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”…

The trade publication High-Performance Composites offers this news about the development of SpaceShipTwo:

Advanced Composites Group Ltd. (ACG, Heanor, Derbyshire, U.K.) will supply a new generation of out-of-autoclave prepregs for the project, featuring MTM45-1, a variable-cure temperature, high-performance, toughened epoxy matrix developed for resin film infusion and prepreg processing. It was designed for low-pressure vacuum bag processing and, in addition to resin film and prepreg formats, is available in partially or selectively impregnated formats to reduce layup time, surface defects and internal voids. After a freestanding postcure, the system is capable of 150°C (302°F) wet Tg and reportedly exhibits good damage tolerance. Initial cure can be as low as 80°C/176°F, which ACG says allows for the use of lower cost tooling materials.

But you all knew that already.

While Virgin Galactic got a lot of publicity in the Middle East last week when it announced its first customer from the UAE, not everyone is impressed. In an article in ArabianBusiness.com, Anil Bhoyrul sees the announcement, and Virgin Galactic itself, as little more than a publicity stunt designed to further the overall Virgin brand. Bhoyrul acknowledges that Virgin Galactic has attracted a lot of attention and customers to date (although it’s not clear they have really signed up 400 fully-paid customers yet, and even if they did, the $80 million in revenue would not be nearly enough to break even). However, “the real point here is that, whether it made a dollar or not, this is going to be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, and executed by one of the world’s greatest marketing men.”

Almost exactly a year after examining what the well-dressed space tourist will wear, the New York Times reexamines the subject, this time looking at what designer Philippe Starck is proposing for Virgin Galactic. His current design is pretty basic: a “plastic-looking bodysuit with attenuated gloves and a dome helmet”, according to the Times. But that’s not his first design: he originally suggested that SpaceShipTwo passengers fly in the buff. Fortunately, “the prospect of what denuded passengers would look like in zero gravity made him reconsider.”

USA Today takes a look today at the various people who have signed up to fly on Virgin Galactic, the usual mix of stars and starry-eyed folks, many of whom (like Victoria Principal) have gotten significant publicity already for signing up to fly on SpaceShipTwo. Virgin does reveal that they will be giving away two tickets: one to Stephen Hawking and the other to James Lovelock, who proposed the “Gaia” model of earth as a living organism. (Lovelock is profiled in the USA Today article.) A New York travel agent who is among those accredited by Virgin Galactic who has sold two tickets so far (to a hedge fund manager and a financial company CEO) said he’s found success marketing it as a “thrill sell”: “They’re going for the Wow!”

Reuters has an article today on the struggles Russian cosmonauts encounter once they return to Earth after long-duration missions to the ISS. The article includes the opinions of one cosmonaut, Gennady Padalka, has about flying tourists on missions to the ISS: “On the one hand, when a guy comes along with a big sack of money and flies into space while other Earth dwellers can’t do that… of course, it isn’t good. But it’s good financial support.”

I ran across this week this article about space tourism from a publication called The Student Operated Press. Pretty harmless stuff, until you read the roster of space tourists who have flown to the ISS: Denis Titio, Mark Shattlvort, George Olsen, Anyshe Ansary, and, most recently, Charles Simony. Yeah, that’s right. One possible reason for this, ah, non-standard spelling might be that the author is Ukrainian, posing thus some translation/transliteration problems, but that’s why there are editors, right?

Zogby International has released a new survey that offers conflicting news for space tourism companies and proponents. The survey, conducted online in mid-March and released late last week, indicates that about 30 percent of Americans “are interested” in space tourism, although what “interested” means isn’t defined (interested in general? interested enough to participate if the price is right?) in the Zogby press release. However, the press release goes on to add that 41 percent said that “if money weren’t an issue, they would personally travel to the moon”, while 32 percent said the same about a trip to Mars.

Does that make any sense? If 30 percent of the public are “interested” in space tourism, why would a larger number be interested in going to the Moon or Mars “if money were no object”? Unfortunately, the press release doesn’t offer any further details, not a look at the survey instrument used for this poll, so it’s hard to gauge the intent of the respondents. (Other parts of this survey, which touched on a wide range of space issues, also suffer from a similar degree of vagueness.) While proponents of space tourism may be heartened to see nearly a third of the American public “interested” in space tourism, without knowing more about the poll, it’s difficult to say whether that figure means much of anything.

Virgin Galactic announced this week that it has signed up its first customer from the United Arab Emirates, Ibrahim Sharaf. He will apparently be one of the Founders, the first 100 to fly on Virgin’s suborbital flights. Not only will Sharaf get to fly to space, his company, Sharaf Travel, will be the accredited travel agents for Virgin Galactic in the UAE. The reports don’t mention whether Sharaf will be paying full fare—about $200,000—for the trip, or if he’ll be getting a discount as part of the sales deal.