See WK2 and SS2 fly in New Mexico this October

Well, at least flyby overhead. The organizers of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) announced today that the two vehicles will put in an appearance in the skies over Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 22, the day after the two-day ISPCS. “This will be the first long distance test flight […]

SpaceShipTwo captive carry flight video

Virgin Galactic has posted a video of yesterday’s first captive carry flight of SpaceShipTwo, including a brief interview at the end with test pilot Mark Stuckey, who says that “I don’t think we could have planned, realistically planned, for any better success” on the flight.

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SpaceShipTwo flies, on schedule

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg)

Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about […]

Brief notes: Soyuz, Virgin, and… iCarly?

The news media has something of a case of amnesia when it comes to space tourism in Russia: they regularly, breathlessly report comments that Russia will stop flying space tourists on Soyuz flights to the ISS. Every few months, it seems, a Russian official makes comments to that regard, dutifully reported by the wire services […]

Burt Rutan’s BigThink

The web site Big Think has posted an extended interview with Burt Rutan, who talks about space tourism, innovation in NASA and the private sector, and other topics. I haven’t watched the full one-hour interview in its entirety yet, but in the portions I’ve watched he covers some familiar ground about the utility of space […]