An article in the Sunday Times of London reports that EADS Astrium will announce this week plans to provide suborbital space tourism services. The article is short on details, although EADS is apparently looking at a suborbital vehicle that would reach 100 kilometers altitude, with a per-ticket cost similar to Virgin Galactic’s going rate of $200,000. One possibility is that EADS will offer an air-launched solution using the freighter variant of the A380 super jumbo jet as the carrier aircraft, something reported back in April by Flightglobal.com and this month by Engineering News.

The Times article breathlessly claims that “Europe is to enter manned space travel for the first time” because of this project, but that’s a debatable claim. Even if EADS does go ahead with this venture, there are already ventures at least partially based in Europe that may get there first: besides Virgin Galactic (which eventually plans to operate out of Kiruna, Sweden), of course, there’s Starchaser, which is based in the UK although with growing operations in the US. There’s also ARCA, the Romanian effort that competed for the X Prize and continues work at some level; it even calls itself “The European Private Manned Space Program”. There have also been a number of other European proposals and studies in recent years. The advantage EADS has, though, is that it has financial resources that no one else save Virgin can bring to bear on this, if it chooses to do so.

Interest in the economic boom many feel the new commercial spaceport in New Mexico will create has real estate developers making plans to build office space on speculation in the region, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. The city of Las Cruces agreed to sell 45.4 acres of land at its West Mesa Industrial Park to developer Adam Grabois, who plans to use one parcel of that land to build a 40,000-square-foot even though the building has no announced tenants yet. “I’ve heard (Gov.) Bill Richardson talk about the potential of a spaceport here in New Mexico, and right away I thought our company would be perfect to be a part of that,” Grabois told the paper, adding that he has some ties, albeit tenuous ones, with the governor. “He and I graduated from the same university, Tufts University… He and I are also members of the same fraternity there.”

At a couple of recent conferences, including the ISDC just over a week ago in Dallas, John Carmack said it would take “very bad luck” for Armadillo Aerospace to not win prize money in this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge. This weekend, Armadillo demonstrated why Carmack has been so confident. On Saturday Armadillo flew a “complete LLC 1 [Lunar Lander Challenge level 1] operational profile” at the Oklahoma Spaceport using its Pixel vehicle, doing two 90-second flights between two pads, both times landing within a meter of the center of the pad. All the parameters of the flight fell within the requirements for the prize, making Armadillo the first time to clearly demonstrate that it can win at least the level 1 purse at this October’s competition. “If it weren’t for the X-Prize Cup doing the management of the NASA prize, we would have won it last weekend,” Carmack wrote. “I understand the reasoning behind tying it to an event to help promote the industry as a whole and provide more opportunities for other teams to catch up with the front runner, but as the front runner, I would rather have the check…”