Briefs: COTS article; Lunar prize team; Brian Feeney update

Florida Today reports on COTS: Aiming for the space station - floridatoday.com - Dec.15.07
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Space Prizes points to a lunar prize competition team in development: Revolution, Not Evolution - I, Cringely/The Pulpit/PBS - Dec.14.07
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A brief item about Brian Feeney and his current plans for suborbital tourism: Next stop: Outer space - Globeandmail.com - Dec.15.07. His group put in a lot of time and effort but it is quite an exaggeration to say that Mr. Feeney's group, or any other entrant, was a runner-up to Burt Rutan in the X PRIZE. I don't think that just having signed up for a competition makes you a runner-up.

Posted 12/15/07 | 14:13:12 by TopSpacer | Filed under: General

Comments

Sounds like Dreamspace will be flying tourists before Virgin Galactic. They have alread unveiled their models so their designs look closer to implementation.

Posted by anonymous at 12/18/07 00:31:10

LOL, that was funny

Posted by anon at 12/18/07 11:11:47

The runner-up phrase has been often sighted by media because we made more progress on hardware at that time than any other competitor. In all fairness since October 2004, Armadillo Aerospace has sped ahead of us and the pact though there are still a few teams that are making good but quiet progress. XCOR a non XPRIZE competitor is clearly a front runner.

For our part we did move in March 2008 to the Niagara area based at an airport now where we can do a lot of our testing - Toronto was less than ideal for this.

How competitive we may be against the others for the next (first post xprize manned suborbital space flight) and start of commercial operations, we will have to see.

We will be rolling out the XF1 (which is the identical test prototype to our 2 person XF2 commercial spacecraft) sometime late this summer. We could be the first group to show case actual commercial flight hardware. The XF1 can carry 2 persons though it will initially test fly with one.

Expectation are of drop testing in the Fall and a long series of powered non space flight envelope expansion flights throughout 2009 - as long as we can keep the funding coming in which has not always been consistent.

Brian Feeney - DreamSpace Group

Posted by Brian Feeney at 04/16/08 20:30:43

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