We held our collective breath last week as that aging relic of ’70s technology, the Space Shuttle, limped its way into space. (You know your spaceship is old when, after you’ve climbed out of Earth’s gravity well, you have to inspect the entire craft to make sure it arrived with all of its parts.) But the real action in space is taking place later on this week, and later on this fall, as a number of private space efforts take to the sky.
First off the pad is Vegas hotelier Robert Biglow’s test flight of the first component for his proposed space hotel. On July 14, a subscale model of his planned inflatable space modules will be launched from a pad in Russia. If successful, he plans on starting to launch the actual inflatable modules which will eventually go together to create the first hotel in space. Biglow thinks big, hoping to start turning down the upright sleeping bags in your sub-luxury space birth by 2012 (that’s right, less than SIX years from now). The next next-gen space event will take place in the fall, at the X Prize Cup Expo in Las Cruces, Mexico. Fifty teams have signed up to participate in making attempts at suborbital flights (unmanned, of course) and two teams will show off vertical take off and landing vehicles.
But wait, there’s more! SpaceX, founded by PayPal’s Elon Musk, will make another attempt with their Falcon rockets, the only serious contender in the field to possibly sending humans or sats into space via private rocketry in the next few years. That flight is scheduled for October as well. And, if all stays on schedule, we might see another Virgin Galactic flight by year’s end too.
So, all and all, an exciting year for private space flight. Let’s just hope that the Mr. Magoo of Low Earth Orbit, the Shuttle, doesn’t drive up onto the median strip or otherwise wreck the ol’ pile o’ heat tiles on the way home.