The next time you’re in the airport in Bakersfield, California (which may well be the first time), you’ll be greeted by a full-scale replica of SpaceShipOne. The SS1 model is hanging from the ceiling of the Bill Thomas Terminal of Meadows Field, the city’s commercial airport. Burt Rutan and Mike Melvill attended the unveiling Thursday, which was attended by “scores” of people, according to the Bakerafield Californian and two local TV stations, KGET and KERO. “About 10 years ago … I decided we were going to try to build a spaceship,” Rutan said at the event, according to the Californian. “I didn’t know at the time that the success of doing that might actually spawn a whole new industry.”
|
||||||
|
Yesterday SPACE.com ran an article on the revelations regarding Blue Origin’s suborbital vehicle development program that came from its draft environmental assessment. There’s not much here that hasn’t been reported earlier, although Leonard David does get some interesting perspectives from John Garvey, who worked on the DC-X (upon which the New Shepard vehicle appears to be patterned). Apparently that latest article was enough to convince the New York Post to run an article of its own on Blue Origin. As you might expect, there’s definitely nothing new here that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, but at least the Post thought it worthy of attention—or maybe it was just a slow news week. British media, such as The Scotsman newspaper, reported that Scotland is being considered for a Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceport, in particular an existing air base, RAF Lossiemouth. Other than specifically identifying a proposed site, though, there’s not much new here, since Virgin Galactic officials have previously indicated they are considering Scotland for a European location, but are also considering Kiruna in Sweden. Also, SPACE.com’s Leonard David reports that ESA plans to kick off a study soon “aimed at European space tourism initiatives”. the study would examine particular technologies for manned vehicles, specifically suborbital vehicles, and their economic feasibility. SpaceShipOne pilot Brian Binnie has another honor to add to his collection: he received an honorary doctorate from Aberdeen University Monday. Binnie is the first Scotsman in space; his father is a former physicist at the university. Binnie said it was great honor to return to Scotland and receive the degree, certainly nearly as big an honor as being a Man of the Square Table. The Register, a British publication that normally specializes in IT news, offers an interesting account of a talk at NASA Ames this week by SpaceDev founder Jim Benson:
Reporter Ashlee Vance sees this as a good sign for SpaceDev and suborbital space tourism in general: “We hope that companies such as SpaceDev can deliver on what they promise because they’re getting little old ladies awfully excited about the prospect of zooming off to the Moon in the near future.” Vance notes that Benson believes that the cost of a suborbital ticket will go down to $15,000 to $50,000 in the next seven to 10 years. Bryan Singer is best known these days as the director of the newly-released blockbuster Superman Returns. But he also has a secret identity that he revealed to a Malaysian newspaper: he is a Founder:
One wonders if he got any discount by giving Branson a cameo in the movie (although I have yet to see the film to see exactly how that turned out). Eileen Borgeson, the artist who designed the giant trophy given to the Dennis Tito Award winners at the ORBIT Awards ceremony last month, announced this week that she has created an ORBIT Awards poster that is “Free to all Earth Citizens”. (Aliens, presumably, will have to pay some pricey interstellar shipping-and-handling charges.) We terrestrials can view the poster online. It lists the award winners as well as the major speakers at the International Space Development Conference: “Burt Rutan, Elon Musk, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Peter Diamandis, Dr. Gregory Olsen, Rusty Schweickart, Rick Searfoss, Shana Dale, Charles Elachi, Bill Nye, Gen. Pete Worden and Rep. Diane Rohrabacher.” Wait: Rep. Diane Rohrabacher? To the best of our knowledge, Dana Rohrabacher has not changed his name—or sex. A Flight International article reports that the Explorer suborbital vehicle being developed by Russia’s Myasishchev Design Bureau for Space Adventures will undergo a test regime of at least 100 flights, to be carried out from the Zhukovsky air base near Moscow. The exact schedule of test flights wasn’t revealed by Space Adventures’ Chris Faranetta, but it’s not surprising: several other suborbital space tourism vehicles under development also have rigorous flight tests planned, including Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Rocketplane Kistler’s Rocketplane XP, and Blue Origin’s New Shepard. This makes perfect sense for a vehicle designed to carry paying passengers, and thus needs to be as rigorously tested as possible to provide customers with some degree of confidence about their safety. It is, though, a marked departure from conventional from conventional space vehicle development, where it’s rare to see 100 test flights—or even 100 flights, period—of a specific vehicle. This is actually an old article, but only discovered it recently. It appears that some architectural critics are less than enthused with the designs for spaceports in New Mexico and the UAE. Or, as the headline puts it, future space tourists “will be flying out of the most crap-ass ground-based aeronautical terminals ever conceived.” (One assumes that “crap-ass” is a term of art in architecture.) Read on for the unnamed author’s assessment of the Virgin logo that’s part of the New Mexico design ( “undergraduate-level Illustrator rendering”) or the overall appearance of the UAE spaceport ( “looks slightly less like a child’s rendering, and slightly more like a NASA space rendering from 1962.”) Conclusion: “The heavenly experience of kind-of-weightlessness is bracketed by completely pedestrian experiences on the ground.” A couple of articles in this week’s issue of The Space Review touch upon space tourism:
|
||||||
| Copyright © 2025 NewSpace Journal - All Rights Reserved | ||||||
Recent Comments