The US Weekly article includes the claim that Lady Gaga “has to do a month of vocal training because of the atmosphere,” an odd statement since the cabin of SpaceShipTwo will be pressurized, presumably at least to levels found in commercial jetliners. The overall article has been widely re-reported, with little additional information; one exception is E! Online, which reports that the Zero G Colony event will be a “high-concept ground event music festival” that includes “futuristic attractions.” (Nothing is said about the logistics of holding a music festival at the remote spaceport, particularly during the winter, when it can be quite chilly in the New Mexican desert; in addition, the acoustics inside the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space hangar are, based on personal experience, lousy.)

There’s been no official announcement from Virgin Galactic or other participants in the reported flight, beyond a cryptic tweet from Lady Gaga herself:

A follow-up tweet from the singer suggests more details will come out Sunday, tied to the release of her latest album, ARTPOP:

Much of the coverage that has been published about the report plays up claims that Lady Gaga would become the first recording artist to perform in space. In fact, though, she joins a number of other individuals and groups seeking to be the first to perform in space. In 2011, British group Muse said they were interested in performing on a Virgin Galactic flight. A year later, there were reports the musical power couple of Jay-Z and Beyoncé were considering filming a music video on a Virgin Galactic flight. And, just last month, pop star Rihanna reportedly purchased three Virgin Galactic tickets, although there was no talk of her performing on the flight (the extra tickets would go to her brother and a very lucky bodyguard.)

In any event, Lady Gaga (or Jay-Z and Beyoncé, or Muse, etc.) could become the first recording artist to perform in space, but certainly not the first musician. A number of astronauts have, over the years, demonstrated their musical talents while in space. In 2011 NASA astronaut Cady Coleman performed a flute duet with Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull fame) while she was on the ISS. (Anderson was earthbound.) Earlier this year, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield performed David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” near the end of this stint on the space station. Hadfield is not a professional musician, but his cover of “Space Oddity” might sound better to many ears than the collected works of Lady Gaga.

She’s particularly interested in going on Virgin Galactic, and claims she has an inside connection. “I’ve got a friend who invested in it, and he can kind of hook it up. I want to be one of the first ones,” she claims. It’s not clear who that friend is: Virgin has primarily been financed internally, with the exception of a stake in the company purchased by Aabar Investments of the UAE four years ago. At a current ticket price of $250,000 (not “like a billion dollars,” as she claims), she likely can afford to buy a ticket herself without the need for special connections.

In addition to her ability to afford a ticket, she also appears to have a healthy appetite for risk (both on and off the stage.) In the Rolling Stone cover story, Cyrus, among other things, goes skydiving.

This “news” apparently had its origins in a talk Sir Richard Branson gave last week, and picked up by the UK tabloid The Sun. However, since The Sun’s article is behind a paywall, most people saw references to it elsewhere, such as the Daily Mail and The Star. The gist of those reports: Shatner turned down an offer to be among the first Virgin Galactic passengers because he’s afraid of flying.

While those and other publications treated that as a new revelation, it’s something Shatner himself has been saying for years. “I don’t like to vomit,” Shatner said in 2007, referring to a zero-g airplane flight but also expressing his lack of interest in spaceflight. “I’m interested in man’s march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me,” he said back in 2006. His views clearly haven’t changed, but few, if any articles, reached any farther back than similar comments Shatner made in 2011.

Remember, just because it’s in the news doesn’t mean that it is news.

In the last decade, a number of billionaires have done just that, backing space startups: Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, and Elon Musk and SpaceX. While these ventures have enjoyed some success, don’t count on Gates to follow in their footsteps. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, journalist Brad Stone asks Gates if commercial spaceflight was “interesting” to him or worthwhile to humanity. Gates’s response:

Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into.

That sounds like a no. Not mentioned, though, is that Gates once did invest in the space business—and it didn’t turn out well for him. In the 1990s he was one of the early investors in Teledesic, a company planning to operate a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites providing broadband data services. In an era when companies like Iridium and Globalstar were planning (and eventually did deploy) fleets of dozens of satellites, Teledesic’s plan stood out: it originally planned to launch on the order of 900 satellites to provide global coverage. Over time the number of satellites fell, to 288 and then 120, but it still stood out as a venture more audacious than anything being seriously considered at the time. (See this presentation from (likely) the late 1990s for an overview of their plans at the time.)

Teledesic, though, was a victim of the telecom bust at the turn of the century that hit satellite ventures particularly hard, thanks in part to the rapid proliferation of terrestrial alternatives. The company scaled back its plans further, proposing a 30-satellite system, but even that was too much. In June 2003, Teledesic surrendered the FCC license for its satellite system, ending its bid to deploy a system without launching anything more than a single test satellite. Gates invested an unspecified amount—thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars—into the failed Teledesic.

Despite that experience, though, Gates is not totally divorced from the space industry. He is an investor in Kymeta, a company developing advanced satellite communications antenna technology. Gates was an initial investor in the company, which recently raised a $50-million Series C round. Kymeta, though, appears focused for now on the groundbased aspects of antenna technology and not space-based systems.

Musk said the problem with three of the thruster pods was initially puzzling because they didn’t expect three to fail. “These things are cross-strapped. You’d think that maybe one wouldn’t work or a cross-strapped pair wouldn’t work, but not three. It was really, really strange.” That left the spacecraft tumbling while SpaceX developed new code to send to the spacecraft to try and solve the problem, using US Air Force antennas with enough power to get that code uplinked to the spacecraft.

Musk said that the company now believes the problem was with check valves in pressurant lines leading to oxidizer tanks for the three affected thruster pods. “There was a slight change to a check valve that was in three of the tanks and not in the other. We were able to replicate that problem on the ground later,” he said. They solved the problem by building up pressure upstream and then releasing it to “slam the valve” and get it to open. “We’re trying to give it sort of the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver,” he said. That ultimately worked, getting all four thruster pods up and running.

Another topic discussed in the interview was the company’s interest in developing a new commercial spaceport on the Texas coast near Brownsville. On Friday, Musk was up the street from the Austin convention center at the State Capitol, testifying before a committee about his plans. “Right now, Texas is arguably the leading candidate,” he said at SXSW. “We need certain legislation passed supportive of space launch.” That legislation, which he said is “not particularly controversial,” includes the ability to close the beach during a launch (current state law requires beaches to be open to the public), as well as “protection for the 1-in-10,000-person case who complains about the thing.” He didn’t specify what that “protection” would be, although he cited a case where a person sued over SpaceX’s rocket testing facility near McGregor, Texas, even though that person didn’t even live in the same county as the test site.

“If thing go as expected, it’s likely that we’ll have a launch site in Texas,” Musk said. In the best-case scenario, the company would make a decision this year about the location of the launch site and start construction of it next year. The first launches from the spaceport would take place in two to three years.

Later in the interview, after discussing his other two ventures, electric car company Tesla and solar power company SolarCity, the interview turned back to Musk’s interest in going to Mars. “If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I’ll be really disappointed. That would probably be my biggest disappointment,” he said. “I do personally want to set foot on Mars, but honestly, I would be doing this even if I knew there was no chance of me to go to Mars, because I think it’s important that we’re on a path to getting there.”

Near the end, Musk was asked who influenced and inspired him. He went through a number of historical figures and then some current businesspeople, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who, of course, has his own space company, Blue Origin. “Every time I see Jeff Bezos,” Musk said, “I say, ‘Why aren’t you doing more in space?'”

The UK news agency Press Association reported that Rowling, speaking in London on Thursday, claimed she had been offered a flight into space, apparently on the Space Shuttle. “I was offered a seat. For a mere £2 million [US$3.2 million] I could have been on the shuttle, but I turned it down,” she said, according to the report. The article doesn’t state if Rowling mentioned when she was offered the seat, or why she turned it down.

There are problems with this report, though. First of all, seats on Space Shuttle flights were controlled by NASA, which did not offer them for sale at any price. (And, even if they did, Rowling would be an odd choice to be offered a seat.) Second, the price seems out line of what is being offered for commercial human spaceflights, assuming she confused another vehicle with the shuttle. Soyuz flights, for example, cost about an order of magnitude more than that: upwards of $40 million today, according to various reports. Suborbital flights, like that offered by Virgin Galactic, cost far less: $200,000 or less. Perhaps Hermione can conjure a spell to reveal the truth about this claim…

The announcement would seem to confirm some media reports last month that Brightman was interested in flying to the International Space Station as a space tourist, although we won’t know for certain until next month’s press conference. One issue will be the timing of the trip: for the time being there are no extra seats available on Soyuz spacecraft going to and from the ISS, as they are currently used exclusively for rotating ISS crewmembers. Space Adventures has talked in the past about a dedicated Soyuz flight, with one professional cosmonaut pilot and two commercial passengers. Another possibility is that one or more ISS crewmembers may stay on the station for up to a year to study the effects of an extended mission, like one to Mars; that would free up seats on the Soyuz vehicles (which have a six-month orbital lifetime) for commercial passengers like Brightman.