SpaceX’s Elon Musk didn’t say anything really new in his speech yesterday at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, at least compared to his address last week at a satellite conference in Washington. However, there is one new development that he did not mention in his speech. As reported by socalTECH.com yesterday, SpaceX has […]
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Here’s about an excerpt of a video released by Virgin Galactic on Friday with clips of a WhiteKnightTwo flight: WhiteKnightTwo flight highlights from Jeff Foust on Vimeo. Compared to the good ol’ days (2001), a space tourist flying to the ISS these days is a little, well, ho-hum. Back in 2001 there was all the drama associated with whether NASA would allow Dennis Tito to fly to the station on a Soyuz, and if so, what sort of reception he would get […] Space tourism companies (with the exception of Astrium, as previously noted) have remained optimistic about their prospects despite the current economic crisis. Virgin Galactic’s Will Whitehorn said last month that they continued to sign up customers and had nearly 300 at the time, with only a few asking for their deposits back. XCOR had also […] Rob Coppinger reported this week that Astrium has put on hold “indefinitely” its plans for a suborbital spaceplane. Astrium, a division of European aerospace giant EADS, announced plans for the “space jet” at the Paris Air Show in 2007, but there had been little visible progress in the vehicle’s development since then, beyond some propulsion […] WhiteKnightTwo, the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo, took to the skies on Wednesday afternoon, according to several observers in Mojave. No word yet on the technical details associated with the flight, including flight time, altitude, etc. This was the first flight since February 5th and the third overall; the first was on December 21. Elon Musk was the luncheon speaker Tuesday at the Satellite 2009 conference in Washington. His speech was a general overview of what SpaceX is doing on both the Falcon launch vehicles and Dragon spacecraft, but he did offer a few new and interesting items: Musk said that SpaceX has 19 Falcon 9 orders (12 of […] Last week we noted that Richard Branson had a more ambitious schedule for Virgin Galactic than company officials have recently stated, claiming that “Virgin Galactic will take off in November”. That statement, made in Boston last week, doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident. The German magazine Stern has an article this week about Virgin […] On Wednesday I had a long telephone interview with Charles Simonyi, scheduled to make a return trip to the International Space Station late next month. (The interview got delayed a couple hours because his training that day ran long.) I plan to have a more complete account of the interview in Monday’s issue of The […] Last week Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn said that the first glide tests of SpaceShipTwo would take by the end of this year, not offering a timetable for either powered test flights or the beginning of commercial service. However, in Boston this week to mark the beginning of Virgin American flights into Logan Airport, Richard […] |
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