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An intriguing short item in today’s San Jose Mercury News about the Space Adventures press conference later today: Space tourists are getting their own ride. Space Adventures, a Virginia company that arranges passage for wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station, plans to buy a Soyuz flight all […] In an announcement whose timing was a bit surprising but also not entirely unexpected, Scaled Composites revealed that Burt Rutan would be stepping down as president and would be replaced by Doug Shane, who had been vice president of Scaled and also served as a test pilot for the company. Rutan will remain with the […] Space Adventures sent out a media advisory yesterday announcing a press conference planned for Wednesday, June 11, in New York. The press conference will reveal the identity of a “notable future orbital client” as well as “significant announcements regarding new orbital spaceflight planning”, including a “vision for the next decade”. Richard Garriott, currently in training […] During the Q&A session of his ISDC speech Thursday, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn was asked about thoughts about XCOR Aerospace, who announced plans for its own suborbital vehicle, Lynx, in March: XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they’re not building a spaceship. They’re building basically a high-altitude MiG […] The Personal Spaceflight Federation issued a press release yesterday about a new study with some financial metrics about the personal spaceflight industry. The numbers are surprisingly large: the study found that the industry generated $268 million in revenue in 2007, up from $165 million in 2006, with $1.2 billion in total investment to date as […] White Knight 2 (WK2), the carrier aircraft under development by Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic, will be rolled out on July 28, Virgin’s Will Whitehorn announced Thursday morning at the International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. He didn’t announced the location of the rollout, but presumably it will be in Mojave, as he said […] Speaking of Armadillo’s John Carmack, in his team’s latest update, he provides his own unvarnished assessment of the various companies in the suborbital spaceflight sector. The Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic partnership “is the safest bet for success”, but cautions that Virgin may need the field to itself in order to make a profit on SpaceShipTwo: “If […] I was contacted by a reporter earlier this week looking for information about Sprague Astronautics, a company that made a splash a few years ago (under the name AeraSpaceTours) but has been quiet since. (Its last press release is dated June 28, 2005.) I haven’t heard anything about them for some time, and assume the […] A session of the Space Access ’08 conference last night dealt with “paths to rocket piloting”: how can people who are interested in piloting a number of the new suborbital vehicles under development prepare for getting those jobs. Some companies have turned to test pilots and/or former astronauts, but if this industry does grow, the […] Here are a few items of interest I picked up from listening to the webcase of the XCOR press conference yesterday in LA: Lynx is designed to fly up to four times a day, which allows a single vehicle to carry as many passengers in a day as a larger vehicle (like a Rocketplane XP, […] |
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