Previewing ISPCS 2008

The 2008 edition of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) will be taking place the next two days in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (I’m writing this from a hotel room in Las Cruces, and will be at the conference.) The conference started in 2005 as simply the ISPS; the “and Commercial” part of the title got added last year. The first day of the conference, though, is focused primarily on personal spaceflight: after a keynote by Gary Payton, Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force Space Systems, on operationally responsive space, there are panels on suborbital and orbital human spaceflight and the “power of prizes”, as well as a dinner speech by orbital space tourist Anousheh Ansari. The second day gets more into broader commercial issues, including the roles of universities and associations, but there are sessions planned on personal spaceflight “industry indicators”, astronaut training, and spaceports.

I’ll be providing some coverage as time permits during the day, including brief news items on my Twitter feed, with some wrapups after each day.

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