The attorney general of New Mexico has concluded that a local tax increase passed this spring should not be collected starting January 1 as originally planned because of a lack of a mechanism to spend the revenues. Voters in Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces, passed the quarter-cent gross receipts tax increase in April; at the time the tax was set to take effect on January 1. However, county officials had asked that the introduction of the tax be delayed because the money can’t be spent until a spaceport tax district is created, and that district can’t form until at least one other county also approves a similar tax. Two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, also plan to hold tax referenda, but not until spring 2008 at the earliest.

Apologies for the short notice, but Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and his latest client for a Soyuz flight to the ISS, Richard Garriott, will be on WAMU-FM in Washington DC at 12 noon today on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, talking about space tourism. If you’re not in Washington and/or can’t listen at noon, archives of the show should be available on the web site later today.

That’s the designation that Virgin Galactic is giving to the coming year, according to a Flight International article that reports on a speech given by Will Whitehorn on Thursday at a space conference in the UK. Virgin anticipates a busy year, highlighted by the first test flight of the White Knight 2 carrier aircraft in July. The airplane is 60% complete now and is scheduled to be fully assembled by June; the aircraft’s “last” engine will be delivered in January. Virgin is also planning to publicly unveil the designs for White Knight 2 (which Whitehorn says resembles the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, also built by Scaled Composites) and SpaceShipTwo on January 23. The report doesn’t indicate where or how that will take place, but previously Virgin officials had said they were planning an event in New York in January. The report doesn’t provide a schedule for the development of SpaceShipTwo, other than to say that the first vehicle is currently 50% complete. (Also no word on what Burt Rutan, who is notorious for not releasing vehicle development schedules, thinks of all of these announced plans.)

Whitehorn added that Virgin is considering also using White Knight 2 or a larger successor, White Knight 3, as the first stage for an orbital launch system. That system, which would also involve a two-stage rocket, would be intended to put smallsats into orbit for $3 million.

This week’s issue of Newsweek magazine includes an essay by Charles Simonyi on his flight to the ISS earlier this year. Simonyi described how he started down the path of being a “Spaceflight Participant” on a Soyuz flight to the station:

I was just an earthbound tourist, visiting Baikonur, the Russian spaceport, when I met Eric [Anderson, of Space Adventures] in 2004. I was amazed by the openness of the Russian space program—we could practically touch the fully fueled rocket on the launchpad as we saw the cosmonauts off to space. I was even more amazed when Eric, ever so gently, suggested that one day I might want to be on the departure platform where the cosmonauts were standing.

Simonyi said he went through a series of medical tests he passed without problems, and then got a surprise:

Eric was the first to congratulate me. He also said that, as opposed to what we had planned, the Russians wanted me to enter training as soon as possible and fly on the next spacecraft. I had to decide then and there. It actually wasn’t as hard as it seems in the abstract. I felt incredibly lucky and privileged just to have been asked. The answer had to be yes, come what may.

The rest is a fairly abbreviated, high-level discussion of his training and the flight itself (he does reveal that he didn’t get spacesick at all during the flight; he would simply recall his training on Earth when he felt “any unease”).

If there are questions about his flight that he didn’t answer in his essay, you can pose them to him in a live chat Thursday, December 6 at 2 pm EST.