Gearing up for ISPS and X Prize Cup

I’m in Las Cruces, New Mexico for what is arguably the marquee week this year in the space tourism field: the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight this Wednesday and Thursday, and the X Prize Cup Saturday and Sunday at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo (where the event is billed as the “2007 Holloman Air and Space Expo Featuring The X Prize Cup”.)

The conference will be a good opportunity to get updates on the progress of various ventures (not the least of which being Rocketplane Kistler, now that the company has lost its funded COTS award), while the Cup will be headlined by the Lunar Lander Challenge, with Armadillo Aerospace likely to be the only team flying, unless Acuity, who has been developing their entry largely out of the media spotlight, has made more progress than publicly recognized. There are a number of other announcements by various companies expected at the Cup, primarily during a media day on Friday.

I will be posting updates from both the ISPS and the X Prize Cup, Internet connectivity permitting, as well as get caught up on some other recent developments I haven’t had an opportunity to post here. Also, as an experiment in up-to-the-microsecond microblogging, I’ll attempt to post some quick updates during the events on a newly-created Twitter feed.