Space Companies Update Plans for Doing Space Things
Space Adventures vehicle for circumlunar flights. (Credit: Space Adventures)
Michael Belfiore has a piece in the MIT Technology Review about a May 1 event at the Explorers Club in New York where 13 commercial space companies showed off their plans. Several key players had updated schedules which anyone paying the slightest bit of attention will know to take with 1.7 metric tons of salt:
- Virgin Galactic’s head of Astronaut Relations Lauren De Niro Pipher predicted that Richard Branson and his children would fly to space aboard SpaceShipTwo in November or December. Note, this was prior to the announcement of a change in the ship’s engine, which officials insist won’t have a major impact on the schedule.
- XCOR hopes to fly the Lynx Mark I before the end of the year. The ship is now being assembled in Mojave, Calif.
- Blue Origin said it would begin test flights of its first full-scale spacecraft within a year.
- Space Adventures says it has signed up two unidentified customers willing to spend $150 million to fly a modified Soyuz spacecraft around the moon. The flight is set to launch in 2017 or 2018.
- Penn State Lunar Lion plans to send a coffee-table sized spacecraft to land on the moon in an effort to win the Google Lunar X Prize.
- Planetary Resources discussed plans to launch its first Arkyd spacecraft from the International Space Station by the end of this year.
- World View Enterprises said the company would launch a small test vehicle of its high-altitude manned capsule in about a month, which would be right about now.
