Branson appealed to keep Homans’ job

The turmoil surrounding the management of Spaceport America in New Mexico has been relatively quiet the last couple of weeks, after the resignation of executive director Rick Homans at the insistence of the new governor, followed by the dismissal of the spaceport’s board of directors early this month. That situation is still in flux, the […]

Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic make a little news in Munich

On Sunday afternoon Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, and George Whitesides, president and CEO of Virgin Galactic, appeared on a panel at the Digital – Life – Design (DLD) conference in Munich. The half-hour panel, with the rather clunky title “New Space Mission”, was designed to provide attendees of this rather eclectic conference with […]

More turmoil for Spaceport America

The new year has not been a good one so far for Spaceport America, the commercial spaceport under construction in southern New Mexico. Early this month executive director Rick Homans resigned, apparently at the insistence of the administration of new governor Susana Martinez, who took office on New Year’s Day. On Thursday the governor announced […]

Spaceplanes, real and imagined

EADS Astrium has proposed developing a suborbital spaceplane for several years, but has made little progress beyond some early-stage technology development work. (credit: EADS Astrium)

Yesterday Scaled Composites competed a fourth glide flight of SpaceShipTwo. According to the flight log all test objectives were achieved on the 11.5-minute test, the first glide flight of […]

Space Adventures: Soyuz seats available

Space Adventures announced today that it has concluded an agreement with the Russian space agency Roskosmos and RSC Energia for additional Soyuz seats for future flights of space tourists, starting in 2013. Three seats will be made available as Energia increases production of Soyuz spacecraft from four to five a year; the additional Soyuz flight […]

Homans to resign at Spaceport America director

The uncertainty about the future of Rick Homans as executive director of Spaceport America, as discussed here earlier this week, appears to be over. The Las Cruces Sun-News reports Wednesday that Homans has tendered his resignation, effective Friday. Homans, speaking at an emergency meeting of the spaceport’s board, said that he had been informed last […]

New Mexico uncertainty

By and large things are going well at Spaceport America: other than a delay with one of the spaceport buildings, construction of the commercial spaceport in the New Mexico desert is proceeding, with the runway dedicated in October and other buildings, including the main terminal, making progress. Yet there is some uncertainty about the future […]