An article in the Singapore newspaper Today makes an interesting claim: that the spaceport planned for the island city-state will be “the world’s first commercial tourist spaceport.” The source of that claim is unclear, although the article sites the February announcement by Space Adventures about the spaceport project as “plans to develop the world’s first civilian spaceport in Singapore.” The actual Space Adventures press release makes no such claim, other than a statement by Eric Anderson that with the Explorer suborbital vehicle under development “we will enable operations of the world’s first commercial suborbital flights.”

There are several obstacles that make it unlikely that Singapore’s spaceport will be first. For starters, spaceport project backers in Singapore say the facility is scheduled to open by 2009; by that time commercial suborbital flights may well be available in Oklahoma, Mojave, and perhaps New Mexico. (No date was announced for another Space Adventures spaceport project in the UAE.) Second, the group backing the spaceport is still trying to line up financing, even while a study by KPMG has raised the cost of the effort from $115 to $130 million. Of that, the article revealed, Space Adventures is providing $10 million; no other investment was revealed in the article, although the spaceport group said it still plans to have all the necessary financing lined up by the end of the year.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Eric Michaels recounts a trip on Zero-G’s aircraft he took earlier this year. It’s clear from his column that he enjoyed the trip; his stomach, not so much: “Trust me, I’ve never had so much fun making myself sick.” In his case, the queasiness didn’t come until after he completed all his parabolas. “I was lacing up my sneakers when the Action Stomach started sending hints up the pipe that it wasn’t happy. Seconds later, I watched a backward replay of breakfast. Thankfully, I had eaten lightly.” He notes that Zero-G claims that only one in 100 fliers will experience motion sickness, but “of the eight rookie fliers on my trip, six had to use air-sickness bags.”

Of course, Michaels could have avoided that unpleasantness by taking the motion sickness drugs Zero-G provides. However, “I’m not prone to motion sickness, and Nancy Reagan once told me to ‘Just Say No.’ So I stuck to her sage advice and passed.” In the end, though, “I wish I’d said ‘Yes’ to the drugs.”