Alan Boyle has an interesting “compare and contrast” of the current planned providers:

The feedback from would-be fliers has been that “the overall nature of the experience is primarily about the view, and feeling the forces,” Lauer said. Thus, both companies are trying to optimize the view of a curving Earth, spread out beneath the black sky of space. But they’re doing it using different methods.

SpaceShipTwo will offer as many portholes as it can, placed strategically around the side walls of the passenger cabin. Rocketplane, in contrast, plans to make the most of the forward view. “The best views are really out the front window, just as they are with any airplane. … When you’re in the back seats, it’s surprising how much of the forward view you do get,” Lauer said.

Back-seat passengers will each get two of their own windows as well, currently planned for placement at shoulder height and above their heads, he said.

The SpaceShipTwo concept gives you dials to watch, showing G-forces, altitude and other statistics, plus a larger cabin display. Rocketplane promises to provide a customizable video display for each passenger. And both spacecraft will be fairly bristling with video cameras to record the highlights of your out-of-this-world flight.

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.