Another Blue Origin test upcoming

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that the FAA has issued a temporary flight restriction for the airspace around Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas. The restriction, in effect from 7:30 am through 12:30 pm CST on Thursday through Saturday, is similar to one in effect earlier this month for Blue Origin’s first low-level flight test. […]

A bit unclear on the concept

J.D. Fortune, the relatively new lead singer of the band INXS, told the Canadian publication JAM! Showbiz that his band has been offered a most unusual gig, although his description of it makes you wonder just how real his claims are:

INXS has played some great gigs the past year, including to 70,000 people in […]

A flight in White Knight

This week’s issue of Aviation Week features an article about White Knight, the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipOne. While SS1 is now hanging from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum, White Knight is still flying today, serving as “an ideal testbed for large, heavy payloads,” in the words of William B. Scott, the […]

Post-holiday catchup

Brief notes about a few space tourism-related articles that appeared over the last few days:

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Alex Howerton offers an “appreciation” of last month’s X Prize Cup, emphasizing that despite the failure of any competitors to win prizes, the event is a big step forward for the NewSpace […]

Space tourism on CNN International

CNN International is airing CNN Future Summit, a show that, in its words, “brings together some of the brightest minds of our time to see how science and technology are shaping our future.” One of the topics of the show will be space tourism; the “brightest minds” the show includes are Anousheh Ansari and Buzz […]

Genesis 2 launch delay

A SPACE.com article today provides an update on plans to launch Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 2 spacecraft, a small-scale demonstrator of the company’s planned inflatable orbital habitats. The launch, which earlier had been pushed back to January 2007, is now planned for “the early end” of the first quarter (which sounds like sometime in late February […]

Picking winners and losers

An article in the current issue of Travel Weekly (“The National Newspaper of the Travel Industry”) has a lengthy article about the emerging space tourism industry. (free registration may be required) Much of the article is a basic primer about some of the major companies in the industry, including Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic, and […]

Oberstar and the threat to US space tourism

In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman addresses the potential threat to the emerging space tourism industry in the US posed by Rep. James Oberstar. The Minnesota Democrat is poised to become the chairman of the House Transportation Committee in January when the 110th Congress convenes. Oberstar led an […]

Followup: Ansari at Stanford

The Stanford Daily has an article about Anousheh Ansari’s speech in a “packed” auditorium last Friday night at Stanford University. There aren’t too many insights in the article about her speech, which appeared to be more inspirational than anything else. She does tell that paper that she believes that the price for space tourism flights […]

Virgin Galactic’s good press

You can say one thing about Virgin Galactic: they’re good about generating press (and good press, at that), even when they have little new to report. On Friday SPACE.com runs an article about the company’s business plans, based on an interview with company vice president Alex Tai. There are some interesting items in here, including […]