Odds and ends

A roundup of a few space tourism-related items from the last several days:

Wyle Labs Inc. is creating a new business unit “focusing on providing human spaceflight services to the emerging commercial ‘space tourist’ industry”. The Commercial Human Spaceflight Services unit, led by Vernon McDonald, will offer a variety of medical, training, and operations [...]

No blues for Blue Origin

Last night the FAA held a hearing in Van Horn, Texas on the draft environmental assessment of the proposed private spaceport being developed in west Texas by Blue Origin. Alan Boyle of MSNBC offers an account of a event where not much happened. About half of the 40 people who attended actually came from [...]

Blue Origin hearing today

The AP and the British newspaper The Independent both published articles in recent days about Blue Origin’s plans for a suborbital vehicle that will fly from the company’s facilities in West Texas. The articles are based on details previously disclosed in the company’s draft environmental assessment report, which will be the subject of a [...]

Blue echoes

Yesterday SPACE.com ran an article on the revelations regarding Blue Origin’s suborbital vehicle development program that came from its draft environmental assessment. There’s not much here that hasn’t been reported earlier, although Leonard David does get some interesting perspectives from John Garvey, who worked on the DC-X (upon which the New Shepard vehicle appears [...]

Blue’s Origins

If you haven’t heard by now, some new details (or, rather, some details period) about the New Shepard RLV being developed by Blue Origin were released last week, tucked away in a 229-page environmental assessment of the company’s planned West Texas launch site (PDF, ~12 MB). Both MSNBC’s Cosmic Log and RLV and Space [...]

Ode to Jeff Bezos

The Neon Trees is a small UK band that plays a type of music that they call “country power-pop” (which actually sounds more like folk than anything else). The uber-blog Boing Boing notes that one song available on their site, “The Life and Times of Jeff”, was inspired by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder [...]