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Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, the founder of rocket company Blue Origin, will unveil plans on Thursday for missions to the moon tailored to the U.S. government’s renewed push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years, people familiar with the matter said. Bezos, the world’s richest man and also chief executive and founder of Amazon.com, is scheduled to host a rare media event at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) in Washington to provide “an update on our progress and share our vision of going to space to benefit Earth,” Blue Origin said in an advisory. Blue Origin spokeswoman Caitlin...

Delays in prepping the CST-100 crew capsule could cost Boeing millions -- or more. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." -- attributed to Mark Twain And over at Boeing (NYSE:BA), "history" looks like it's about to rhyme with "misery" for the one-time space monopolist. As you may recall, Boeing (in the form of United Launch Alliance, its joint venture with Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT)) was forced to bow out of an Air Force competition to launch a GPS III satellite into orbit last year. ULA's withdrawal was partly Congress' fault, inasmuch as Congress had briefly enacted a law forbidding...

Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has just dropped a huge gauntlet in the race to develop a reusable rocket. It just launched its New Shepard space vehicle (video, below), consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule, to the edge of space at a suborbital altitude of 100.5 kilometers (62 miles). The capsule then separated and touched down beneath a parachute, but more importantly, the BE-3 rocket also started its own descent. After the rockets fired at nearly 5,000 feet, it made a a controlled vertical landing at a gentle 4.4 mph. So far,...

As a child growing up in rural India in the 1960s and 1970s, Naveen Jain would gaze up at the moon and imagine a life beyond his modest surroundings. Today he's still gazing at the moon, but for far different reasons. Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year. This serial entrepreneur-he founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius-believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges. Among...

SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and its mothership, VMS Eve (WhiteKnightTwo) herald a new era in commercial space flight with daily space tourism flights set to commence from Spaceport America in New Mexico after test program and all required US government licens Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, today reveal SS2 to the public for the first time since construction of the world’s first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed. The unveiling represents...

Sept. 21, 2009 -- Lured by millions of dollars in prize money, teams of private firms aren't waiting for NASA to figure out if, when and how to get back to the moon. They're preparing to go themselves. The first $1 million prize for demonstrating a lunar landing system is due to be awarded at the end of October. The front-runner is Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which this month made back-to-back flights of a vehicle named Scorpius. Two other contenders plan to enter the NASA-backed competition before this year's cutoff on Oct. 31. Contestants for the top prize are judged by...

Last year Sir Richard Branson said that there is a real possibility that space travel could become a commercial and scientific norm in the near future. Some important progress is being made toward this prediction with yesterday’s news that an investment vehicle of the Abu Dhabi Government, Aabar, has taken a 32 per cent stake in Sir Richard’s Virgin Galactic. Another $100 million will be set aside for the development of a small satellite launch site in Abu Dhabi that could include spaceport facilities to host flights for space tourists.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) passed another significant milestone on the way to first flight of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle by completing qualification testing for the first stage tank and interstage at the company's structural and propulsion testing facility near Waco, Texas.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and many are taking the occasion to speculate about the future of American space exploration. With the Space Shuttle program set to go out of service in about one year, the United States will soon be incapable of putting astronauts into orbit. Will the government revive the space program, or is space destined to be a dimming and increasingly irrelevant frontier for human exploration?

Richard Garriott had more reason than most to dream the Apollo moon landings would rapidly expand space travel. His father was a NASA astronaut, as were many of his neighbors near Texas' Johnson Space Center. With nearly all of humanity still on Earth nearly four decades later, the computer game developer paid $35 million for a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the international space station.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson today unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis next year. Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is one of several commercial enterprises vying to offer the ultimate in sightseeing, said his SpaceShipTwo will start test flights later this year.Two thousand eight is going to be the year of the spaceship. We're excited about this, and everything it will do," said Branson at a media event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan." Virgin Galactic, part of Branson's airline, vacation and retail company...

Jim Van Laak, of the NASA Langley Systems Management Office, spoke at Oshkosh this week about the important of risk management in the privatized spaceflight sector. Laak, who has been a pilot for 37 years and owned 30 airplanes, knows risk well. In his career, he has had eight engine failures and three fires in flight. Laak's experience working with 21 Shuttle missions has given him a unique perspective on the hazards inherent in manned spaceflight. Laak, who has also worked extensively with the American and Russian space programs, reminds us that in spaceflight, there is "lots of risk and...

Rocketeers By Michael Belfiore Smithsonian, 305 pages, $26.95 American space exploration had a rough time of it on Thursday. NASA's already bruised reputation took a one-two punch with revelations that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly even though they were intoxicated and that a computer due to be delivered to the International Space Station in August had been sabotaged. The news might have bolstered the case for the increasingly robust efforts at privately funded space ventures, except Thursday also brought news of a deadly explosion at a Mojave Desert airport where a propellant system for a...

As an investment opportunity this plan is way out there. It’s questionable, too, in terms of the planet’s future well being. An Associated Press article this week reported that a Boston-area investment group, Boston Harbor Angels, which consists of fat cats with money to spare, is teaming up with an outfit called XCOR Aerospace of Mojave to launch a space tourism venture. According to the AP, XCOR is building a “reusable suborbital vehicle named Xerus” and if all goes as planned, travelers aboard the Xerus would “experience up to 3 minutes of weightlessness some 62 miles about Earth.” The rocket...

LOS ANGELES - A prototype of an inflatable space station module has successfully expanded and deployed its solar panels after being launched into orbit, a private developer said. A Russian rocket lofted the Genesis II module, developed by Bigelow Aerospace of Nevada, into space on Thursday The 15-foot-long module's flexible exterior was folded around an inner core for launch and had to expand from a diameter of about 6.2 feet to 8 feet. The solar panels also had to extend to supply power. Both actions were confirmed, said spokesman Chris Reed.

Private space station company Bigelow Aerospace, based in North Las Vegas, Nevada, successfully launched its Genesis 2 prototype space station from a Russian Dnepr rocket on Thursday, June 28, 2007, at 11:02 a.m. EDT (15:02 GMT). The launch occurred at Yasny Launch Base, a Russian strategic missile facility. The Dnepr booster rocket is a converted ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), which launches artificial satellites into orbit. Russian-Ukrainian launch service provider ISC Kosmotras coordinates the launches of Dnepr rockets, the first of which occurred on April 21, 1999 when it successfully inserted an UoSAT-12 satellite into orbit. The Genesis spacecraft is an...

ASPEN, Colorado - You don't have to pack your bags quite yet, but passenger travel to the Moon is on the flight manifest of a space tourist company. The price per seat will slap your wallet or purse for a swift $100 million - but you'll have to get in line as the first voyage is already booked. Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, is in negotiations with the customers who will fly the first private expedition to circumnavigate the Moon. "I hope to have those contracts signed by the end of the year," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures' president...

FAIRBORN — The Air Force wants to make launching satellites as routine as flying airplanes. It also wants missile-fast planes that can strike targets or deliver Marines anywhere on Earth, officials said Tuesday. To that end, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is seeking closer ties with the emerging commercial space industry to make the Dayton region a leader in the field. AFRL is wooing the new industry as it seeks to ease the cost and difficulty of reaching space, and the effort is bringing space entrepreneurs to town — at least for visits and tours.

On a 50-acre spread in North Las Vegas, near the intersection of Warp Drive and Skywalker Way, the prototypes for future space stations are being built from strips of fortified fabric, supertough inflatable skin and lattices of metal. Today a gaggle of journalists and space entrepreneurs got a rare look inside Bigelow Aerospace's industrial-park production facility and mission control center, just a week and a day after the company's launch of its Genesis 1 orbital test module. We were treated to three and a half hours of talk and tours, led by billionaire Robert Bigelow and his top engineers.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada – It’s a new form of “high stakes” from this gambling city—a privately-funded and designed expandable space module now circles the Earth. Bigelow Aerospace here is the odds-on-favorite to create a low-cost, low Earth orbit space complex that is accessible to the commercial sector. That goal has been bolstered by the success of their Genesis-1 expandable module, lofted into space July 12 courtesy of a converted Cold War rocket—the Ukrainian-built Dnepr booster provided by ISC Kosmotras. Even as Genesis-1 circles the Earth, work is already underway for a Genesis-2 launch before year’s end. That flight is expected...