From Matangi Tonga Magazine, Vol. 16, no. 3, December 2001.

‘Eua, or one of the remote southern islands of Tonga, could become the site for a private space port to be developed for launching tourists into orbit at the low cost of $2 million per seat.

Included in the cost of your seat will be a sixty-day training period to accustom you to G forces, while staying in a resort setting.

Looking for a site for a private space port, the chief executive of InterOrbital Systems, Randa Milliron, and her partner Roderick Milliron, a rocket engineer, who co-founded the company, visited Tonga in December, as guests of Crown Prince Tupouto‘a. Travelling with a business associate, Eric Gullichsen, they visited the south coast of ‘Eua.

“We are looking for a remote site that gives a trajectory over the southern ocean,” said Randa. “We want to develop orbital tourism, orbital manufacturing and manned space research.”

Space entrepreneurs

The company aims to provide space tourism at $200 per minute compared to $20,000 per minute, which is the present going rate for suborbital flight, and to capture some of a potential market for satellite launching. They belong to a new breed of free-lancing space entrepreneurs who are racing to launch the first non-governmental manned space flights.

Today they say the challenges are financial not technical and their small company is  looking for investors.

The Millirons expect manned space travel to become a highly profitable commercial enterprise, and they say that at present the only obstacle to on-orbit operations is the steep cost of getting there and back, but they believe they can do it for a fraction of the cost.

InterOrbital Systems is developing a launch system, the Neptune Orbital Spaceliner they describe as “simple and low cost”. It will be capable of placing two pilots and two tourists into polar low earth orbit for a period of up to seven days, and they would like tourism flights to begin as early as 2004.

Sea launch

Randa explained that to use present launch facilities in the United States costs millions of dollars, and there was a scheduling period of two years, but their plans for launching at sea circumvented both of these problems. Land launch could only be economical if it was carried out away from the international government run spaceports, she said.

InterOrbital Systems wants to begin construction of a private island spaceport and astronaut training centre soon, in a resort setting in the South Pacific.

Do-it-yourself

The company currently conducts rocket and spacecraft development at its desert facilities located at the Mojave Civilian Flight Test Centre in California, U.S.A. Randa, a newcomer to rocketry, is an African language specialist and television producer-director, while Rodney used to work for Grumman Aerospace. Fortune magazine visited their facilities last year and reports that Rodney was an electronic warfare systems engineer, who has worked on the F14 fighter jet, and Hawkeye surveillance plane. With their freelancing aerospace friends working on a voluntary basis, they are building all their own major rocket components. Roderick machines the parts himself and Randa sews the re-entry parachutes for the test vehicles.

They are developing amphibious space launch vehicles, that can be launched at sea using low-cost surf-launch technology or from a land-based space port. They believe that in time cheap reuseable launch vehicles will dominate the market, phasing out the existing ultra high cost launch vehicles like the Titan and the Ariane. The philosophy is, why use a Rolls Royce when a space truck will do?

Blast off

Rockets  are said to be fairly simple vehicles designed to pack the maximum amount of fuel and payload into the lightest structure possible. The fuel is highly volatile, and the IOS Neptune Orbital Spaceliner will use liquid propellants including white fuming nitric acid and hydrocarbon x for the booster, with liquid oxygen and liquid methane for the orbiter.

Rocketry is all about the huge power at lift off, said Randa, explaining that the human body cannot withstand the massive forces generated, and must stay several kilometres distance away from the launch site.