In his presentation about Rocketplane Kistler at the ISDC on Friday, company CEO George French suggested that the Oklahoma Spaceport would soon get its launch license. “Oklahoma is going to be getting their spaceport license very shortly, and it’s already been published in the federal record.” He said the license would be official in the next two weeks. “There’s going to be a big party in Oklahoma” when the license is announced, he said, “and I’m told you’re all invited.” A check of the Federal Register didn’t turn up any announcement of a spaceport license, although the May 5th edition did contain a “Finding of No Significant Impact” declaration regarding the environmental assessment of the proposed spaceport, a key milestone towards getting the spaceport license. An announcement in the next couple of weeks suggests that it may come at the next meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), which will take place at FAA Headquarters on May 24. [Disclosure: my employer performs work for FAA/AST, but is not involved in the spaceport licensing process.]

Although Richard Branson wasn’t present at the ORBIT Awards dinner Thursday night, he did give an acceptance speech by video at the event. He revealed the early origins of the name “Virgin Galactic”: “Back in 1992, I registered the name “Virgin Galactic Airways”. I registered it because I loved the sound of the name, but also I thought it would be a way of spurring everybody at Virgin to go out and try and find a reusable space vehicle that would be possible for tourists to use one day.”

Will Whitehorn of Virgin Galactic, who picked up the award for Branson, offered a slightly different recollection of the name. Whitehorn said his boss is “slightly dyslexic” and sometimes gets dates mixed up; Virgin Galactic was actually founded in 1999, not 1992. The inspiration, he said, came while Branson, Steve Fossett, and Per Lindstrand were in Morocco in late 1998 for their launch a balloon on a round-the-world flight. Buzz Aldrin was there to see the balloon launch, and they ended up in a bar talking while waiting for weather conditions to improve. The conversation, Whitehorn recounted, came around to a discussion about why NASA always launched rockets from the ground, at which time Aldrin talked about early air-launch concepts. “You know, there’s got to be a better way to do this, and we better find it,” Whitehorn recalled Branson as saying to him at the time. “We better register the company name now, in case someone else tries to use the Virgin name for space tourists.”

That timing makes some sense, since Virgin Galactic first popped up on people’s radars in the industry in the spring of 1999, when there were reports that this new Virgin Galactic venture was in negotiations with Rotary Rocket Company, something that Whitehorn confirmed in a speech at last year’s ISDC.

On Friday the Russian news service RIA Novosti reported that Anousheh Ansari had officially been signed up as the backup to Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto for this fall’s Soyuz ISS flight. The news wasn’t that surprising, since she had previously been reported to be in training in Russia to serve that role, possibly as a prelude to flying herself.

So could she account for that “extra” $20 million not otherwise accounted for in the company’s press release last week marking the fifth anniversary of Dennis Tito’s flight to the ISS? It turns out that, by coincidence, there was a plenary session about Space Adventures Friday morning at the ISDC, with company president Eric Anderson and recent ISS tourist Greg Olsen among those speaking. Before the session I talked with another company official, who declined to offer any confirmation about Ansari’s status and whether she represented that extra $20 million. In a brief conversation after his speech, Anderson didn’t offer any confirmations, either, although he did note that, hypothetically, “I wouldn’t go through that training if I wasn’t going to fly myself.” When asked about the extra $20 million, he first seemed to indicate that it was actually deposits for suborbital flights, but then later said, “so that makes it $140 million.” The press release itself states that the $120 million the company has received in revenues has been for orbital spaceflights. (See Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log entry on the same and related subjects.)

During his speech, Anderson didn’t mention Ansari by name as a potential or future customer, but did say that besides Enomoto and Charles Simonyi, there are “a few others that we haven’t announced yet. There are a lot of people who are in the queue and who will be experiencing the space experience of a lifetime in the next few years.”