Virgin Galactic gets one flight closer to spaceflight success
Looking more like a bizarre Siamese twin (or beer-goggle double) than a real plane, the WhiteKnightTwo launch “mothership” took its maiden flight yesterday, and moved the world a little closer to a future in which the wealthy can soar far, far away from our little problems here on the ground.
For those who aren’t familiar with Virgin Galactic or the startup building the craft, Scaled Composites, WhiteKnightTwo is only half the equation needed to put someone… Continue Reading
Is there an economic downturn in space?
[Editor's Note: Yesterday, we heard from William Pomerantz, who runs Google's Lunar X Prize, on how private enterprise may give NASA and America's space program a much-needed infusion. One question he didn't touch on is how the current economic downturn may affect these space privateers and the investors who keep them flying. Below, Jeff Foust, editor and publisher of The Space Review, sheds light on the issue.]
Over the last several years, an entrepreneurial space industry… Continue Reading
Roundup of action: Opus Select, Boobik, Branson’s space warming & more
1. Yandex, Russian search engine, grows quickly
2. Opus launches hedge fund in New York
3. Matrix goes to China
4. Dogster takes $400,000 in financing
5. Semantic search engine Powerset raises $2M
6. Pubmatic, draw ads from all networks
7. Boobik, the Twitter clone, but for sex
8. Branson taking global warming to space
9. Oversee.net gets $150M to monetize domains
10. Google’s Palimpsest hosts terabytes of raw data
Yandex, Russian search engine, grows quickly — Yandex did more than a million billion searches last month,… Continue Reading