Richard Branson spoke at an event Tuesday night in Jacksonville, Florida, talking about his various ventures, including Virgin Galactic, which led to this exchange as reported in the Florida Times-Union:

Branson began building his business empire in the 1970s when he established Virgin Records, initially as a mail-order record outlet and later a record label. Virgin then expanded into a host of fields, including mobile phones, aviation, animation and, in one of Branson’s most high-profile endeavours, space travel, with Virgin Galactic planning on sending tourists into space two years from now - for a price.

“How many people out there are willing to spend $200,000 to fly into space?” [host Howard] Kelley asked, a question that elicited a lone clap from the back of the hall.

“Well, one,” Branson said with a chuckle, and then pointed out into the audience. “I’ll see you later.”

Reader Garrett Smith passed along a note about the call for papers for the IAA Symposium on Private Manned Access to Space, to be held May 28-30, 2008 in Arcachon, France. The conference will focus on the technical, legal and regulatory, financial, and other issues associated with human suborbital and orbital spaceflight. The deadline for submissions is December 5. And, as the call for papers notes, “Arcachon in May should be terrific!”

The introduction of this Arizona Republic article probably puts it best:

By day, Morris Jarvis works as an instrumentation and control engineer for Intel Corp.’s newest factory, Fab 32.

By night and on the weekends, he is Arizona’s version of the “Astronaut Farmer,” building a vehicle he hopes to launch into space someday.

Jarvis is building a small winged vehicle that can be launched by balloon or rockets (the article is vague whether the balloon is part of the launch system or just, as noted, a means to generate revenue before going to rocket-powered flights), eventually carrying four people to about 100 kilometers for $100,000 apiece. He estimates he needs only $5.4 million to begin rocket-powered flights (”only” in sense that other ventures have suggested needing far larger amounts—think of EADS Astrium and its €1 billion).

From the limited information in the article, though, it’s tough to take this venture that seriously. Jarvis has kept a low profile in the personal spaceflight community to date. At the very least, given his location, he should be presenting his project at the Space Access conference in Phoenix; if he did, people might be better able to judge his effort from a technical and financial standpoint, and even perhaps offer some assistance.

Cue the “thrill of victory, agony of defeat” theme music…

• Our first stop in our world tour is Israel, where the first travel agency certified by Virgin Galactic has started selling tickets. According to the director of that agency, Galactic Dreamlines, most Israelis who have expressed an interest in suborbital spaceflight to date are businesspeople “who like new experiences and adventures.”
• Next we go all the way to New Zealand, where one Virgin Galactic customer, Jackie Maw, is preparing for training in the US. One of Virgin’s 100 Founders, Maw will undergo training, including centrifuge time, at the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia.
• And, finally, we go to Canada, where a musical group called the TADROS twins claim that they will be “the first artists to do a musical project in space”. They announced Monday that they have signed up with the “airline” Space Adventures to fly no earlier than 2010; a more specific launch date will be announced in 2008, and they don’t specify if it will be an orbital or suborbital flight. They plan to sing “a song for peace” while in weightlessness. They already appear to have completed some training: they “lived in a bubble for 7 days and 7 nights on the esplanade of La Place des Arts in Montreal”, where they wrote and recorded songs being released in a new album.

Lost in all the developments surrounding the X Prize Cup was a report that Lockheed Martin would invest $45 million towards the development of a spaceport in Nova Scotia for PlanetSpace. Well, so much for that. The Globe and Mail reported a day later that Canadian officials had quashed any such investment plans, which were tied to the Canadian government’s purchase of Lockheed-built C-130 cargo planes. “There have been no discussions between Industry Minister Prentice or any member of his staff regarding Lockheed Martin investing $45-million of its own money in the so-called PlanetSpace space-tourism project in Cape Breton. Nor will there be any such discussions,” a spokesman for Canada’s industry minister told the paper. Apparently government officials flinched at investing anything linked to space tourism: “Space tourism will be left to tourists.”

When Rocket Racing League’s Granger Whitelaw announced last Friday that their prototype X-Racer had performed three test flights the day before in Mojave, he declined to show any photos or video of the flights, and provided few technical details about the tests. There’s still no information about the tests on the RRL’s web site, but there is now an independently-produced video available by Ben Brockert. In an email earlier this week Brockert said he filmed the tests standing outside of airport property, “so that I’d be free to share the video on my terms.” That distance means that the video doesn’t show a lot of details, although you can clearly see the X-Racer make a few short hops off the runway.