After taking eight years to get licenced to provide parabolic flight services to the general public, Zero Gravity Corporation finally started its long-awaited service on September 14.

by Alan Breakstone

Scaled Composites has announced that SpaceShipOne will make its first flight to space on June 21, 2004 – a date that will live in the history of space flight along with those of other epoch-making flights, such as the first ever flight to space, by Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, and the first private flight to space, by Dennis Tito on April 28, 2001.

The X-Prize has been renamed the Ansari X-Prize after two Iranians, Anousheh and Amir Ansari, contributed an unspecified—but probably spectacular—sum to the X-Prize Foundation.

It looks like Burt Rutan's next planned flight test of his SpaceShipOne will include firing the rocket motor again. This may turn out to be quite ambitious compared to the first in-flight firing late last year.

In a characteristically stimulating presentation at the session on Space Tourism of the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF-2004) on Monday February 9, Chuck Lauer, Vice President for Business Development at Pioneer Rocketplane Inc, confirmed that the company had finalised an agreement with Spaceport Oklahoma (officially OSIDA, the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority) to develop the passenger-carrying XP Rocketplane, which will be capable of sub-orbital flights, at Burns Flat in Oklahoma. The XP is an adapted Learjet, with a rocket engine being developed by Orbitec Inc. It is not primarily targeting the “X Prize” but the sub-orbital passenger market, including tourism. “But if no-one else has won the X-Prize by 2006, then we will” Lauer said.

By Carol Pinchefsky

By Carol Pinchefsky

On Saturday, February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas. Columbia, on its twenty-eighth mission, was on its descent after a sixteen-day journey as it broke up. There were no survivors.

by Alan Breakstone