I’m in Dallas right now for this year’s International Space Development Conference, which gets underway today with the Space Venture Finance Symposium, featuring a number of companies in the personal spaceflight or related fields. Some highlights from the rest of the conference, which runs through Monday morning:

• Alex Tai of Virgin Galactic will speak during a plenary session on Friday morning;
• Eric Anderson of Space Adventures will be the luncheon speaker on Friday, talking about his company’s proposal for circumlunar spaceflights for tourists;
• A “Space Business” track Friday afternoon features, among others, John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jim Benson of Benson Space Company, Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane, David Gump of t/Space, and Rick Tumlinson of Orbital Outfitters;
• A “Frontier Transport” track, also Friday afternoon, includes talks about space tourism and spaceports;
• Another Friday afternoon track on “Spaceflight Law and Insurance” covers some related issues, including “Insuring Space Tourism: It Isn’t Rocket Science - Is It?”;
• There will be a session on NASA’s COTS effort Saturday afternoon, with speakers from NASA, Rocketplane Kistler, and SpaceX;
• The COTS session will be followed by talks by Brett Alexander of the Personal Spaceflight Federation and Rick Homans of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority;
• A session Sunday afternoon will be devoted to NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and the X Prize Foundation;
• There will be two space medicine tracks, on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, with a particular focus on space tourism medical issues.

There’s actually a lot more, but those are (some of) the highlights. I’ll post updates from these sessions as time permits. There will be plenty of other reports from other outlets, as well: Alan Boyle of MSNBC has already posted a preview article about the conference with a nice overview of the status of a number of companies in the field.

An effort to establish a commercial spaceport at Cecil Field, a former Navy air base near Jacksonville, Florida, has taken a step forward with an FAA review of an environmental assessment. According to the Florida Times-Union article, “no major issues” came up during the review, although there were a number of unspecified issues that the local aviation authority, which operates Cecil Field, has to address, and doesn’t anticipate completing the spaceport licensing process until some time next year.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, they’re thinking big about the future role Spaceport Okahoma might play. Noting that there is a statue of an Irish immigrant to America in both an Irish seaport and Ellis Island, an op-ed in the Edmond (Okla.) Sun suggests:

Within the next several centuries, when colonization of other planets begins, there may be a similar monument situated at the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority’s facility in Burns Flat in Washita County to commemorate those who left earth to begin new lives on other planets.

Odds are that, when you travel, especially to exotic, out-of-the-way locations, you’ll be charged with bringing back souvenirs for friends and family who didn’t get to go. That’s true even for space tourists. Only problem: there’s no gift shop on the ISS. So Charles Simonyi had to improvise when he brought “a plastic shopping bag bearing artifacts” to Seattle’s Museum of Flight on Wednesday. Inside the bag was a glove from the spacesuit he wore on his flight and the drogue parachute from the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft, in which Simonyi returned to Earth last month after his stay. Sure beats something like “Charles Simonyi went to the ISS and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”…