SpaceDev announced today that its founder, Jim Benson, passed away this morning. Benson had been in ill health since last year, having been diagnosed with a brain tumor that was the cause of his death. That illness led to the dissolution of Benson Space Company, a space tourism venture that Benson founded in 2006 to […]
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In a cabinet reshuffle last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown selected Paul Drayson as its new science minister. Drayson, as I noted over on Space Politics, is a strong supporter of human spaceflight, and is clearly in favor of overturning a long-running ban on funding human spaceflight programs in the UK. In an interview […] Space Adventures announced today that Esther Dyson will train as the backup to Charles Simonyi for his spring 2009 flighyt. Dyson will pay $3 million for the training, similar to the training that Nik Halik paid for as Richard Garriott’s backup. Dyson, who made her name in the computer industry as the longtime editor of […] Space Adventures will be holding a press conference today with Charles Simonyi, who, as announced last week, will be making a return flight to the ISS next year. If all goes well I will be liveblogging the press conference; check back here around 11:30 am EDT (1530 GMT). Click Here for liveblog […] Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who flew to the ISS in spring 2007, will return again next spring, Space Adventures announced this morning. (The news leaked out overnight in this AP article, although the formal press release wasn’t issued until this morning.) The text of the announcement follows: Space Adventures’ Orbital Spaceflight Candidate, Charles […] [Yes, I’m trying to get back into the blogging game here again. Thanks for your patience.] A report by the Arab news channel Al Arabiya notes that more Saudis have signed up for Virgin Galactic flights than from any other nation in the middle East. The article doesn’t provide any hard numbers, but states that […] Here are some of the key items from this morning’s press conference held by Space Adventures about their future plans (see their press release for some additional details): The first major announcement was that the company has reached an agreement with Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, for a dedicated Soyuz flight to the ISS in […] 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 […] 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 […] |
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