The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australian and American scientists and engineers have successfully tested a scramjet engine in the Australian Outback. A rocket accelerated the scramjet to Mach 10 before it was activated. It is hoped that travel times from Europe to Australia could eventually be reduced to as little as two hours by the technology.
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Virgin Galactic has demo’ed a mockup of their planned spaceship which is based on SpaceShipOne.
Slashdot has an “Ask Slashdot” feature about watching a space shuttle launch. Some advice in there, but it’s pretty Americentric. Still, even international spectators would have to go through most of the same motions. Except that if you travel there internationally just for the launch, it’d be a much harder disappointment if it gets postponed. Some day, I’ll go there and watch one though. It must be pretty impressive.
The US FAA has drafted a set of rules for Space Tourism, the BBC reports. The FAA thus is trying set a minimum safety standard for the emerging Space Tourism market. This will directly affect Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic venture, which aims at being the first private, “standard” passenger space flight company in the world and which will launch its flights from US territory with technology licensed from Scaled Composite.
According to a BBC report the newly-founded “Virgin Galactic” will commercialize SpaceShipOne. The company hopes to send up to 3000 passengers into sub-orbital space over a five year period.
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