longest SpaceShipTwo glide flight to date.

Test pilot Peter Siebold and co-pilot Doug Shane, who is the president of Scaled Composites, flew SpaceShipTwo during the test, which lasted 14 minutes and 31 seconds, said Christine Choi, a spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic.

The glide tests typically have a checklist of items that range from evaluating stability and control of SpaceShipTwo to maintaining pilot proficiency.

The first SpaceShipTwo vehicle, named the VSS Enterprise, and its mothership VMS Eve are both being developed by Scaled Composites for British billionaire and adventurer Sir Richard Branson, who founded the Virgin Galactic spaceline. [Vote Now! The Best Spaceships of All Time]

SpaceShipTwo spacecraft are designed to carry six passengers and two pilots to the edge of space and back. The flights are expected to offer a spectacular view of the Earth and several minutes of weightlessness, Virgin Galactic officials have said.Tickets for the flights cost $200,000 per seat.

Test flight successes

SpaceShipTwo has been put through an ever-expanding set of flight objectives, starting with its maiden free-flight on Oct. 10, 2010; a second glide test on Oct. 28; a third drop test on Nov. 17; and a fourth glide test earlier this year on Jan. 13.

Shortly after tarmac touchdown, a debriefing was held involving personnel involved in the glide flight.

More tests of the SpaceShipTwo are expected as part of a dedicated campaign to ready the craft for commercial operations. A major milestone still to come are the SpaceShipTwo tests involving short, medium and long blasts from the spacecraft's hybrid rocket motor.

Last month, a sixth full-scale flight design rocket motor hot-fire was performed using ground test facilities. Reportedly, all objectives were completed, such as evaluating igniter performance, nozzle ablation and monitoring the stability of the burn.

Spaceport America construction

Meanwhile, construction of New Mexico's Spaceport America -- billed as the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport -- is nearing completion. This site will support Virgin Galactic's commercial space business of flying passengers into space.

Once fully operational, Spaceport America will handle both vertical and horizontal launch vehicles.

In February, the Spaceport Authority Board of Directors announced that Christine Anderson has become Spaceport's executive director. Among several past military and civil positions, she was the founding director of the Space Vehicles Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic's VSS Enterprise test flight program is slated to continue through 2011, prior to commercial operations, which will be based at Virgin Galactic's future headquarters at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

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Explanation Proposed for Weird Space Anomaly Seen By Pioneer Probes (SPACE.com)

A mysterious anomaly in space seen on two NASA probes that has caused scientists to question the laws of physics may  just be a trick of the light, a new study suggests.
The study may answer questions dating back more than a decade, when anomalies were seen in the trajectories of the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 deep space probes as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny, mysterious amount of acceleration that seemed to hold them back as they headed away from the sun.
A host of potential explanations have been tossed around regarding this so-called Pioneer anomaly. At times, these explanations are based in conventional science ("perhaps leaks from the spacecraft affected their orbits"). Other times, they are rooted in more speculative physics ("maybe our theories regarding gravity need to be modified").
Initially, researchers suggested that heat radiating from the plutonium powering the spacecraft might explain this enigma.
Light does exert an extraordinarily tiny but definite amount of pressure, a fact that solar sails rely on to move through space. This idea was at first discounted because it could not cause the constant acceleration suggested by the anomaly, but later research hinted that inconstant levels of acceleration could also explain the mystery.
Recent estimates suggested that thermal effects could account for as much as 67 percent of the anomalous acceleration. [Wacky Physics: Nature's Coolest Little Particles]
Now physicists at the Higher Technical Institute in Lisbon and their colleagues have discovered that it can account for the entire anomaly if one considers not only the heat the spacecraft emit but also the full effect of the heat they reflect.
"Fully accounting for the reflections did not provide only a correction to our previous calculation of the thermal effects, but added a considerable amount to them," researcher Orfeu Bertolami, a physicist at the University of Porto in Portugal and the Higher Technical Institute in Lisbon, told SPACE.com.
The scientists used computer modeling techniques to create 3-D simulations of how thermal radiation from the spacecraft bounces off their surfaces. Indeed, heat from the main equipment compartments of these deep space probes bouncing off the back of each spacecraft's sunward-pointing high-gain antenna could help explain the enigma. [The Strangest Things in Space]
"We now need to wait for the results of the other teams performing thermal analyses. We expect that their results will be fairly closed to ours. If so, the Pioneer anomaly will be pretty much closed," Bertolami added.
The scientists detailed their findings online in a pre-print paper posted March 27 to the online astronomy research site arXiv.org.
Follow SPACE.com contributor Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Visit SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

China looking to public to name space station (AP)

BEIJING – China is asking the public to help come up with a name and logo for its future space station in a sign of growing confidence in its ambitious program.

The appeal is the latest indication of how China's military-backed space program is emerging from its veil of secrecy as leaders seek to galvanize public support and maximize its educational and patriotism-inspiring aspects.

Eight years after China joined Russia and the United States as only the third country to put a human into orbit, the program has chalked up a string of successes, including launching a lunar probe and conducting its first ever space walk in 2008.

China expects to launch the space station's first module later this year, followed by a manned spacecraft to dock with it. Names are being sought for the station, due for completion before the end of the decade, along with its command module, two laboratory modules and supply ship. The program is also seeking new logos for the station and the manned space program.

"Considering the glorious achievements of the program and its majestic blueprint for the future, we feel the program should have an even brighter and more distinctive logo and a resonant and inspiring name," Wang Wenbao, head of the Chinese Manned Space Engineering Office, said in a statement posted Tuesday on the program's website.

There is a deadline of May 20 for naming the ship and July 25 for naming the station.

The space program has in the past looked to traditional culture for grandiose-sounding names. Ships in the manned space program have all been named Shenzhou, or "Sacred Vessel," while the lunar exploration program set to launch an unmanned lander next year has been christened Chang'e after the ancient Chinese goddess of the moon.

Models of the planned space station had borne the provisional name Tiangong, "Celestial Palace" in English.

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Florida Braces for Huge Crowds for Friday's Space Shuttle Launch (SPACE.com)

Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Senior Writer,
Space.com Clara Moskowitz, Space.com Senior Writer,
space.com – Mon Apr 25, 3:29 pm ET

The Florida space coast is expecting near-record crowds to flock to Cape Canaveral to watch the space shuttle Endeavour launch on its last voyage April 29.

Crowds have been getting thicker and thicker for shuttle launches as NASA winds down its 30-year-old space shuttle program. After Endeavour's mission, there is only one more shuttle flight planned before the three orbiters are retired. [Photos: Shuttle Endeavour's Final Mission]

The area around NASA's seaside Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, where the shuttles are launched, saw between 400,000 and 500,000 visitors for the last liftoff of the shuttle Discovery in February, according to Robert Varley, executive director of Florida's Space Coast Office of Tourism.

"We think we're going to do better than that this time," Varley told SPACE.com. "It's going to be a big day next week."

He predicted at least half a million visitors, and likely more, for Friday's blastoff at 3:47 p.m. EDT (1947 GMT).

In comparison, most regular shuttle launches draw between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors, Varley said. Where those usually bring about $4 million to $5 million in to the area, Endeavour's launch is expected to cause between a $10 million to $15 million economic impact, he said.

The area has about 11,000 hotel rooms, between 4,000 and 5,000 condominiums and another 35,000 campsites, he estimated. Nearly all of those are booked for this week.

Oral Ali, general manager of the Clarion Hotel in Merritt Island, the Luna Sea Bed and Breakfast Motel in Cocoa Beach and the Travelodge in Cocoa, said he is seeing much more interest in the upcoming launch compared to normal launches. His 270 rooms have been booked for at least a month.

"It's very hard to say no to people," he said. "I wish I had another hotel the same size."

The Space Coast Office of Tourism tracks rooms and can be a good resource in trying to track down places that may have vacancies.

"Most people are now aware that it's the last of the shuttle launches and so they're trying to come see one," said Sheryl Rodriguez, an employee at the Cape Winds Resort in Cape Canaveral, which is fully booked for next week. "It's very difficult -- just about everybody is sold out."

The fact that next Friday's launch will be the last ever for Endeavour has certainly led to some of the boost in attendance. The liftoff is also especially high profile because President Barack Obama has announced that he will bring his family to watch in person.

Additionally, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, wounded wife of Endeavour's commander Mark Kelly, will attend. Giffords is recovering in Houston from a bullet wound she received in January during a community outreach event. Kelly and NASA officials have said they hope she'll be in Cape Canaveral for the launch, but it depended on her health and the advice of her doctors. She was reportedly has since been cleared by her doctors to attend, accoring to reports.[FAQ: Inside Astronaut Mark Kelly's Shuttle Flight]

Endeavour is slated to carry six astronauts, a load of spare supplies and an ambitious $2 billion particle detector to the International Space Station. During a two-week visit, the shuttle astronauts will conduct four spacewalks to outfit and upgrade the station.

It's not just the Cape Canaveral area that's getting a boost. People planning to attend the launch are also staying in tourist destinations such as Orlando (about an hour away) and Daytona (about 1 1/2 hours away), Varley said.

The visitors' center at Kennedy Space Center, which houses a museum with rockets on display, an IMAX theater, rides and more, has also seen a huge boost in traffic in recent weeks, partly due to the fact that Endeavour can now be seen standing at the ready on Launch Pad 39A. 

"They're experiencing extreme high numbers of visitation -- around 10,000 or 11,000 people a day out there," Varley said.

Overall, next week's space shot is expected to rival some of the most famous in history, in terms of turnout. The Apollo 11 launch in July 1969, which sent astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon for the first time, drew close to a million people to Florida's Space Coast, Varley said.

He predicted Endeavour's blastoff next week will attract crowds close to that level.

And the effect is only likely to balloon for the next launch -- the June 28 liftoff of shuttle Atlantis. That is that last planned space shuttle mission ever, before all three orbiters are retired to museums.

"The last one will definitely draw over a million people," Varley said. "I have no doubt. It's history."

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Enormous statue of powerful pharaoh unearthed (AP)

CAIRO – Archaeologists unearthed one of the largest statues found to date of a powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the country's antiquities authority announced Tuesday.

The 13 meter (42 foot) tall statue of Amenhotep III was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation.

The statue consists of seven large quartzite blocks and still lacks a head and was actually first discovered in the 1928 and then rehidden, according to the press release from the country's antiquities authority. Archaeologists expect to find its twin in the next digging season.

Excavation supervisor Abdel-Ghaffar Wagdi said two other statues were also unearthed, one of the god Thoth with a baboon's head and a six foot (1.85 meter) tall one of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet.

Archaeologists working on the temple over the past few years have issued a flood of announcements about new discoveries of statues. The 3,400-year-old temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, where the powerful pharaohs of Egypt's New Kingdom built their tombs.

Amenhotep III, who was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, ruled in the 14th century B.C. at the height of Egypt's New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.

The pharaoh's temple was largely destroyed, possibly by floods, and little remains of its walls. It was also devastated by an earthquake in 27 B.C. But archaeologists have been able to unearth a wealth of artifacts and statuary in the buried ruins, including two statues of Amenhotep made of black granite found at the site in March 2009.

(This version CORRECTS original date of discovery.)

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Alien Bacteria Could Breed in Extreme 'Hypergravity' (SPACE.com)

Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer,
Space.com Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer,
space.com – Mon Apr 25, 3:30 pm ET

If alien life is out there, it may be able to exploit more-extreme environments than scientists think, because huge gravitational forces don't seem to pose much of a problem for microbes.

Several different species of bacteria can survive and reproduce in "hypergravity" more than 400,000 times stronger than that of the Earth, a new study reports. The find suggests that alien life could take root in a wide range of conditions -- and that it could survive the high G-forces imposed by meteorite impacts and ejections, making the exchange of life between planets a distinct possibility.

"The number and types of environments that we now think life can inhabit in the universe has expanded because of our study," said lead author Shigeru Deguchi, of the Japan Agency of Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life ]

A fortuitous find

Deguchi and his colleagues didn't set out to establish the high gravitational tolerances of microbes. Rather, they simply wanted to measure the density of Escherichia coli bacteria cells, using a centrifuge.

When they spun E. coli up to the equivalent of 7,500 G's (7,500 times the force of Earth gravity), however, they found that the microbe didn't miss a beat. It grew and reproduced just fine.

"The finding was a total surprise to us, and stimulated our curiosity very much," Deguchi told SPACE.com in an email interview."So we repeated [the] same experiments at higher G, and eventually found that E. coli proliferates even at 400,000 G, which was the highest gravity we could achieve by our instrument."

By contrast, anything above about 50 G's invites serious injury or death in humans, even if the exposure is for just a few hundredths of a second. Astronauts aboard NASA's space shuttle experience up to around 3 G's on liftoff and re-entry.

The researchers expanded their experiment, exposing four other microbe species to hypergravity for up to 140 hours. They found that another bacterium, Paracoccus denitrificans, can also reproduce at about 400,000 G's, though its proliferation -- like that of E. coli -- is stunted in such extreme conditions.

P. denitrificans and E. coli were the hypergravity-tolerance champs, but all five examined species could reproduce to some extent up to about 20,000 G's.

Deguchi and his colleagues report their results today (April 25) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A wide range of habitats?

While previous studies had demonstrated that some microorganisms can survive gravity exceeding 15,000 G's, the new research breaks ground by showing that a variety of microbes can actually proliferate in hypergravity.

The only comparable study the researchers are aware of found that E. coli can grow at 100,000 G's. Deguchi says that paper, published in 1963, didn't attract much notice because it was ahead of its time.

"The paper was published two years before microorganisms thriving extreme conditions were widely recognized by the discovery of thermophilic microorganisms in Yellowstone National Park in 1965," Deguchi said. [Extremophiles: The World's Weirdest Life]

The new study suggests that a wider variety of alien habitats may be open to life than scientists had imagined. The results even extend the possibility of life beyond planets, to the strange "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs, researchers said.

After all, if Earth bacteria can breed in 400,000 G's, the 10-to-100 G's possibly found on a brown dwarf shouldn't be much of an impediment. And some brown dwarfs may be cool enough to support life as we know it, researchers said.

Panspermia possible?

The results also suggest that the transport of viable lifeforms between worlds is a real possibility, researchers said.

Over the ages, Earth has been showered with perhaps 1 billion tons of Mars rocks, which were liberated from the Red Planet via meteorite strikes. Such interplanetary exchanges, in our solar system or others, could theoretically transfer microbes as well -- an aspect of the "panspermia" hypothesis, which posits that the seeds of life are everywhere and hopscotch from world to world.

Scientists think meteorite-caused rock ejections can generate up to 300,000 G's, researchers said. The new study indicates that microbial life could survive those conditions and keep right on breeding.

"If life does exist in other places in the universe, our study provides further evidence that it could spread within solar systems by the mechanism often discussed in panspermia hypotheses -- i.e., impact-based transport of meteorites between bodies of the same solar system," Deguchi said.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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