Virgin Galactic making a profit

Flightglobal.com, in a feature article about Virgin Galactic turns up one mildly surprising point: the company, while still in the development stage, is profitable, if only by a modest amount. The article notes that in the company’s first publicly available financial reports since it was formally incorporated in the UK in mid-2006, the company had […]

Branson, in India, on space tourism

Indian television network NDTV posted a transcript of a recent interview with Richard Branson. (The transcript is very rough; perhaps it has gone through multiple translations, such as from English to Hindi back to English, given the odd language found in it.) In the interview, Branson appears to indicate that SpaceShipTwo will be rolled out […]

Reviving Spaceport Singapore

A Reuters article last week led with the news that Virgin Galactic planned to order additional SpaceShipTwo vehicles, with an initial order of five. That, though, has been what the company has been saying for some time (although the option for seven more, also mentioned in the article, isn’t as widely known). Virgin’s Alex Tai […]

Screening and training space tourists

Also in Monday’s issue of The Space Review I discuss some of the issues that are emerging with the screening and training of space tourists, as well as their crew members, based on a panel during the FAA’s annual commercial space transportation conference earlier this month. The highlight of the panel upon which most of […]

When royalty and space tourism promotion mix…

…hijinks ensue, the Daily Mail claims:

The gents toilets are the last place you’d expect to find a princess who’s fifth in line to the throne.

But that’s exactly what happened when feisty Princess Beatrice was caught following her beleaguered boyfriend into the toilet to give him a right royal tongue-lashing.

The 19-year-old lambasted her […]

SS2: more interesting items

Many of the news reports about the SS2/WK2 design unveiling cover just the basics, repeating a lot of information that was already known about the effort. There are a few nuggets tucked away in the articles, though:

Perhaps the biggest questions are when SS2 will fly, and what the status of investigation into the July […]

SS2/WK2 new design: first look

Here’s an artist’s impression of the new design of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two:

Perhaps the biggest change not previously hinted at is the dual cabin design of WK2; the number of engines on the aircraft as well as the changed wing location had been previously reported. Skimming through the press release (available, along with […]

SpaceShipTwo design to be released today

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites will be formally unveiling the design of SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, at an event in New York today. Interesting, there hasn’t been much buzz leading up to this event: a preview in the UK newspaper The Telegraph yesterday is one of the few advance stories about […]

Scaled fined for July accident

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (aka Cal/OSHA) has fined Scaled Composites for safety violations identified in the aftermath of the July accident that killed three employees at Mojave Airport. Cal/OSHA fined Scaled $25,780 for failing to properly train its employees about the dangers of nitrous oxide, the chemical that is used as […]

Year-end space tourism wrapup

A few odds and ends from the last week of 2007:

The Washington Times reported on Richard Garriott’s planned flight to the ISS in 2008 in an article published on Christmas Day. In addition to Garriott’s plans to perform commercial experiments on his flight, the article notes that “companies are invited to develop advertising campaigns […]

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