My Space Blog

There have been a lot of studies about space tourism done in Europe.  Flight International has a listing today.  Here are a couple:

Future High-Altitude Flight – an Attractive Commercial Niche? was a 12-month, €127,000 ($170,000) European Union Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) project that ended in October 2007. It concluded that a European air-launched suborbital tourism vehicle was feasible and made technical recommendations.

In 2007 the Survey of European Privately-Funded Vehicles for Commercial Human Space Flight was a €150,000 European Space Agency project that examined UK space tourism company Starchaser Industries as an example of entrepreneurial suborbital operators.

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From Flight International:

NASA’s nascent commercial orbital transport system (COTS) is expected to go live late next year under a $3.5 billion programme. The programme’s aim is to provide more than half of the cargo needed to run the International Space Station in the post-Space Shuttle era.

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There are several people who have done substantive summaries of what happened in space and space launch in 2008.

NewSpace in 2008: Ups and downs in entrepreneurial spaceflight An amazingly substantial summary from Clark S. Lindsey of the NewSpace blog.

Leonard David has written this post: Review of Commercial Spaceflight Uncertain, but Promising.

An interesting summary also written for Flight International: Flight Global