Tag: SPACETOURISM

Virgin Galactic took a major step toward realizing the dream of commercial space travel yesterday when its SpaceShipTwo craft gracefully landed at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The landing marked the first piloted glide flight for the SpaceShipTwo, or VSS Enterprise, which was released from its mothership VSS Eve at an altitude of 45,000 feet. Manned by Pete Siebold and Mike ...

While it's out of the average person's price range, commercial space flight continues to move forward as government-funded space flight withers with a struggling economy. According to Space.com, Boeing, along with partner Space Adventures, plans to sell passenger seats aboard its Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 spacecraft, which will make its first test flights by 2015. The cone-shaped ...

East recently met West in a tale of astronaut suits and cosmic gloves, flying in the face of the Cold War-era Space Race and its resulting political divide. That is to say, a Russian guy and a dude from Brooklyn collaboratively designed a new spacesuit, and unveiled it Friday at New York's Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. Nikolay Moiseev, from Moscow, and Ted Southern, from our favorite ...

Back in the summer of 2008, Virgin Galactic unveiled its WhiteKnightTwo spacecraft, a carrier designed to piggyback the world's first commercial space-liner. Today, after months of anticipation, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson finally revealed the actual craft that the WhiteKnightTwo will jettison into space. According to Engadget, Virgin hopes that the shuttle known as SpaceShipTwo will ...

Spaceport America is officially under construction, and, according to those involved with the project, the world will have its first commercial spaceport by late 2010, or early 2011. This past Friday, Governor Bill Richardson was on hand to break ground in New Mexico for the operational headquarters of Virgin Galactic, and eventually other space tourism and transportation companies. Virgin CEO ...

If you're married, where did you go on your honeymoon? Local romantic hotel? Niagara Falls? Some exotic island? How about space? You know, the final frontier? The latter one is probably out for most Earthly couples, but Finnish airline Finnair is predicting that, within 100 years, space will be an increasingly common destination for newlyweds -- with heavenly trips starting in the middle of ...

At a press conference on Wednesday, a space tourism outfit known as Virgin Galactic showed off models of its privately developed spacecraft that will take paying customers on zero-G, suborbital flights in the next few years. The Associated Press reports that Richard Branson, a British Howard Hughes minus the neuroses, plans on flying customers approximately 62 miles above sea level – just ...

It seems like this whole space tourism thing is getting closer and closer to reality. Former space engineer Xavier Claramunt started planning the Galactic Suite -- a three-bedroom space hotel -- as a hobby, but then a space enthusiast gave Claramunt $3 million to help turn his sci-fi dreams into a reality. (Since then, investors from the U.S., Japan, China, and a "U.S. company intent on ...