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Spaceports spring up all over

Last week, Virgin Galactic announced plans to fly spaceships from Arctic Sweden. News@nature.com looks at where else you can reach for the stars.

Read the briefing here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on January 30, 2007 06:35 PM |

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The Virginia Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has come to life last month and will be very active in the future.

http://Mid-AtlanticRegionalSpaceport.blogspot.com

http://spaceports.blogspot.com

Posted by: Jack Kennedy | January 30, 2007 11:21 PM

Other potential uses of the new manned suborbital vehicles as pointed out by Clark Lindsey on his RLVNews blog are "experiments in astronomy, atmospheric sciences, auroral studies, solar observation, and remote sensing."

Unmanned suborbital sounding rockets are currently used for such applications and they can not lift nearly the payload of the SS2 and its proposed rivals. Those unmanned vehicles are "launch once and throw away" as well and thus are not as economical.

Posted by: Rick Boozer | January 31, 2007 01:36 PM

Is all this commercial space travel just another form of a very expensive amusement ride? Are there any plans for space hotels so that a traveler can at least have a destination to travel too? What are the legal aspects of commercial space travel?

Posted by: George Kimball | February 2, 2007 06:13 PM

Thanks for the comments, all. George - yes, there are plans for a space hotel. Google Robert Bigelow. He's planning an inflatable space hotel from about 2010 onwards, having already demonstrated the technology in space last year.

There's a bit of a problem here, though. Most of the tourist flights planned to date (Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures, et al.) cannot reach orbit. They don't have anything like enough power to get there, and will just go up and down like ballistic missiles. So Bigelow has started his own version of the X-prize, to encourage companies to build vehicles capable of reaching orbit. It's a big ask, but would carry equally big rewards. Nasa are also looking for private companies to build orbital vehicles, so the market is potentially large for a first-to-market orbital craft.

Legally, all US rocket flights have to seek licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration. Customers booking flights will be made fully aware of the risks. It's all very heavily regulated - too regulated according to some, who claim it's stifling the industry.

To start with, most of these flights are just about grabbing the tourist dollars. But as the industry matures, and certainly if it goes orbital, we will see more scientific applications of private space.

Posted by: Matt Brown | February 5, 2007 10:06 AM

I note the interest in orbital flight. Launching from the equator would help. The Philippines has 7,500 islands, most within 10 degrees of the equator, most not populated and a government interested in tourism. Would these be of interest?

Posted by: daniel mcnamara | February 6, 2007 12:06 AM

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