Wednesday’s Huntsville Times describes something that sounds at least mildly quixotic: an effort to recreate John Glenn’s historic 1962 spaceflight on the 50th anniversary, using private funding. The project is the brainchild of retired pilot Craig Russell, who has created a nonprofit organization to raise the money needed to refurbish a Mercury capsule and launch it with an astronaut on board. Russell estimates he need to raise $35 million for a Falcon 9 launch, but thinks that either refurbishing an unflown Mercury capsule or building one from scratch could be done for as little as $10 million because all the R&D needed to build the capsule was done decades ago (also, apparently, student labor would be involved.)

Russell is trying to raise money for the project now, but said he would abandon the project if he can’t raise “significant interest and funding” during the course of this year. NASA doesn’t appear to be interested: Russell met with an unnamed NASA associate administrator last June to brief him on the effort but did not get a positive response. “He was not very enthusiastic,” Russell said.

Today’s Las Cruces Sun-News reports that problems conducting an environmental assessment have led to another delay for New Mexico’s Spaceport America. The report is vague about what exactly the problem is, but apparently it involves some sort of potential conflict of interest with New Mexico State University Physical Science Laboratory and some transfer of data being used for the environmental assessment. “There were some balls dropped” during that data transfer, in the words of Spaceport Authority chair Kelly O’Donnell, requiring the work to be redone.

Groundbreaking for the spaceport is now planned for November 2008. While the article states that groundbreaking has previously been planned for the first quarter of this year, during the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in Las Cruces in October officials were talking about a groundbreaking around October 2008: either this does not appear to be that significant a delay, or that delay had been factored into their schedules for some time.