I’ll be travelling to Las Vegas later today to attend the NewSpace 2006 conference run by the Space Frontier Foundation, as well as some other activities. Some space tourism-related highlights of the upcoming conference:

• Thursday: Constellation Services International and Space Adventures will be providing updates about their lunar mission plans.
• Friday: Robert Bigelow will deliver the keynote, several vehicle companies will provide updates on their developments, and there will be a business plan competition.
• Saturday: A session on spaceports and another on the mass media.
• Sunday: A session on spaceflight and personal risk and a concluding issue on everyone’s favorite topic, sex in space.

If you’re at the conference, be sure to say hi.

Many readers are already familiar with the “first honeymooners in space”, George Whitesides and Loretta Hidalgo, who are among Virgin Galactic’s founders. However, a couple plans to one-up them by getting married in space, The Times of Northwest Indiana reports. Cindy Cashman and Mitch Walling are planning to tie the knot on a Rocketplane XP suborbital flight in 2008. The couple even has a web site titled “First Space Wedding”. (Some might quibble with the “first” part, since A Russian cosmonaut on the ISS got married to his Earthbound bride three years ago; Rocketplane appears to have covered that by “guaranteeing her the option to be the first bride to be married in space.”) Why she came up with the idea wasn’t mentioned in the article. However, at least we know what she can wear for the ceremony.

When the news about the renaming of the Southwest Regional Spaceport as Spaceport America was first reported by the AP, a logo that featured the spaceport name superimposed on the classic Apollo 17 image of the Earth. However, the Spaceport America web site shows a slightly different logo: in this case, replacing the Apollo 17 Earth image with what appears to be a computer-generated view of the Western Hemisphere. The latter is arguably a more appropriate choice for Spaceport America, although the mixed messages are a little confusing.

Speaking of the spaceport, Albuquerque Tribune columnist Gene Grant says he’s “getting warm on this spaceport idea”, and even likes the new name. “Calling itself the nation’s spaceport from the go is cheeky by half, and I love it. That’s the attitude I’m looking for.”