The Economist foresees a “rocket renaissance”

An article in this week’s issue of The Economist provides an overview of the nascent space tourism industry, based in large part on events at last week’s ISDC. This is a pretty good overview of the state of the industry, examining the major companies and some of the (largely technical) issues associated with them, such as choice of propellant, staging, and flight mode. Advocates of vertical takeoff/vertical landing vehicles might argue with the article’s assessment that VTVL is “about the most difficult way” to do suborbital flights (in addition to Blue Origin and Armadillo Aerospace, a couple of other companies are pursuing this “weird” approach, including Masten Space Systems and TGV Rockets.) The article also manages to conflate the Rocket Racing League and the X Prize Cup near the end, but otherwise this is a decent introduction to the topic.