MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that the FAA has issued a temporary flight restriction for the airspace around Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas. The restriction, in effect from 7:30 am through 12:30 pm CST on Thursday through Saturday, is similar to one in effect earlier this month for Blue Origin’s first low-level flight test. Company officials told the local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, that the November 13 test was a success but offered no additional details.

J.D. Fortune, the relatively new lead singer of the band INXS, told the Canadian publication JAM! Showbiz that his band has been offered a most unusual gig, although his description of it makes you wonder just how real his claims are:

INXS has played some great gigs the past year, including to 70,000 people in India, according to Fortune, but there’s one gig that will top them all, if it goes through - in space.

Virgin Group entrepreneur Sir Richard has formed Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company, which aims to send civilian passengers into suborbital space by late 2007 (for $200,000 U.S. a seat), and Branson wants some live music onboard.

“He’s looking to put a band up in space to do a 45-minute set, going around the world doing six orbits around the planet and then coming back down, but, man, I’m afraid to fly,” says Fortune. “I’d be on so much Xanax, I don’t even think I’d be able to speak (laughs).”

That’s right, 6 orbits in 45 minutes, all in a suborbital vehicle. I don’t think Mr. Fortune will need to worry about the Xanax.

This week’s issue of Aviation Week features an article about White Knight, the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipOne. While SS1 is now hanging from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum, White Knight is still flying today, serving as “an ideal testbed for large, heavy payloads,” in the words of William B. Scott, the AvWeek writer who got to fly on White Knight recently. Much of the article discusses how White Knight served as a pathfinder for key SS1 systems, ranging from the environmental control system (ECS) to the landing gear actuators on White Knight (which are the same as the feathering system actuators on SS1). Flying White Knight is a little difficult because of the unique pattern of circular portholes: “It’s like flying inside a giant ‘whiffle ball’,” said Scaled Composites’ Doug Shane. Still, he notes, “The [SS1] feather was, relatively speaking, a genius idea, but the whole idea of using this airplane to solve the problems for SpaceShipOne was equally genius. It’s the best thing we did for the program.”

Brief notes about a few space tourism-related articles that appeared over the last few days:

• In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Alex Howerton offers an “appreciation” of last month’s X Prize Cup, emphasizing that despite the failure of any competitors to win prizes, the event is a big step forward for the NewSpace industry. “The sense of failure, if there is one, stems from the difference between our expectations and reality. We get impatient; we want to go to space now, and we can’t be bothered to wait until the system actually works.”
• Also in TSR, Sam Dinkin interviews Jessica French, who, besides being the daughter of Rocketplane Kistler president George French, worked for Virgin Galactic at its display at the EAA AirVenture show last year. Oh, and she also designed the logo for Dinkin’s skill game venture, SpaceShot.
• Shanghai Daily reports that an unnamed young Chinese businessman will be the country’s first space tourist, flying on Virgin Galactic in 2008.

CNN International is airing CNN Future Summit, a show that, in its words, “brings together some of the brightest minds of our time to see how science and technology are shaping our future.” One of the topics of the show will be space tourism; the “brightest minds” the show includes are Anousheh Ansari and Buzz Aldrin. The program is showing on CNN International several times a day from Thursday through Sunday. (Note that this is airing on CNN International, not the regular CNN network in the US. Therefore, it will be difficult for people in the US to see it unless and until CNN US reairs the show.)

In advance of the show the Malaysian newspaper The Star has been publishing articles about Aldrin, Ansari, and even the host of the CNN International program, Richard Quest.

A SPACE.com article today provides an update on plans to launch Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 2 spacecraft, a small-scale demonstrator of the company’s planned inflatable orbital habitats. The launch, which earlier had been pushed back to January 2007, is now planned for “the early end” of the first quarter (which sounds like sometime in late February or early March), still on a Dnepr. The reason for the slip isn’t discussed in the article, although the Dnepr has yet to return to service following a launch failure just two weeks after the successful Genesis 1 launch.

The article also recaps the agreement announced in September between Bigelow and Lockheed Martin to study human-rating the Atlas 5, a plan described by a Lockheed official as an effort “to evaluate the market of space tourism and research to determine if Atlas could be a part of this potential new market area.” While there were rumors earlier this month that another Bigelow-Lockheed announcement was imminent, there’s no indication in this article of anything like that in the works.

An article in the current issue of Travel Weekly (”The National Newspaper of the Travel Industry”) has a lengthy article about the emerging space tourism industry. (free registration may be required) Much of the article is a basic primer about some of the major companies in the industry, including Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic, and how travel agents are adapting to this new market.

So far, so good. The first warning sign about this article by David Cogswell comes early on, with this passage:

In the last year, entrepreneurial commercial enterprises have snatched a ball that since the days of Sputnik have been carried by a handful of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations. In a matter of a few months, they have begun generating crucial momentum for establishing a fledgling space-travel industry.

Of course, the real progress in this industry has taken years, not months: it’s hardly an overnight success. However, it’s a pretty harmless statement. It gets worse, though.

“Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) already lists 24 space tourism companies,” says Cogswell. Wikipedia-based research? Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! (A quick check of Wikipedia didn’t turn up such a list; the “Space tourism” entry lists far fewer than 24 companies.) Then, he adds, “But in reality, there are just four players with advanced business plans, and only two of those are already selling seats on spacecraft:”

So whose are those four leaders?

• Space Adventures (well, duh)
• Virgin Galactic (of course)
• Blue Origin (makes sense, once they become less secretive)
• AERA Corp. (WTF?)

So how did AERA Corp. (now Sprague Astronautics) make the cut? “This private space tourism firm, based in Temecula, N.M. [sic], plans to launch civilians on suborbital flights from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Base through an agreement with the Pentagon.” A check of the web site, though, shows that the California (not New Mexico) company hasn’t made any announcements in nearly a year and a half, a long silence for a company that once planned to begin flights from the Cape at the end of this year.

If you had to pick four companies, there seems to be any number of other companies that would make the cut in place of AERA/Sprague: Rocketplane Kistler, SpaceDev/Benson Space, Armadillo, XCOR, and others. It would seem that the overall tourism industry still has a lot to learn about this emerging market.

In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman addresses the potential threat to the emerging space tourism industry in the US posed by Rep. James Oberstar. The Minnesota Democrat is poised to become the chairman of the House Transportation Committee in January when the 110th Congress convenes. Oberstar led an effort two years ago to try and get more stringent passenger safety requirements included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, requirements many in the industry thought could kill the industry before it could get started. Oberstar submitted similar legislation early last year, but the legislation was referred to the House Science Committee, where it never saw the light of day. Some fear that with the power of a committee chairmanship, Oberstar would have the power to give his proposed legislation a better chance at passage.

The saving grace may be in Dinerman’s last sentence: “One hopes that the new Congress will have enough to do so that it just leaves space tourism alone, at least for the next five years or so.” Oberstar’s own committee has a broad purview, and commercial space transportation would presumably have a low priority compared to aviation, highways, and the like. We will find out soon enough just how important this issue is to both Rep. Oberstar and supporters of the existing regulatory system in Congress.

The Stanford Daily has an article about Anousheh Ansari’s speech in a “packed” auditorium last Friday night at Stanford University. There aren’t too many insights in the article about her speech, which appeared to be more inspirational than anything else. She does tell that paper that she believes that the price for space tourism flights “will come down” over time, although she doesn’t specifically discuss what her company, Prodea, is doing supporting the Russian Explorer suborbital vehicle.

You can say one thing about Virgin Galactic: they’re good about generating press (and good press, at that), even when they have little new to report. On Friday SPACE.com runs an article about the company’s business plans, based on an interview with company vice president Alex Tai. There are some interesting items in here, including Tai’s statement that he anticipates Virgin Galactic spending $225-250 million by the time the company begins commercial operations. And as for what they’ll be offering: “We’ll be giving them a really sexy training experience… I don’t think we’re in danger of under-delivery.”

The Guardian has an extended article on Virgin Galactic and its Founders, its elite initial group of customers. (The reporter has a rather extreme fascination with one of them, Victoria Principal. “Perhaps it’s my age. I can’t get the picture out of my mind of the former Dallas beauty, three decades on, a few husbands down the line, floating in space.” As you might guess, this will not end well.) The article is primarily a series of character portraits of a number of Founders.

While many of the Founders are wealthy enough to easily afford the $200,000 ticket price, others aren’t: the article profiles one, Lina Borozdina, who (with her husband) remortgaged her house to afford the price of the trip. “Virgin has always had an eye for a great story. Despite the fact that there were more than 13,000 applicants, they were determined that Lina would be a founder. Now she faces the next 30 years mortgaged to the hilt. Does she ever think she’s made the wrong decision? ‘Absolutely. I’m a worry bird 24/7.’”

And then there’s the case of Princess Beatrice, the 18-year-old daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, who has agreed to fly on a Virgin Galactic flight at some point. She was persuaded by her boyfriend, David Clark, who works in the sales and marketing department of Virgin Galactic. Whether she’ll pay for her own ticket wasn’t disclosed.