According to MSNBC and the AP, Blue Origin performed its first low-level flight test on Monday morning at about 7:30 am EST from its test site in West Texas. The company, not surprisingly, has released few details about the flight. FAA officials said that the flight lasted “one or two minutes”, but we don’t know how high (prior to the flight it appeared that it would not go much past 600 meters, with airspace reserved to 3,000 meters) nor how successful the test was. Standard operating procedure, really, for Blue Origin.

A front-page article in today’s Washington Post discusses the impending launch of a Minotaur rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. That launch will carry an experimental military satellite, TacSat 2, but spaceport officials would like to expand their operations to include suborbital or even orbital space tourism:

[Spaceport director Billie Reed] said MARS would love to host a tourist mission.

“Absolutely!” he said. “If you print anything, I would really like you to print that: Hey, guys, we can do it!”

MARS, while located in Virginia, is a cooperative venture between Maryland and Virginia (the facility is located just south of the Maryland border on the Delmarva Peninsula.) A Maryland official quoted in the article, though, was more skeptical about the whole idea of space tourism:

But there are concerns about the future of space tourism. “How large is that market?” asked Aris Melissaratos, Maryland’s Secretary of Business and Economic Development and the state’s point person on the spaceport. “I really don’t want to put too many economic eggs in that basket.”

That statement is ironic since one of the leading forecasts of the size of the space tourism market was developed by a Maryland company, Futron. (My employer; standard disclaimers apply)