October 19 News Items

Google, Amazon CEOs Invest in Manned Space Flights (Source: CNBC)
While NASA seems to be flying in orbital circles, with manned flight still stuck on the space shuttle, the private sector has been dumping millions into its own space ventures. "We're trying to move the industry to a point where people believe what we say," said Jeff Greason, a former Intel computer genius who now runs XCOR, one of a half dozen companies in the Mojave desert of California trying to get ordinary citizens into space. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has already tested a vertical takeoff and landing craft, which may someday carry people just beyond the atmosphere. Hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow already has a couple of unmanned craft in orbit.

Bigelow is offering $50 million to any American venture that can fly a fully loaded five-passenger craft into orbit by 2010. The most visible effort has been Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, already selling tickets for $200,000. But test flights won't happen for 18 months, pushed back after a fatal explosion at the Mojave company building his spacecraft: Scaled Composites, run by X Prize-winning Burt Rutan. Three men died in a fuel flow test in July. It hit the community here hard, but it did not stop the inflow of investor money. Now, even bigger things are planned. Google is using some of its profit to encourage innovation to get to the moon as "Earth's offshore island." It is putting up a $30 million Lunar X prize, and most of the money will go to the first private group which can launch, land, and operate a robotic rover on the Moon's surface.

Back in Mojave, Rutan's company became wholly owned by Northrop Grumman and other private ventures are waiting to see if ownership by a traditional, large aerospace company is a good thing or not. Rutan says he wants to build 50 spacecraft, and not just for Branson. He has reportedly been talking to an unnamed established airline. Greason says it's hard to tell who will succeed, and who will never get off the launchpad. But, to Greason, it's not about being first. It's about being able to last. For those investors who tell him they fear it's already "too late to get in," he points to the Wright Brothers. Yeah, they were first, but nobody's flying airplanes made by the Wright Aircraft Company.

China Mulls Communist Branch for Space (Source: AP)
China might not have a permanent presence in space yet, but the country's rocket men are already thinking about setting up a Communist Party branch in the outer reaches. Now 14-strong, the Chinese astronaut corps more than meets the party's minimum requirement of at least three members for a branch, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.

Nigerian Space Program Isn't a 419 Scam (Source: WIRED)
Nigeria, a country whose best-known technological export is probably the flowery e-mail output of its "419 scam" artists, is ramping up a scrappy space program that's working wonders with a relatively small investment. Robert Boroffice, leader of Nigeria's National Space Research and Development Agency, or NASRDA, looks to the sky to solve his country's earthly problems of hunger and disease. The country has launched satellites on the cheap to aid agricultural and medical initiatives and is seriously contemplating building an international spaceport. These are just some of the grand plans kicking around in the mind of Boroffice. His defense to charges of misplaced priorities -- wasting money on space technology when Nigeria faces so many other pressing problems -- is as disarming as it is forward-thinking: Space is one of the smartest micro-investments a developing nation can make, he said.