Millionaut Richard Garriott (lower left) aboard the International Space Station - presumably without any shrunken heads or vampire medical kits.
Ever wondered how your average millionaire-software-developer-turned-space-tourist lives? Pretty well, it turns out. Steven Andrew has the answer. The Examiner writer visited Richard Garriott at his estate near Austin, TX.
X-51 Waverider
Mach 6 test aircraft set for trials: X-51A WaveRider could change aircraft design
Network World
The aspiration that jets may some day fly at over six-times the speed of sound took a very real step toward reality recently as the US Air Force said it successfully married the test aircraft, known as the X-51A WaveRider to a B-52 in preparation for a Dec. 2 flight test.
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Richard Garriott
The Examiner has a lengthy Q&A interview with millionaut space tourist Richard Garriott. Some key excerpts:
Yes, $30 million is about right. The brash answer is I earned this money the old fashioned way, with hard work and elbow grease building successful businesses, and I can spend it how I want. But the more relevant answer goes back to the prior question: this wasn’t just an expensive lark. (more…)
China has started developing the Long March 6 carrier rockets for its space programs, the China National Space Administration announced on its official website.
Ares may look dead but keeps kicking
Orlando Sentinel
Critics of NASA’s Ares 1 rocket have all but declared the program dead. But Ares 1 contractors are fighting back with a campaign to convince the White House that their plan to replace the space shuttle should continue….
A taikonaut emerges from China's Shenzhou 7 spacecraft after a successful orbital flight
China strives to launch space labs
China Daily
Two to three space laboratories may be launched by China between 2010 and 2015, roughly less than a decade before the nation embarks upon a space station in 2020, a top scientist said.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
An effort to use NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to search for water in the same crater on the moon failed due to an instrumentation problem, Aviation Week reports.
On Aug. 20, the two spacecraft peered into a crater at the north pole from different angles using synthetic aperture radar units.
Sir Richard Branson greets Virgin Galactic ticketholders. Financier Per Wimmer is at left; behind Branson is Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.
Quest For Space At Virgin Galactic
Aviation Week
With a rather unique support base of $40 million in deposits representing $60 million in total income from 300 suborbital adventurers, the project’s financial footing remains firm despite the global economic gloom. “These are the kinds of customers who are not much affected by that, and sales this month are better than they were a year ago. Regardless of what’s happening in the economy, success or failure is in the hands of the people in the project,†says Whitehorn.
NASA Aeronautics Research Program Ready
Aviation Week
NASA is putting the finishing touches on plans for its first new aeronautics research program in almost a decade knowing that any shift away from human spaceflight will increase the pressure to produce results aircraft manufacturers and operators can use.
The future ain’t what it used to be….but it’s getting pretty close.
Back in the 1960’s, the future of transportation was forecast to look to look like this:
The Jetsons
This week, NASA announced that it was working on this:
SkyTran by Unimodal Systems
A man who helped lead an effort to establish orbital skydiving as a new extreme sport was killed last week in a diving accident in Switzerland.
Eli Thompson headed up the Space Diver Dive team for Orbital Outfitters, a California-based start up company that is designing suits for high-altitude diving and suborbital space flights. Thompson was killed in a skydiving accident in Lautterbrunnen, Switzerland on August 28.
NASA MISSION UPDATE
Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:11:29 PM PDT
At 5 p.m. (PDT) on Sept. 3, the LCROSS Project took the LCROSS spacecraft off of Emergency status. For the past two weeks, under close, continuous monitoring from the LCROSS mission operations team, the spacecraft has not exhibited any repeat of the anomalous behavior which had caused the spacecraft to consume large amounts of fuel while out of view. All spacecraft systems are operating in a nominal state.
