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The uncertainty about the future of Rick Homans as executive director of Spaceport America, as discussed here earlier this week, appears to be over. The Las Cruces Sun-News reports Wednesday that Homans has tendered his resignation, effective Friday. Homans, speaking at an emergency meeting of the spaceport’s board, said that he had been informed last [...]
Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn speaks at the Spaceport America runway dedication in October 2010, with Sir Richard Branson looking on. (credit: J. Foust)
Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn will retire from the company next month and be replaced by current CEO George Whitesides, the company announced Thursday. Whitehorn, who has been working for [...]
Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an extended account of George French and his involvement with Rocketplane, the company that, for a time, was developing both suborbital and orbital vehicles (the latter under a NASA COTS agreement) before running into financial problems and eventually going bankrupt. French had long been interested in space, but it was [...]
The web site Big Think has posted an extended interview with Burt Rutan, who talks about space tourism, innovation in NASA and the private sector, and other topics. I haven’t watched the full one-hour interview in its entirety yet, but in the portions I’ve watched he covers some familiar ground about the utility of space [...]
In this week’s issue of The Space Review I reviewed By Any Means Necessary!, a book by Greg Olsen in large part about his trip to the ISS as a private citizen in 2005. The book is broadly an autobiography, from his childhood to his post-flight activities, but it is largely centered around his efforts [...]
Tomorrow morning a Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch to the ISS a NASA astronaut, Roskosmos cosmonaut, and a space tourist, Guy Laliberté. Or rather, a clown, Guy Laliberté. That’s based on some of the recent media coverage, where Laliberté is almost exclusively referred to, in the headline or early in the story, as a [...]
This week the Personal Spaceflight Federation announced it was changing its name to the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and unveiled a new web site at the commercialspaceflight.org domain name. Why the change from the PSF to the CSF? According to the industry association, it’s a recognition that the companies who are members do more than personal [...]
One issue not raised with last week’s announcement of Guy Laliberté as the next commercial ISS visitor is who his backup would be should he be unable to fly. Yesterday Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson hinted that an announcement was forthcoming, saying only that the person was “a very talented and special lady”. However, the [...]
As expected yesterday, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté announced his plans to fly to the ISS at the end of September on the next Soyuz flight to the station. Laliberté is calling his flight the “Poetic Social Mission” in space “to raise humanity’s awareness of water-related issues” for his One Drop Foundation. “Information about [...]
While there’s been talk for years about the first wedding or honeymoon in space using suborbital vehicles from Virgin Galactic or Rocketplane Global, one couple is going for a related first: the first wedding in zero-g. Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan are planning to hold a press conference this evening in New York to discuss [...]
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