RpK has replaced OSC with Andrews. They’ll take over some of the systems engineering and integration work, and will be making an investment. So another one of the unsuccessful COTS bidders gets back in the game, through the back door.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey has a press release.

[Update at 5:30 PM EDT]

And here’s a more extensive article on not only the Jim Benson announcement, but on NewSpace in general. Bottom line (buried in the middle of the article)–investors are starting to take this industry seriously.

Mr. Benson says he “managed to raise $1 million with less than a dozen phone calls.” Some investors said yes without ever seeing a formal proposal, he says. “If I had tried three or four years ago to solicit money for this kind of private space flight, I wouldn’t have had any luck.”

Not much giggling left.

Alan Boyle has more.

And yes, I really do have some thoughts on this stuff, but I’m saving them for a couple articles I’m working on, for TCS Daily and The New Atlantis.

Jim Benson is leaving SpaceDev, the company he founded, to form a new public space travel company. Looks like he’s starting a separate spaceline to use Dreamchaser.

Dennis Wingo has some thoughts on Anousheh Ansari’s excellent adventure.

Keith Cowing has been critical of the overhyping of all the firsts. In that context, he has an interesting posting to her blog.

Bravo.

[Via Robin, who is apparently managing Anousheh’s blog]

Keith Cowing has been critical of the overhyping of all the firsts. In that context, he has an interesting posting to her blog.

Bravo.

[Via Robin, who is apparently managing Anousheh’s blog]

Keith Cowing has been critical of the overhyping of all the firsts. In that context, he has an interesting posting to her blog.

Bravo.

[Via Robin, who is apparently managing Anousheh’s blog]

Dwayne Day has a good rundown on a conference I missed last week because I was attending one on the left coast.

Taylor Dinerman had an article in yesterday’s issue of The Space Review, but it doesn’t have the latest news about the OSC deal falling apart.

This experiment doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, if they’re really trying to understand what surgery will be like in weightlessness:

Whizzing above southwest France aboard a specially modified Airbus, strapped-down surgeons will attempt to remove a fatty tumor from the forearm of a volunteer in a three-hour operation.

The Airbus A300 Zero-G, based in Bordeaux, is designed to perform roller coaster-like maneuvers that simulate weightlessness. It will make about 30 such parabolas during the flight.

The problem is that you only get about twenty-five seconds of weightlessness at a time. In between, you get two or more gees as you do the pullup maneuver going in and the pullout on the way down. So in addition to probably making the surgeons nauseous, they’ll have to deal with tools being pulled down in the high gees (and any fluids will also be pooled, rather than continuously floating). I really don’t think that it will usefully replicate the problems of surgery in a continuous weightless environment (and it really is a problem). This is the kind of research that has to be performed on ISS, or some other orbital facility.

I also found this a little strange:

The patient, Philippe Sanchot, and the six-person medical team underwent training in zero-gravity machines, much like those astronauts use, to prepare for the operation.

What “zero-gravity machines” are they talking about? I’d like to get one.

Not to mention an astrophysics blogger.

I met Louise Riofrio last week at the conference in San Jose. She has a lot of posts, and pictures. And she likes to put herself in the pictures, for an “I was there” feel to it. Keep scrolling.

(Note to readers from the distant future–this is just a link to the blog, not a permalink, so you’ll have to dig into the archives for the date of this post.)

She’s also going on the blogroll.