The website for Time magazine has a fairly detailed review article about the emerging space tourism industry. Writer Cathy Booth Thomas talks with a number of the leading companies, including Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Benson Space Company, and also covers the more secretive Blue Origin; there’s also coverage if Bigelow Aerospace and developing spaceports, in particular Spaceport America in New Mexico. If you’ve been following the industry you won’t find that much new in this article, although the visit to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort where he gathered a number of his Founders late last year, is at the very least entertaining (including the obligatory discussion of sex in space, featuring Branson himself.)
In your previous article about Benson Space Company, you mentioned that we would be conducting a contest for a free trip to space in conjunction to our reviving Brian Emmett’s dream of going to space. Our news broke on the same day as the “news” about astronaut Lisa Nowack, which bumped me from Miles O’Brien’s CNN morning show.
People can sign up for news of the Benson Space contest at:
http://www.FreeTripToSpace.com
We will be announcing details in a few weeks. This will be a competition that anyone can win, and not just a drawing, So people should go to the web site and register their email address for early notification of the beginning of the contest.
Onward and upward,
Jim Benson
http://www.BensonSpace.com