On Wednesday I had a long telephone interview with Charles Simonyi, scheduled to make a return trip to the International Space Station late next month. (The interview got delayed a couple hours because his training that day ran long.) I plan to have a more complete account of the interview in Monday’s issue of [...]
|
||||||
|
A roundup of space tourism news from across the globe: Our first stop is Davos, Switzerland, where Space Adventures’ Eric Anderson says “business is good” for the space tourism company. Anderson, attending the World Economic Forum, said he’s looking for additional customers, but potential clients “should not expect any bargains because of the global financial turmoil.” While [...] The commercial space community was atwitter (figuratively and literally) over a Russian news report that Russia planned to end taking space tourists to the ISS after this March’s return trip by Charles Simonyi. The implication was that there wouldn’t again be any other means of visiting the ISS. However, this report is hardly the breaking news [...] Rob Coppinger of Flightglobal.com covered a speech this morning by Will Whitehorn of Virgin Galactic at a UK space conference. Whitehorn said that the first flight of WhiteKnightTwo will be “soon” (but we’ve heard that before) and that SpaceShipTwo is “almost finished”. Virgin Galactic is now putting its second group of 100 customers [...] Richard Garriott, the space tourist who flew to the International Space Station last month, is leaving computer game company NCSoft to pursue new ventures that were at least inspired by his recent trip to space. “Many of you probably wonder what my plans are, now that I have achieved the lifelong dream of going to [...] Richard Garriott is now the sixth commercial passenger to fly into orbit on a Soyuz taxi flight to the ISS. The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft lifted off on schedule at 3:01 am EDT (0701 GMT) and entered orbit nine minutes later. The flight is a realization of a long-term dream of Garriott, son of former [...] Space Adventures announced today that Esther Dyson will train as the backup to Charles Simonyi for his spring 2009 flighyt. Dyson will pay $3 million for the training, similar to the training that Nik Halik paid for as Richard Garriott’s backup. Dyson, who made her name in the computer industry as the longtime editor [...] To update my earlier post, I spoke briefly yesterday with Eric Anderson of Space Adventures to try and clarify any apparent contradictions between the company’s announcements and statements by the Russian space agency Roskosmos. Anderson said that Perminov’s statement that he had “no information about such plans” was reference to reports about Sergey Brin flying [...] An article in Saturday’s edition of Florida Today reports that NASA “was among the last to know” about Space Adventures’ plans for a dedicated Soyuz flight to the ISS in late 2011. Of course, NASA didn’t need to be consulted prior to the announcement, so that’s not too surprising, although NASA and the other international [...] Here are some of the key items from this morning’s press conference held by Space Adventures about their future plans (see their press release for some additional details): The first major announcement was that the company has reached an agreement with Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, for a dedicated Soyuz flight to the ISS in the second [...] |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 NewSpace Journal - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
Recent Comments