Around this time tomorrow Anousheh Ansari will no longer be on the station, having joined Pavel Vinogradov and Jeffrey Williams on the Soyuz spacecraft that will take them back to Earth; landing is scheduled in Kazakhstan at approximately 9:10 pm EDT Thursday. In the meantime, Ansari speaks about the joys of weightlessness and the benefits of Velcro when those joys aren’t so apparent. Her official web site now has several videos she recorded on the ISS, including one thanking all the people who visited and left comments on her blog. (Note that in the videos she is wearing overalls whose design incorporates both the US and Iranian flags. Hopefully no one at the State Department is going apoplectic at the moment…)

That’s the suggestion of Jack Kennedy, a Virginia attorney, in an op-ed in the Roanoke Times this week. Looking at the boom in commercial spaceports in the US and elsewhere, he believes that the state is missing an opportunity to get involved by using an existing spaceport, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), co-located with the Wallops Flight Facility. “Unlike nearly all the commercial tourist spaceports being touted,” he notes, “it has the launch runways, tracking and telemetry facilities needed to be a part of the human suborbital space tourist business.” His recommendation: “Virginia government executives and legislators need to focus on incentives to attract Virginia’s own Space Adventures to base its East Coast human suborbital launches near Chincoteague… Double-time effort to correct the benign neglect of Virginia’s spaceport should be made.”

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend, or in easy traveling distance, you may want to check out the Wired NextFest at the Javits Center, which will feature, among others exhibitors, Virgin Galactic. While some reports indicate that Virgin Galactic will be displaying a full-scale mockup of SpaceShipTwo, the company itself indicated in a media announcement that it will be unveiling a “full-sized mock-up showing the conceptual interior of SpaceShipTwo within the concept of scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne.” Rather convoluted language, but suggesting that what’s really being unveiled is the current design of the cabin interior, not the full vehicle itself. (One imagines that the overall design of SS2 itself will be kept under tight wraps until Burt Rutan is good and ready to show it off.)

In addition to the cabin mockup (which will be unveiled at a Thursday morning press conference featuring Richard Branson, Will Whitehorn, and other Virgin Galactic officials), there are a couple of related panel sessions during NextFest itself. At noon on Friday Virgin officials (sans Branson), along with Brian Binnie, will speak on “Virgin Galactic, Cleared for Take-off”. Saturday at 10 am “The New Vacationauts” panel includes Eric Anderson, Peter Diamandis, Whitehorn, Granger Whitelaw of the Rocket Racing League, and Chris Shank of NASA.