A roundup of a few space tourism-related items from the last several days:

• Wyle Labs Inc. is creating a new business unit “focusing on providing human spaceflight services to the emerging commercial ’space tourist’ industry”. The Commercial Human Spaceflight Services unit, led by Vernon McDonald, will offer a variety of medical, training, and operations support services for vehicle operators and spaceports. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Wyle Labs is up for sale by the private-equity firm that holds a controlling interest in the company.
• The San Antonio Express-News reports that the citizenry of Van Horn, Texas, is excited about the prospects of a Blue Origin spaceport near their community. The town is looking for an economic boost from Blue Origin, although only a couple dozen jobs are currently envisioned. Best quote is from Celeste Stokely,a native of Austin who attened the hearing there last week, trying to learn more about Blue Origin’s plans: “I’ve been reduced to reading the space blogs, but they are just guessing.” Well, we do our best.
• Popular Science has posted the article from its latest issue about Rocketplane. Michael Belfiore provides some interesting, although not earth-shattering, details about Rocketplane’s development work, including some details about Polaris Propulsion, the company led by an ex-Rocketdyne engineer that is developing the AR-36 rocket engine that will eventually be used by Rocketplane.
• The AP descibes how the early customers for Virgin Galactic and Rocketplane have taken on roles as “celestial missionaries” for those customers, selling the experience of suborbital spaceflight even before they’ve had a chance to fly.
• Forbes.com (free registration required) interviews Brian Binnie about his suborbital flight on SpaceShipOne and his thoughts about the future. binnie expects progress to be “conservatively paced” since “no one has a business plan that can gracefully recover from a smoking hole in the ground” (although he believes the industry as a whole can survive an accident.) As for himself, “I’m not hanging around Mojave because I’m enamored with the scenery or with getting sand in my teeth. Let’s just say I’m very motivated to see that SS2 supports a business plan.”

Last night the FAA held a hearing in Van Horn, Texas on the draft environmental assessment of the proposed private spaceport being developed in west Texas by Blue Origin. Alan Boyle of MSNBC offers an account of a event where not much happened. About half of the 40 people who attended actually came from out of town (including conference organizers and journalists), and only three people made comments during the hearing: two locals who supported the venture and Boyle himself, who posed several questions about the project to company officials in attendance. This suggests that Blue Origin may get the required FAA approvals—an experimental permit for flight tests and a spaceport license—within a few months.

And about the site itself? The location is still off-limits to the public, although Boyle reports that from the vantage point of the highway that passes closest to the site, “Earth-moving equipment, trucks and even a bus could be seen stirring up dust on Tuesday.”

The AP and the British newspaper The Independent both published articles in recent days about Blue Origin’s plans for a suborbital vehicle that will fly from the company’s facilities in West Texas. The articles are based on details previously disclosed in the company’s draft environmental assessment report, which will be the subject of a public hearing today in Van Horn, Texas, the town closest to the Blue Origin site. The hearing, which will be covered by Alan Boyle of MSNBC, may offer the best chance to date to see what the secretive company is up to.

Yesterday SPACE.com ran an article on the revelations regarding Blue Origin’s suborbital vehicle development program that came from its draft environmental assessment. There’s not much here that hasn’t been reported earlier, although Leonard David does get some interesting perspectives from John Garvey, who worked on the DC-X (upon which the New Shepard vehicle appears to be patterned).

Apparently that latest article was enough to convince the New York Post to run an article of its own on Blue Origin. As you might expect, there’s definitely nothing new here that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, but at least the Post thought it worthy of attention—or maybe it was just a slow news week.

If you haven’t heard by now, some new details (or, rather, some details period) about the New Shepard RLV being developed by Blue Origin were released last week, tucked away in a 229-page environmental assessment of the company’s planned West Texas launch site (PDF, ~12 MB). Both MSNBC’s Cosmic Log and RLV and Space Transport News have discussed the details about the vehicle, which appears to first order to be a derivative of the Delta Clipper. (I also talk about it in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review about the second anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s flight.) The report does raise some questions about the vehicle’s development and operations:

• The out-of-the-way location (about 250 kilometers’ drive from El Paso) is ideal for testing: as the document shows, there’s not much in the way of an environment that can be affected. It’s less ideal, though, for actual commercial operations, particularly when a commercial spaceport—presumably with more infrastructure—will be operating not that far away in southern New Mexico. Will Blue Origin operate New Shepard from other spaceports? What sort of cost-convenience tradeoff is there between effectively building your own spaceport versus using another commercial facility?
• Compared to other operators, Blue Origin has a somewhat slower schedule, with a series of prototype tests through the rest of the decade (starting this year, according to the document), but not entering operation until 2010, after Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane, Space Adventures, and possibly others. Will they be coming too late to the market?
• The whole flight, from liftoff to landing, will be less than ten minutes. Will that seem too short to prospective passengers? How much weightlessness time will passengers get? Or, since this will be more like a conventional rocket than spaceplanes like SpaceShipTwo and Rocketplane XP, will this be more “space-like” ands hence attractive to passengers?

The Neon Trees is a small UK band that plays a type of music that they call “country power-pop” (which actually sounds more like folk than anything else). The uber-blog Boing Boing notes that one song available on their site, “The Life and Times of Jeff”, was inspired by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder who started Blue Origin to develop commercial spacecraft. There’s no overt evidence that’s the case on the band’s site, but there are certainly some suggestive lyrics:

Jeffrey wants to buy a spaceship
Jeffrey want’s [sic] to save your life
Jeff’s going to make a lot of money
Jeff’s going to take a real long flight

Of course, since Blue Origin is reportedly planning to first develop a suborbital vehicle, those initial flights might be really short, not really long. I’m just disappointed they’re not singing about me.