Virgin Galactic has responded to yesterday’s report that the company is only accepting US citizens for its flights by, in effect, saying the article is completely off base. The Irish Independent article claimed that an Irishman living in England, Cyril Bennis, had been told by the company that it was currently only accepting US citizens. A [...]
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Is Virgin Galactic only accepting US citizens now? That’s the claim of an article Sunday in the Irish Independent, which reports that an Irishman living in England “received a legal notice from Virgin Galactic stating that at present only US citizens can be considered for inclusion.” The company has signed up and accepted deposits [...] New Mexico and Virginia have been among the leading states in supporting entrepreneurial space efforts. New Mexico committed $200 million to develop Spaceport America and lure Virgin Galactic to their state; Virginia has supported the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), bringing Orbital Sciences’ Taurus 2 rocket there as well as passing laws to support space activities [...] Will Spaceport America get a second paved access road? Right now the primary access is from the north, via the town of Truth or Consequences, on a road paved earlier this year to permit spaceport construction to begin. That results in a fairly roundabout trip for visitors coming from Las Cruces and points south: [...] At last week’s unveiling of SpaceShipTwo in Mojave, Virgin Galactic commercial director Stephen Attenborough said that it was the company’s relative strong performance during the current recession—a “substantial net increase” in customers—that attracted the attention of Aabar Investments, the Abu Dhabi fund that purchased a 32-percent stake in the company for $280 million. But a [...] I was on vacation last week in London, but that did not stop me from making a visit to the Royal Aeronautical Society last Tuesday for their “Space Tourism: A New Industry in the Making” conference. I’ve written up some highlights of the conference in The Space Review this week. One of the bigger developments at [...] I posted on this yesterday at Space Politics, but if you missed it there a summary of this latest, positive development regarding ITAR (US export control regulations) as they apply to space tourism is below: The Economist reported Wednesday that regulators have agreed that prospective spaceflight participants will not need any export control agreements to fly on [...] This weekend was a milestone not just for Armadillo Aerospace and the Lunar Lander Challenge but for one of the people behind the scenes, Ken Davidian. The former manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program, Ken is leaving his position leading commercial policy development in NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate for a similar position within [...] The attorney general of New Mexico has concluded that a local tax increase passed this spring should not be collected starting January 1 as originally planned because of a lack of a mechanism to spend the revenues. Voters in Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces, passed the quarter-cent gross receipts tax [...] Earlier this week the Select Committee on Science and Technology of the British Parliament issued a report on UK space policy. What’s noteworthy about this report is that it includes a section about space tourism. This section outlines the recent developments in vehicles and companies to serve primarily the suborbital market, including Virgin [...] |
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