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New Mexico's Spaceport America Is Opening For Tours, No Blastoffs Yet
If you’re patiently awaiting the launch of Virgin Galactic, there’s something new to keep you entertained for a little bit. Bulldozers and cranes at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico have been moving dirt and rocks around to get things ready for rockets, shuttles, and spaceships. Things have been progressing so well that public tours will begin in December—looks like a great holiday gift.
The tours will require a snazzy hardhat, because of course, it’s a work zone and they don’t want any lawsuits injuries. Visitors will learn all about the history of New Mexico from conquistadors to the state’s future in outer space tourism. The highlight of the tour will be to see the runway and the vertical launch pad up close and personal. Maybe you'll even be able to add your initials if the concrete is still wet.
Tags: Space Tourism / Space Travel / Cirque du Soleil / Activism Travel / Active Travel / → All Tags
Cirque Du Soleil Founder Becomes Latest Space Tourist For A Cause
Cirque Du Soleil founder and "I'm so rich I could go to space" mega-billionaire Guy Laliberté has—fittingly—taken off from Kazakhstan on his way to the International Space Station. Now that he's entered orbit, he's officially become the latest in a slowly increasing list of space tourists. Unlike other space tourists, though, Laliberté isn't just going for pleasure. He's bundling his trip into a broader program of environmental and anti-poverty activism.
Here's where things get a little bit dicey for us. Laliberté seems really sincere and the organization he's promoting, the One Drop Foundation that he founded, literally does the Lord's work getting water to people who don't have it. But we can see how the particular way he's chosen to highlight his cause might engender, in a certain kind of person, a potential... snideness:
Tags: Space Tourism / Virgin Galactic / Science Travel / → All Tags
The Best Way To Jumpstart Space Tourism Is...Not To Go To Space?
If you want to be a space tourist today, pretty much your only option is to pay a space tourism company hundreds of millions of dollars to hook you up with the Russians. While that usually works—and it doesn't always—it's hardly what most people mean when they talk about broad-based "space tourism." They mean an industry where space is accessible as a luxury vacation option to a variety of tourists.
A new report on the industry insists that the only way to open up outer space is to start small:
Tags: Summer-Vacations-With-An-Edge / Active Travel / Space Travel / Space Tourism / → All Tags
Summer Vacations With An Edge: Go To Mother-effing Space
If you're very rich, very bored, and have a very deep need to one-up your shark diving and sandboarding friends, space tourism company Space Adventures will train you, put you on the back of a Russian rocket, and shoot you into outer space. They've been doing it for over a decade and they've become pretty good at it, sending several tourists into orbit to the tune of over $170 million.
The company offers all kinds of packages, from a lunar mission and orbital spaceflights to zero gravity walks on the International Space Station. This is usually where we'd give you the pricing for each separate package, but after the first dozen or so million dollars we lose track. Suffice it to say that the lunar mission, which takes tourists around but not onto the surface of the moon, clocks in at a cool $100 million. No one has taken them up on the offer yet so there's still a chance for you to become the world's first private lunar explorer.
Apparently the Earthrise as seen from the dark side of the Moon is quite stunning this time of year. Or any time of year.
Tags: Moon Landing Anniversary / Apollo 11 / Space Travel / Space Tourism / NASA / → All Tags
Follow Along With Apollo 11's Lunar Landing, 40 Years Ago Today
Forty years ago today, you could look up into the night sky at the moon and know that way up there, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were hopping around and generally making history as the first men to walk on the moon. Now that it's been four decades since that seminal moment of "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" and no one has walked on the moon since 1972, it's about time we look back and reflect on the physical and technological feats that were accomplished to bring this about.
Sure, there are tons of events this week in celebration, and Louis Vuitton threw an astronaut party last week, but the real action is at home on your computer. It's called "We Choose The Moon," and it's a flash website that effectively re-broadcasts the transmissions between Houston Command and Apollo 11 throughout their mission. Along with browsing historical photographs, the site allows you to follow along with a livestream, three Twitter accounts (@AP11_CapCom, @AP11_Spacecraft, and @AP11_Eagle), and a route map that progresses in real time with the mission as it was fourty years ago.
There's a lot of technical phrases, but also quips from the astronauts about dealing with lack of gravity and passing time in outer space, and the best part is that they're the actual transmissions! Since today is the day for the lunar landing and moonwalk, tune in or install the desktop widget to experience history all over again—we recommend forwarding it to your parents and grandparents who watched the original event on TV in 1969.
Related Stories:
· We Choose The Moon [Official Site]
· Apollo 40 Years, Event Schedule [NASA]
· Where to Celebrate The 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing [Jaunted]
[Photo: National Air and Space Museum]
Tags: Apollo 11 / Moon Landing Anniversary / Space Travel / Space Tourism / → All Tags
One Small Step for Man, Lots of 40th Anniversary Celebrations for Mankind
The 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11's Landing on the Moon will happen on Monday, July 20, 2009 but the moon landing celebrations have already begun. We rounded up a few of them for you last week and HotelChatter's got the skinny on a moon landing hotel package at the Moon Rise Hotel but there are a few more moon events you might want to check out.
Kennedy Space Center
There will be a free concert at The Kennedy Center's Concert Hall on Saturday at 8pm.
Tickets are on a first-come, first-serve basis and will be extremely limited. Ticket distribution begins at 10am in the Hall of Nations until noon (or until all tickets have been given out.) But if you can snag a pair, you'll be treated to performances of Fanfare from 2001: A Space Odyseey and the theme songs from Lost in Space, Star Trek, Star Wars and E.T.
Virginia Living Museum
Folks near Newport News, Virgina can pop into the Virginia Living Museum this weekend for their "Astronaut" special at 11:30am and 12:30pm. This is a full-dome immersive experience that shows you what a rocket launch is like from inside the body of an astronaut. "Discover the perils that lurk in space as we subject ‘Chad,’ our test astronaut, to everything that space has to throw at him." Also folks from NASA Langley will be on hand to talk about sending more humans to the moon and Mars. Each show is $4 plus museum admission.
Tags: Space Travel / Space Tourism / → All Tags
Where to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing
It was 40 years ago this month that man first stepped foot on the Moon, and celebrations around the country are reminding Americans of just how amazing the feat was. For those who need a refresher, the Apollo 11 mission took off from Cape Canaveral at the Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, shooting Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin (pictured) into outer space with the help of the Saturn V rocket. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin had the singular pleasure of traipsing along the rocky lunar surface, while poor Collins orbited above.
Tags: Virgin Galactic / Richard Branson / Space Travel / Space Tourism / → All Tags
Virgin Galactic Will Depart From Spaceport Sweden in 2012
Virgin Galactic hasn’t even begun to fly yet, and they’re already quick to announce new routes. Honestly, we’re not too surprised since Richard Branson is behind the whole space tourist industry.
Besides launching from the desert of New Mexico, travelers can now choose to depart from Sweden as well. The IceHotel has announced that they’ll start packaging a quick trip into space along with accommodations at their chilly hotel. The trips will depart from Spaceport Sweden in Kiruna starting in 2012, as long as all the testing—which we assume is pretty extensive—goes well. If you’re not up to an icy hotel, there’s some other Scandinavian travel agents that have been approved to book your trip too.
Tags: Moon Travel / Space Tourism / Space Travel / → All Tags
Perigee Moon Alert: If You're Outside Tonight, Look Up
Here's a ray of light in an otherwise dark time of year. Tonight, billions of people around the world will witness a perigee Moon, a once or twice a year phenomena that results in the biggest, brightest full Moon the lunar cycle. As the Moon men of NASA point out, a perigee Moon is as much as 14% wider and 30% brighter than "lesser moons" because it's about 50,000 kilometers closer to the earth than when it's at its apogee. The result is a big, beautiful moon that casts an otherworldly glow over the earth, bright enough to "read a newspaper, ride a bike, write a letter, and at the same time count the stars overhead."
Unlike NASA, we don't actually recommend you count stars while riding your bike, but you ought to make a point of getting outside at some point tonight and looking up in the sky. Find the night setting on your digital camera and see what kind of photos you can get, as they might make a good desktop wallpaper. The weather forecast calls for snow tonight in many parts of the U.S., which might obscure the moonlight, but I'm sure plenty of people will do a double take at the sky as they stumble out of the bars, pausing for a moment to gaze at the celestial show.
[Photo: NASA]
Related Stories:
· Biggest Full Moon of the Year, Take 2 [NASA]
· Tonight's Full Moon Closest, Brightest of the Year [The Ledger-Enquirer]
· Moon Travel Coverage [Jaunted]
Tags: Space Tourism / Space Travel / Ansari X Prize / → All Tags
Beyond Ombudsmanship: Jilted Space Tourist Sues for $21 Million
This one's worth following because it could just as easily have happened to you or me. A 37-year-old Japanese businessman named Daisuke Enomoto thought he had booked the vacation of a lifetime, a 10-day visit to the International Space Station in September, 2006. Reuters points out that Enomoto paid $21 million to Virginia-based Space Adventures to make the arrangements, completed his training, and was all set to blast off in a Russian Soyuz capsule when he was bumped from the mission due to health reasons.
Tags: Virgin Galactic / Richard Branson / Burt Rutan / Space Travel / Space Tourism / Videos / Xeni Jardin / → All Tags
More Galactic Fallout: More Video of Virgin's Newest Plane
Didn't get enough Virgin Galactic as we were liveblogging the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo last week? Then allow us to present this video from our pals at Boing Boing tv.
Host Xeni Jardin chats with Buzz Aldrin, Richard Branson and David Cush to get more scoop on the launch vehicle that--fingers crossed--will be lofting paying passengers 62 miles above Earth by 2012.
Related Stories:
· Virgin Galactic with Buzz, Branson and Rutan [BBtv]
· More Photos of WhiteKnightTwo [Jaunted]
· Virgin Galactic Launch: Now With Video! [Jaunted]
· Richard Branson and Burt Rutan Wow Mojave [Jaunted]
Tags: Space Travel / Space Tourism / → All Tags
Adventures of Link: Space!
We were hardly the only ones out in Mojave today covering the unveiling of Richard Branson's latest baby. We also spotted a bunch of travel bloggers, some aviation reporters, a couple friends from Virgin America and, why not, Buzz Aldrin.
So to spread the love around--and give you a more complete picture on what's up--we're linking to some of our pals today who also braved the desert heat to poke, prod and videotape White Knight Two.
Related Stories:
· Virgin Galactic Shows off Mothership [AP, via Google]
· Branson Unveils Space Tourism Jet [BBC]
· Live from Virgin Galactic [CrunchGear]
· Virgin Galactic WK2 Photos [Gizmodo]
· Like You Could've Missed It: Our Virgin Galactic coverage [Jaunted]
