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LONDON (AP) -- Designer Philippe Starck, former soap star Victoria Principal and ``Superman Returns'' director Bryan Singer have booked their flights for tourist trips in outer space, an official from the company selling the galactic voyage said Monday. Virgin Galactic, a Virgin Group company, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008, said Will Whitehorn, the company's president. It has collected 8.5 million pounds (US$15.6 million, euro12.4 million) in deposits for the flights that cost 109,000 pounds (US$200,000, euro158,000). "Right now we're headed right on schedule," Whitehorn said. "Things are looking good from our perspective."...

HOUSTON, TX (May 25, 2006) - Trustees of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust announced today that the first-ever Heinlein Prize will go to Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. The Heinlein Prize was founded to reward individuals for making practical contributions to the commercialization of space. Dr. Diamandis will be honored at a dinner and award ceremony on July 7, 2006 at the St. Regis Hotel in Houston, Texas and receive $500,000, a gold Heinlein Medallion, the Lady Vivamus Sword (as described in Heinlein’s book Glory Road) and a Laureate’s Diploma.

LOS ANGELES, California – Leaders of two private space ventures that suffered failures vowed today to try, try again. Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society based in Pasadena, California, said that they are proceeding with a privately-backed Cosmos 2 solar sail effort. The earlier Cosmos 1 sail was launched skyward on June 21 of last year atop a Russian sub-launched Volna rocket. But the submarine-launched booster’s first stage shut off, with the mission failing some 83 seconds into flight, Friedman told attendees of the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) that began today.

In Bob Newhart’s classic comedy routine, “Merchandising the Wright Brothers,” he has an imaginary phone conversation with Orville and Wilbur just after their historic flight at Kitty Hawk. As a marketing guy, Bob is concerned about the length of the flight. He’s worried that people who pay for a trip to the coast won’t be happy at having to land every hundred feet. And what about getting a john on board? This illustrates the phenomenon I call the “Kitty Hawk Moment”. It is that instant when the impossible becomes a reality. Is it any wonder that people find it hard...

Creating a money-making rationale for private space ventures—be they public space travel, orbiting hotels, low-cost rocketry, a space junk collection service, or even a lunar power and light company—such enterprises must be grounded in first-order business basics. Over the decades, several entrepreneurial space firms have come and gone, their vision getting too far ahead of business reality, but there are encouraging signs that private space ventures are reinvigorating—as well as agitating and disrupting—customary models of space commercialization. That’s the message to be heard at Space Billionaires: Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, a Thought Leader Forum being held April 4...

The US Department of Transportation, the country's transport ministry, could be ready to certificate commercial spacecraft by 2008, says transportation secretary Norm Mineta. “This timeline isn’t based on science fiction,” Mineta told delegates yesterday at the Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, DC. “It is a timeline based on the reality of where commercial space is today and where we expect the state of commercial space to be within two short years.” Mineta says the regulator will be ready to approve the flights once tests of craft designed to take passengers into space are completed. Test permits will be...

Virgin Galactic is a company established by Richard Branson's Virgin Group to undertake the challenge of developing space tourism for everybody. Virgin Galactic will own and operate privately built spaceships, modelled on the history-making SpaceShipOne craft. These spaceships will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in our history. Due to the unique technology developed by Burt Rutan, this space craft design has overcome the difficult issues of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere faced by so many designers trying to create efficient, re-usable space vehicles. We believe that it is in mankind's interest to develop our knowledge and...

2005 may not have been a good year for George Bush or for the US movie business, but it’s been a great year for the space tourism industry. In October, the history-making SpaceShipOne, the first privately-developed manned vehicle ever to make it into space, was recognized when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum hung the craft in their Milestones of Flight gallery alongside the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the Apollo 11 command module. The next step is underway as Burt Rutan plans to build SpaceShipTwo for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which has already having a...

LOS ANGELES - A new space age has begun, one in which travel beyond Earth's atmosphere is driven by consumer demand to experience space, rather than governmental or scientific goals. Such is the belief of a new breed of space entrepreneurs, many of whom are setting up shop in California. "Eventually, we will get to the point where the minority user (of spaceflight) by far will be government" and the majority of users will be commercial consumers, said Peter Diamandis , chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation and the man behind the international Ansari X Prize space competition....

LOGAN, Utah—Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) of El Segundo, California is putting in place private rocket facilities at a Kwajalein Atoll launch area in the western Pacific Ocean. Yet the going has been tough for the private start-up, bankrolled by Elon Musk, chairman and chief executive officer of SpaceX. First, the group’s hoped for premier takeoff of the Falcon 1 booster at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was stymied by an on-going delay of a Titan 4 rocket launch carrying a classified payload. That booster—the last to fly from Vandenberg—remains ground-bound and won’t be airborne until this October,...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The company that pioneered commercial space travel by sending "tourists" up to the International Space Station is planning a new mission: rocketing people around the far side of the moon. The price of a round-trip ticket: $100 million. The first mission by Space Adventures could happen in 2008 or 2009 and is planned as a stepping stone to an eventual lunar landing by private citizens. "For the first time in history, a private company is organizing a mission to the moon," Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson said at a Manhattan news conference Wednesday, a day after...

One day after NASA brought the shuttle Discovery back from low Earth orbit, a private company plans to announce a more audacious venture, a tourist trip around the Moon. Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station. A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million. The space-faring tourists will travel with a Russian pilot. They will steer clear...

British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF. – Not far from bustling Los Angeles International Airport and the glistening office towers of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other aerospace giants sits a cluster of squat buildings that may hold a key to the future of manned spaceflight. Inside the main facility, whimsical trash cans sport nose cones and rocket fins. A Segway electric scooter shares an expansive shop floor with segments of rocket bodies. In one corner, inside a "clean room," engineers piece together a rocket motor. Welcome to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Think dotcom trailblazing with Buck Rogers technology. This upstart and others like...

As the drama surrounding the space shuttle’s return to flight continues, NASA is forced to deal with two major, interrelated problems. The first is how to fly the shuttle safely until its planned retirement in 2010. Obviously, they will not be able to fly all 28 flights currently scheduled. This means the International Space Station (ISS) will not be completed as planned. Some of the ISS hardware will either have to be left on Earth, or a way to get it into orbit without using the shuttle will have to be found. This will be difficult since the modules and...

SCOTTSDALE, AZ -- NASA announced Wednesday the first two cash prizes offered as part of the agency’s Centennial Challenges program. Its mission is to encourage the commercialization of space transportation. The competitions should make for good fun. In the $50,000 2005 Tether Challenge, teams will compete to make the strongest tether of a specified diameter. Tethers will be stretched until they break, and winners will advance in a March Madness-like bracket system. The winner must then beat NASA's "house tether," made of existing material, to snare the cash. The 2005 Beam Power Challenge will give $50,000 to the team that...

TORONTO, Canada -- A second team of rocketeers competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a contest for privately funded suborbital space flight, has officially announced the first launch date for its manned rocket.The da Vinci Project, led by Brian Feeney of Toronto, Ontario, said Thursday the group plans to loft its Wild Fire Mark VI spacecraft on Oct. 2, just days after the planned launch of another X Prize contender, the U.S-based SpaceShipOne. The balloon-launched Wild Fire event will be followed by a second launch within two weeks to snag the X Prize purse, according to the plan.

NASA must look to private space enterprises for support in future exploration missions, a panel of aerospace professionals and researchers told the President's Commission for the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy on Wednesday. In a hearing before the commission tasked with shaping NASA's exploration aims, space entrepreneurs encouraged commissioners to embrace private access-to-space efforts and contests, such as the $10 million X Prize competition to spur interest in space travel.

<p>I got a response to last week's column from the office of Rep. David Weldon, R-Fla., specifically from his staffer Brendan Curry.</p> <p>He (and the congressman for whom he works) really is one of the good guys, if you're one of the many citizens (and voters) interested in a vibrant space program and getting into space yourself. But it shows how even the folks who sincerely want to make things happen inside the Beltway can often get into mind sets that continue to constrain us.</p>