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 […]

Private human lunar missions in 20 years?

An article in Tuesday’s issue of the London (Ontario) Free Press reports that NASA Ames director Pete Worden believes that “Private flights to the moon may be available to non-scientists ‘by the end of the 2020s.’” Worden, speaking at the University of Western Ontario, played up the potential for private activity on the Moon, and […]

A setback for circumlunar tourism?

On Tuesday shareholders in Russian aerospace company RSC Energia, which includes the Russian government, officially named Vitaly Lopota as the company’s new president. Lopota replaces Nikolai Sevastianov, who was effectively ousted last month. Sevastianov got into trouble in part by making bold pronouncements about plans to return to the moon, ranging from far-fetched proposals to […]

Canadian optimism about space tourism

A large fraction of Canadians think that space tourism flights to other planets would be possible within the next 100 years, according to the results of a poll reported by the Canadian Press. A whopping 85 percent thought that such vacations would be possible in the next century “or more”, including 13 percent who believed […]

Space Adventures: first circumlunar tourists signed by end of year

Space Adventures’ CEO Eric Anderson believes that his company will have signed up the first tourists for their proposed circumlunar mission by the end of this year. Anderson made the comments last week at the Flight School conference in Colorado, according to SPACE.com. That’s a bit later than what Anderson said a month ago at […]

The next orbital space tourist…

…has been selected, but hasn’t been announced yet, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said during a luncheon speech at the ISDC Friday. “The next [tourist] flight is next year,” he said. “We have the person who is going to go but we haven’t yet disclosed their name. But it will be another exciting one, […]

Mars on the cheap?

PC Magazine, of all publications, has a summary article of the appearance by Space Adventures’ Chris Faranetta and SpaceX’s Elon Musk at the Future in Review (or FiRE) conference in San Diego. (See earlier post.) There’s not too much new here: both go over their plans, and discuss some far-future propulsion breakthroughs (Faranetta is fond […]

Space Adventures and SpaceX review the future

SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Space Adventures vice president Chris Faranetta discussed space tourism and the future of commercial space ventures during talks Tuesday at the “Future in Review” conference in San Diego, CNET News.com reports. There’s not much news in this report, other than a comment by Faranetta that Space Adventures hopes to sign […]

Orbital space tourism survey

SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. (SEI) has posted an online survey regarding demand for orbital space tourism. Normally I am skeptical of any such online surveys, because the audience is self-selected: rather than a random sampling that takes into account various demographic factors of the audience (as is the case with traditional polling) online surveys can be […]