British Partnership Aims to Launch Satellites

After many decades without a serious attempt to compete in the satellite launch business, two British firms have formed a partnership to develop a new air-launch service based on the White Knight Two aircraft developed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites.

Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited (SSTL) and Virgin Galactic are seeking financing to develop a low-cost rocket system that could be carried on the White Knight Two aircraft, which was recently developed with finance from Richard Branson's space tourism venture.

The new launch system would would comprise two solid stages and be capable of injecting satellites from 50kg up to 200kg into a polar orbit of 400km altitude. The target launch price is quoted here at $1 million, which would be a reduction by a factor of 5 to 10 times on the current launch costs for similar sized payloads.

This video explains more details of the partnership.



The predecesor aircraft, "White Knight", was used to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE, demonstrating the feasibility of an aircraft launched sub-orbital space tourism system.

Project Enterprize - Privately Funded European Space Tourism

Project Enterprise is a German/Swiss/Austrian collaboration started in 2004 as Europe's first privately funded spaceflight project with the goal of carrying out sub orbital flights for space tourism and scientific experiments.
Website: http://www.european-spacetourism.eu/i... (in German only)
Google translation

Virgin First Sex in Space

See some hardcore thrusting in this Virgin (Galactic) video, which offers something for everybody, mums, boys, girls, teenagers, white, black, latino, asian, old, young, your nextdoor neighbor, your wife, your husband, your teacher, nurse, animals, or any of your inter-racial friends.

White Label Space is a group of space professionals preparing to officially join the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Right now we are conducting anal ysis on the best possible design for a space mission to complete the objectives of the prize. We hope to officially join the competition before the end of this year.

White Label Space will have a bi-directional emphasis, combining its space engineering expertise with its dedicated efforts to provide the highest possible media exposure to your brand name.

We invite you to take off our label and put your one all over our spacecraft!

And now, after that preamble, the main point of this blog post.. This MSNBC article reports that Virgin Galactic has turned down a $1 million offer to film the first official sex video in space. We think the reason might be because the offer was too low :)



Oh, just in case you didn't figure it out yet, this blog post is an experiment to see how many search engine hits we can get by using the rather attractive words that it contains :)

Did you ever notice how certain brand names are more catchy than others? No doubt Sir Richard Branson had this in mind when he chose the Virgin name for his family of enterprises.

ESA's View on Private Suborbital Spaceflights

In our blog post Government Support for Future Lunar Missions published in July, White Label Space agreed on the necessity of governments to show interest in privately funded space projects like lunar landers.

Now, the European Space Agency has communicated it's view on space tourism, a similar topic, underlining the difficult balance of contributing to activities with available experience on the one hand, while not interfering in competitive markets on the other hand. Below, a quotation of ESA's position on space tourism.

"ESA is taking a position of cautious interest and informed support, with the following guidelines:

1. ESA should monitor the relevant technology activities and assess whether spin-ins and spin-offs could be envisaged for/from European space programmes.
2. While avoiding interfering in the development of a fully competitive market, ESA should further reflect on possible partnership with European ventures or support actions, based on mutual interest and demonstrated technical and commercial maturity, without nevertheless exposing ESA to any liabilities related to business exploitation. To this end, legal schemes should be defined to allow for such activities, as allowed within the principles laid out in the ESA Convention.
3. Provision of services by ESA in the domain of human spaceflight, in particular ‘astronaut training’, i.e. provision of expertise for developing dedicated training programmes and/or facilities for specific tourist flight opportunities, and ‘space medicine’, i.e. provision of expertise to develop dedicated medical preparation programmes of space tourists, should also be explored for mutual benefit, making available ESA’s competences under conditions to be defined.
4. ESA should contribute in the development of a regulatory frame for space tourism in Europe, involving both civil aviation regulatory authorities and competent bodies from the EC, aiming also at a ‘more level playing field’ for all parties around the world, and supporting the interests of European industry.
5. ESA should facilitate the free flow of ideas among all interested European parties, e.g. by establishing a platform for voluntary information exchange."

The full article Space Tourism as well as the complete ESA Bulletin (No. 13, August 2008) in which the article appeared can be downloaded for free from ESA's website.