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Enrico Palermo of Virgin Galactic discusses the company’s development of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo at the NewSpace 2010 conference on Saturday. At the end of Saturday’s sessions at the NewSpace 2010 conference in Silicon Valley, Enrico Palermo, project engineering manager for Virgin Galactic, gave a brief update on the company’s activities. There weren’t any new announcements [...] Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures, updates NewSpace 2010 attendees on his company’s suborbital and orbital spaceflight plans. Two months ago, at the International Space Development Conference in Chicago, Space Adventures announced a partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to develop vehicles for suborbital space tourism. At the end Friday of the first day of the NewSpace [...] Eric Anderson (left) and John Carmack talk about their suborbital partnership at ISDC on Thursday. As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people to [...] Virgin Galactic has posted a video of yesterday’s first captive carry flight of SpaceShipTwo, including a brief interview at the end with test pilot Mark Stuckey, who says that “I don’t think we could have planned, realistically planned, for any better success” on [...] WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg) Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about 13,700 [...] The news media has something of a case of amnesia when it comes to space tourism in Russia: they regularly, breathlessly report comments that Russia will stop flying space tourists on Soyuz flights to the ISS. Every few months, it seems, a Russian official makes comments to that regard, dutifully reported by the wire services [...] Besides the developments by several vehicle operators, there have been a number of other announcements by various organizations at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference. The biggest, in the plenary speech by NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, is that NASA has requested $15 million for the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program in its FY11 budget. [...] Illustration of Blue Origin’s orbital crew vehicle, designed to be launched on an Atlas 5, as shown on a NASA slide at an FAA conference last week. One of the most intriguing NewSpace companies is Blue Origin, perhaps because they’re also one of the most secretive. Backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos—and thus without the [...] An initial group of a dozen prospective scientist-astronauts will begin a two-day training program today at the NASTAR Center just outside Philadelphia in preparation for future flights on commercial suborbital vehicles. The training will include both classroom instruction and “altitude chamber training, multi-axes centrifuge training for launch and reentry accelerations, and several distraction factor exercises”, [...] In The Space Review last month I noted an emerging market for commercial suborbital vehicles: research and education. There’s growing interest among scientists in a variety of disciplines to take advantage of vehicles under development to serve the space tourism market to fly experiments at a fraction of the cost of sounding rockets and other [...] |
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