During her presentation at the Space Access ‘07 conference this afternoon, Michelle Murray of FAA/AST mentioned that Blue Origin had a successful* test flight yesterday (March 22), their second under their experimental permit and the first since their initial flight in November. No other information about the flight is available, but I’ll update this as information comes out.

* “successful” here means successful in protecting public safety, the FAA’s primary concern for these tests. There has been no information released about the success of the flight itself.

Update: I fired off a quick query to Blue Origin’s media contact and got the following boilerplate reply: “Blue Origin’s policy is not to comment on or confirm whether any test flights are scheduled or conducted.”

At the Space Access ‘07 conference this morning, George French III of Rocketplane Inc. announced that the company has signed a letter of intent with Bigelow Aerospace regarding transportation to Bigelow’s orbital habitats. French provided only a few details about the agreement, which basically states that once Rocketplane’s K-1 is ready to carry passengers, and once Bigelow’s modules are in orbit, they’ll do business to ferry passengers to and from the facilities. Rocketplane officials didn’t want to disclose too many additional details since this announcement since this announcement is really a prelude to Robert Bigelow’s planned big announcement next month at the National Space Symposium about his overall business plan, but Rocketplane wanted to get a bit of the news out for the Space Access audience.

There was not much else new about the company in its conference presentation. One minor change is that they now refer to the former Rocketplane Ltd. part of the company, the one developing the XP spaceplane, as “Rocketplane Global”, while the K-1 development is the responsibility of Rocketplane Kistler (the former Kistler Aerospace); the overall company is simply Rocketplane Inc. The “Global” part in the name is designed to reflect the company’s long-term plans to set up XP operations outside the US, such as Japan, and eventually move into the point-to-point transportation market.

The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the state is close to a final lease agreement with Virgin Galactic for the spaceport, although state officials wouldn’t set a timetable for the completion of the agreement. That agreement was one of three conditions that officials in Doña Ana County set on the upcoming local tax referendum. Earlier this week state officials sought to reassure votes that the spaceport cost would not exceed $225 million, another condition on the deal. (The third is obtaining an FAA spaceport license, which is in progress.) The article also notes that the next launch from the spaceport by UP Aerospace, whose inaugural launch in September ended in failure, will now take place no earlier than April.

In the state capital, Santa Fe, legislators in the state House approved a number of bills, including one that that provides $25 million for spaceport roads. The Senate, which was temporarily boycotting the special session of the legislature in a tiff with the governor, is expected to reconvene by Saturday and take up the bills.

As Charles Simonyi prepares for his launch to the ISS early next month, SPACE.com reports that he will get a bit of a bonus: He will spend 13 days in space instead of the previously-planned 11, in order to ensure that the the landing of the Soyuz flight at the end of the taxi mission takes place in daylight in Kazakhstan. In case you were wondering, no, Simonyi won’t be charged extra for spending two additional days at ISS, according to a Space Adventures spokesperson.